Michael Crichton Dead At 66 388
Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.
Sad. RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Andromeda Strain was an excellent scifi movie.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:4, Interesting)
The 1971 version was one of my favourites as a kid... haven't seen the remake yet.
Recently finished reading Travels (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm somewhat confused by why his books spend so much time writing about science (or at least science fiction) when he appears to have been personally bent on the unscientific new-age mysticism activities. Travels talks extensively about his beliefs in fortune tellers, auras, astral planes, and spending two weeks talking to a cactus. It seems contradictory to build a career on science and not approach mysticism with a more cynical eye.
Then again, the science in Critons' books usually end up trying to kill man, so perhaps it's not his love of science that drove him to write, but rather his belief that science with have its retribution on man.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:3, Interesting)
I was about to post the same. An extremely insensitive tag. I understand some morons may be trying to rant against the commercialisation of the "Jurrasic Park" franchise, but you can't pin that on this extraordinary author. I doubt anyone who marked that tag up actually read any (of his, in particular, but not necessarily exclusively) books.
RIP Mr. Crichton (Score:5, Interesting)
For any of you folks who have only seen some of MC's movies, don't judge his storytelling ability without reading the books first. The Andromeda Strain is clearly a classic, but some of his later books like "Airframe" and "The Rising Sun" are good reads too.
I've don't know why, but for whatever reasons, Hollywood has slaughtered just about every title they tried to turn into a movie. The ~1970 Andromeda Strain is probably about the only one where they came close (including Jurassic Park).
Rest in peace, Mr. Crichton.
Re:I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:1, Interesting)
Which you obliquely point out is where he may have gotten his inspiration. Or he made it all up.
Re:Lost World (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading "The Lost World" when I was a under-read, newly minted college graduate.
After four years of being required to read every crappy book ever written* in high school I was pretty much burned out on reading. (I always liked reading, ever since I was young... I even remember reading Iacocca's biography instead of whatever I was supposed to be reading at the time.) But by the time Hight School was done I was only reading car magazines and stuff like that.
The summer after my first year in college I found (literally--someone left it behind in the movie theater where I was working) a copy of Jurassic Park and I started reading it. I got sucked in right away, literally to the point of hiding it in my cash drawer and reading it at the concession stand that I was working at when it was slow. I burned through it in no time, then started reading his other stuff. I remember reading Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man early on and reading Congo and Sphere later on. (Sphere and Jurassic Park are my favorite books by him and I've read and re-read them both several times.) Then I remembered liking some Stephen King stuff that I had read in the past so I went and looked for more by him (Christine, Firestarter--his early stuff) and then I found more and more authors and I got back into reading and I've been reading steadily ever since. But I'll always remember that it was him and Jurassic Park that got me back into reading for fun. Thank you, Mr. Crichton. You will be missed.
* a couple, like Mosquito Coast, were OK, and I loved Catcher in the Rye, but overall, I hated all the selections at my HS. About 10 books a year, including 2 or 3 to read over the summer. The Guns of Navarone, On the Beach, stuff like that.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, making it a pop culture movie diminished its reputation as an interesting piece of fiction.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:1, Interesting)
Calling it denial is to equate skepticism with other taboo topics such as Holocaust denialism ...
In 100 years, let's take a tally on which one killed more.
You had it backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him. That's one reason I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate.
It's not so much that Crichton believed anything people told him so much as he didn't believe in science. While his science themed books show a great interest in reading about science, the conclusion is always that Science is Wrong and Scientists are Evil or Recklessly Stupid. The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Prey are all about the futility of trying to contain living things. In Next, the drug that saves his brother makes him age and die early. State of Fear is no different, really. It's more strident than the rest of his books about how scientists are all arrogant fools who will destroy the world, but it really matches the theme of the rest of his work.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there were three points where I lost a massive amount of respect for Crichton. The first was when I saw the movie westworld on an airplane once, for which he wrote the screenplay. It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot. The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.
The third was when he wrote State of Fear and testified before congress. I never read the book, but just to watch the kind of anti-intellectuals like Inhof invite a science fiction author to be regarded as an expect on climate change. Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.
While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time (way way before Spielberg got his dirty little paws on it), my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless. He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:3, Interesting)
The Terminal Man was interesting reading. Many of the ideas in it are starting to poke onto the feasability horizon now.
(anyone else want to get electrodes wired into their brain?) ...
(would you reconsider if it made your response time quicker in an FPS?)
-ellie
Re:I read the book (SPOILER) (Score:1, Interesting)
Sphere was his ONLY book that had a good ending. I really enjoyed it, thanks to that.
Re:Sad. RIP (Score:1, Interesting)
The 1971 [film of _Andromeda Strain_] is perhaps the most accurate book-to-movie conversion i've seen.
Check out _Rosemary's Baby_ sometime. Roman Polanski wasn't aware you were permitted to change things from the book. The result is one of the best book-to-film transfers ever. :)
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:5, Interesting)
Crichton predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C.
So taking out that "irrefutable" phrase out of your statement since Michael Crichton (in his book or in real life) wasn't even trying to refute that part of it in the first place.
We're left with:
Michael Crichton spoke on "the politicization of Science". Here is the google-cached written reproduction [209.85.173.104] of that talk (which I found on his site, but his site is currently down). And here is the educational background of Michael Crichton. That being said, don't just rely on his educational background. And don't rely on the fact that he was seen testify in front of an idiot. His talk speaks for itself. It's quite short, and to the point.
Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. Crichton's 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, acknowledged the world was growing warmer, but challenged extreme anthropogenic warming scenarios. He predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C. (His conclusions have been widely misstated.)
Crichton's interest in computer modeling went back forty years. His multiple-discriminant analysis of Egyptian crania, carried out on an IBM 7090 computer at Harvard, was published in the Papers of the Peabody Museum in 1966. His technical publications included a study of host factors in pituitary chromophobe adenoma, in Metabolism, and an essay on medical obfuscation in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Re:For those that don't get the joke (Score:1, Interesting)
However, I don't believe it was pointless. For one thing, they could know what dinosaurs in general looked like, and also what it takes for evolution to get a bunch of misplaced and terminally ill animals to survive for enough generations to form a stable population that can eat some of our characters.
Hanging on just long enough... (Score:2, Interesting)
Scientists create new life mouse frozen 16 YEARS [mailonsunday.co.uk]
5th November
Author Michael Crichton dies, 66 [bbc.co.uk]
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:3, Interesting)
I call "Bullshit!" on the articles I've read on that realclimate.org website...
They do a great job at debunking other theories but they still fall flat on two very basic scientific premises:
1) You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set. The accuracy of estimated temperatures just 200 years ago are bad and the guesses on temperatures a millennium ago are just that - barely qualified guesses.
2) Any theory that tries to explain something either already covered by another still-valid theory or which has a major hole in the middle due to the alternate theory still being valid, is basically bullshit. As we have major historic climate changes during the interglacial periods which hasn't been understood or explained fully, it is scientifically impossible to claim that any change we see today are solely or primarily the result of human activities. As the best theories on the ancient climate changes involves a combination of variations in solar output, cosmic radiation and ionization of the atmosphere, variation on the chemical makeup of the atmosphere or the interplay between all these, combined with singular events like volcanic eruptions, meteors and similar, which cannot be ruled out today, Occams Razor tell us that instead of inventing a new theory to explain the changes we may be seeing today, stick to the original one which still cannot be eliminated to be partially or fully responsible for any change observed.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:2, Interesting)
Disagree.
If you actually read his notes at the end of "State of Fear", it stated that the arguments against global warming were not his own personal view, he was just using them to illustrate the zealotry that surrounds scientific debate on this issue. He was a talented enough writer to be able to present opposing points of view regardless of his own personal biases, which is a rare commodity in this day and age where people seem to be unable to engage in rational debate without emotional investment warping their viewpoints.
Re:"andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag (Score:3, Interesting)
You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set.
This is wrong, and indeed is elementary statistics. For example, do a regression with some data points that have small error bars and some that have large. The large-error data points have little influence on the prediction (for better or worse); since they're so uncertain, they're mostly irrelevant.
The correct statement is that the worst data in your set doesn't help you as much as the best data: if some data is much worse than others, then its importance gets downweighted.
The strongest evidence in favor of anthropogenic warming is not based on comparison to climate hundreds of years ago anyway. It's based on measuring the various natural and human sources of warming, now, and seeing which ones have changes which can explain the observed warming, now. Paleoclimate helps some, but it's not the main line of evidence.
As we have major historic climate changes during the interglacial periods which hasn't been understood or explained fully, it is scientifically impossible to claim that any change we see today are solely or primarily the result of human activities.
That's also wrong. This is a typical misuse of the word "fully", coupled with misunderstanding of what we actually know about the glacial-interglacial cycle, coupled with a misunderstanding of what we actually know about the current climate.
First, "fully" is a weasel word. We rarely understand anything "fully" in science, but that doesn't mean we don't know a lot of things.
Second, while we can't "fully" model the glacial cycle, we do know that if we leave the CO2 effect on climate out, we get a much larger disagreement with the real climate.
Third, we don't have to be able to explain every past change in climate in order to explain the current one, particularly since we have vastly better data on current climate factors than past ones. We know exactly how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases are in the air, we know what solar irradiance and volcanic eruptions are, we have satellite observations of global cloud cover, we know the distribution and photosynthetic activity of plants, and so on.
Yes, we can't explain everything about climate change hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we also know far less about the vegetation cover, biotic activity, land surface albedo, the state of the ocean circulation, and so on. These are all things we do know a lot about now, so we can examine their roles in current climate change.
As the best theories on the ancient climate changes involves a combination of variations in solar output, cosmic radiation and ionization of the atmosphere, variation on the chemical makeup of the atmosphere or the interplay between all these, combined with singular events like volcanic eruptions, meteors and similar, which cannot be ruled out today,
Yes, they can be ruled out today. That's the whole point. There haven't been major meteor strikes to alter the climate. There have been volcanoes, their temporary cooling effect has been measured, and we can thereby infer the warming effect due to a lack of eruptions. We can measure solar output and cosmic rays, and their trends disagree in rate, timing, and magnitude with the observed warming since the latter half of the 20th century. (Solar effects can explain fair bit of warming earlier than that.) We have tons of satellite and instrumental observations of the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, including CO2, methane, NOx, water vapor, CFCs, sulfates and sulfate aerosols, black carbon, and so on.
Please note, by the way, that the current warming has been attributed mostly to "variation chemical makeup of the atmosphere" (mostly CO2, due to humans). We have evidence of past climate changes due to variations in greenhouse gases, and lo, we see the same thing today. Paleoclimate evi
The thing people are forgetting (Score:3, Interesting)
Michael Crichton used to write articles for computer magazines. I remember reading one where he talked about the timing how long it took you to type your name and password to determine if it was really you.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/index/index.php?author=Michael+Crichton [atarimagazines.com]