Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2011 December 27

# (8) 27 Dec 2011, 12:18PM: Confidence Interval: I enjoyed having the apartment to myself for a week while Leonard visited his blood family (why is it easier to clean when I have the house to myself? Why?!), but of course I also enjoy his return. After all, I need someone else to admire these clean countertops! And yesterday he and I talked about what's implausible or frustrating about Jurassic Park (the film), which I had watched afresh on Sunday.

For contrast: the year before Jurassic Park came out, all across the US television screens flickered and blared with "Rascals", a cute and fun episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that does UTTERLY AND WHOLLY IMPLAUSIBLE things with biology. We watched it again yesterday and Leonard pointed out that its science is about as bad as (and arguably contradicts!) that in "Similitude" (ENT). Argh argh argh.

Compare Jurassic Park, which barely ripples the suspension of disbelief.

Leonard notes that the scientists shouldn't have used frog DNA to fill in the gaps, but rather some kind of avian DNA. Yes, but I'm willing to be technobabbled out of that.
More troublingly (Leonard read an article about this once) -- could you really get enough intact DNA out of the stomachs of millions-years-old mosquitoes? Probably not; you'd need to find a lot of mosquitoes, and I imagine some anaerobic digestive processes would continue even after amber encasement, denaturing the proteins and so on. Still, I am (possibly too leniently) rather unbothered by this -- my impression is that we keep discovering new places DNA's been stashed, and if it's not mosquito bellies, it's, I dunno, the La Brea tar pits or peat bogs or something.
The engineering management failure is plausible, but only if the managers don't know how to manage large engineering projects and mitigate risk properly. Well, Hammond is a fantastic user interface designer who tried to do the software and hardware sides on the cheap. "Spared no expense" only applies to the user-facing bits. And he doesn't listen to criticism. Annoyingly plausible.
The glimpses of software that we get are basically fine, in my opinion.

Yes, I am not exactly pioneering the field of scifi or media criticism by going over the plausibility of this very-well-known artifact from 1993. But if I'd asked myself last week, "What will have more implausibilities? A TNG episode from 1992 or a big-budget Hollywood action thriller from 1993?" I would not have predicted this case. A reminder not to be complacent.

I also appreciate Leonard's presence because I can occasionally ask him to diagnose a Python error (e.g., "TypeError: 'type' object is not subscriptable"). After years of trying to self-teach with books and tutorials and scratch-my-own-itch projects and lectures and lecture videos, I find that the Boston Python Workshop, CodingBat, and Python Challenge were the dance partners I needed. Yesterday I used a dictionary data type to help solve a problem! And it worked! But I'll write more about this on Geek Feminism. Anyway, hence the "recursion" half of the "recursion dinosaur" graphic.