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61abf4d
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Going back to the 1920s, when Stalin ordered the most famous animal breeder in Russia to do it, to make a new race of soldiers for him. His name was Ivanov,
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Michael Crichton |
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23bc064
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Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn't a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment.
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Michael Crichton |
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a622674
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We can talk in here." Dodgson led him to a glass-walled superintendent's booth, in the center of the building. The glass cut down the sound of the barking. But through the windows, they could look out at the rows of animals."
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Michael Crichton |
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8b5bd67
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but one never really understood life in the New World until confronted with the actual rude experience.
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Michael Crichton |
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a3f00b6
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In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon," Malcolm said. "Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. That's the way evolutionary spirals seem. All the organisms are evolving at a furious pace just to stay in the same balance. To stay where they are."
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Michael Crichton |
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9bf8afa
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drinking a Coke and laughing, waving the camera away. "That's the couple," Watanabe said. "Grace and Bobby"
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Michael Crichton |
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a29597d
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Thorne shrugged. "They're still just fantasies. They're not real. Have you ever seen a self-esteem? Can you bring me one on a plate? How about a photon? Can you bring me one of those?"
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Michael Crichton |
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75d6c7e
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Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it's your power. It can't..
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Michael Crichton |
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e69c31b
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When Ellie shook hands, Gennaro said in surprise, "You're a woman." "These things happen," she said, and Grant thought: She doesn't like him, either." --
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Michael Crichton |
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3e46604
|
People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals--discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds.
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Michael Crichton |
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3e92e43
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They got my glove," Lex said. "My Darryl Strawberry special." They started walking again. Tim put his arm around her shoulders. "Are you all right?" "Of course, stupid," she said, shaking him off. She looked upward. "I hope they choke and die," she said. "Yeah," Tim said. "Me, too."
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Michael Crichton |
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ddce91c
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They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences. That's how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don't see that." "Don'..
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Michael Crichton |
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e4f3815
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The work of the late Heinz Pagels provoked Ian Malcolm.
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Michael Crichton |
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5697988
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Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
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Michael Crichton |
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f4ec72e
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No, my point is that life on earth can take of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long year. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and peaceful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility..
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Michael Crichton |
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3865c04
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Classically, the ability to invent and execute plans was believed to be limited to only three species: chimpanzees, gorillas, and human beings.
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Michael Crichton |
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d9f69ab
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Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer--a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously--you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anythi..
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Michael Crichton |
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520e90b
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Let's say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere--under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of co..
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Michael Crichton |
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9c2cf48
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In his view, a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn't know what he was talking about.
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Michael Crichton |
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bfcef26
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There were several monitors, all running so fast it was hard to see what they were showing. Wu pushed a button and slowed one image. "Here you see the actual structure of a small fragment of dinosaur DNA," Wu said. "Notice the sequence is made up of four basic compounds--adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. This amount of DNA probably contains instructions to make a single protein--say, a hormone or an enzyme. The full DNA molecule cont..
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Michael Crichton |
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c7055b8
|
Then are you working with the entire DNA strand?" Grant asked. "Oh no," Wu said. "That's impossible. We've come a long way from the sixties, when it took a whole laboratory four years to decode a screen like this. Now the computers can do it in a couple of hours. But, even so, the DNA molecule is too big. We look only at the sections of the strand that differ from animal to animal, or from contemporary DNA. Only a few percent of the nucleot..
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Michael Crichton |
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b4f1a20
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Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school--squares and cubes and spheres--fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow. "Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost i..
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Michael Crichton |
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98eb6bc
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Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.
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Michael Crichton |
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a3b00e6
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Can you tell me anything?" "It's a bioengineering firm." "Bioengineering," Barney said. "Well, there's the obvious ..." "Which is?" "A DNA molecule." "Oh, come on," Nedry said. "Nobody could be analyzing a DNA molecule." He knew biologists were talking about the Human Genome Project, to analyze a complete human DNA strand. But that would take ten years of coordinated effort, involving laboratories around the world. It was an enormous undert..
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Michael Crichton |
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36605d3
|
Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.
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Michael Crichton |
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1883a77
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The computer system is secure.
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Michael Crichton |
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8a1e03e
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something." Of course! he thought. He had touched the screen. It was a touch screen! The red lights around the edges must be infrared sensors. Tim had never seen such a screen, but he'd read about them in magazines." --
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Michael Crichton |
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522959d
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Tim watched until he was sure the velociraptor was coming toward the kitchen. Was it following their scent? All the books said dinosaurs had a poor sense of smell, but this one seemed to do just fine. Anyway, what did books know? Here was the real thing.
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Michael Crichton |
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0698f88
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All major changes are like death," he said. "You can't see to the other side until you are there." And he closed his eyes."
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Michael Crichton |
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d9a9dbc
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Welcome to Jurassic Park.
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Michael Crichton |
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697e68e
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You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails." Hammond"
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Michael Crichton |
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814715f
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this attempt to control ... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science--that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational--that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the ..
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Michael Crichton |
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72c561a
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Elena rushed forward, screaming, and the lizards fled into the darkness. But long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant's face, and she knew the child must be dead. The lizards scattered into the rainy night, chirping and squealing, leaving behind only bloody three-toed tracks, like birds.
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Michael Crichton |
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1d6dcc3
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I'm talking about all the order in the natural world," Malcolm said. "And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it's a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human be..
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Michael Crichton |
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ca65403
|
Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can'..
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Michael Crichton |
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9e61ed7
|
You can make a boat, but you can't make the ocean. You can make an airplane, but you can't make the air. Your powers are much less than your dreams of reason would have you believe.
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Michael Crichton |
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96bbd27
|
It's not a matter of wanting it or not, it's a matter of what you think you can accomplish. When the hunter goes out in the rain forest to seek food for his family, does he expect to control nature? No. He imagines that nature is beyond him. Beyond his understanding. Beyond his control. Maybe he prays to nature, to the fertility of the forest that provides for him. He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.
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Michael Crichton |
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c154197
|
Wait," Lex said. "You're confusing it...." "Will you shut up! You don't know anything about computers!"
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Michael Crichton |
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e93e5f5
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They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.
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Michael Crichton |
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77c012d
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We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.
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Michael Crichton |
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58dbe5a
|
They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.
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Michael Crichton |
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743eb9a
|
Multi-XMP? You mean more than one Cray?
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Michael Crichton |
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4a83f00
|
Thirty thousand years ago; when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week.
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Michael Crichton |
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136fb90
|
En general, el promedio de vida de una especie era de cuatro millones de anos. En el caso de los mamiferos se reducia a un millon de anos. Transcurrido ese tiempo la especie desaparecia.
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dinosaurios
el-mundo-perdido
ficcion
jurassic-park
michael-crichton
the-lost-world
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Michael Crichton |