Pursuing praxis

In unrelated and present news: This rockin’ coffee shop I’m in at an ungodly-early hour of the morning usually plays straight up classical music, unless it’s closing time, and then they blast Brazilian mariachi music or something equally intrusive. It took me a minute to recognize the music just now - and it was the theme music to Jurassic Park by John Williams. (If you like his music, he took a lot of cues from Dvorak. Check out Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, "From the New World." Really.) (PS: as a favor to those who don’t know the missing accents on Dvorak’s name and what they mean: it’s pronounced like Duh-VORE-zhock, where that "zh" is like a cross between "sh" "z" and "j" sounds. It’s Czech.)

Wow. It’s been a long time; I’d forgotten how awesome that music is, and it still evokes the giddy awe (and visuals) of the scientists arriving at the island of dinosaurs, "pristine" jungle amid state-of-the-art technology. That was a great movie. Great music, great graphics, decent book, cool dinos, scary dinos, scientist-heroes, a man in black, the lawyer gets eaten while sitting on a toilet, and you’ll never look at rings in a glass of water quite the same again. Plus the follow-up book was kinda heavy on theoretical math (for a high schooler, that is). I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to suspence and scariness, but if I had to pick, getting hunted by Deinonychus in a stainless steel kitchen, or having a piece of plexi-glass between you and the business end of a T. rex is the way to go. 

Who’s Deinonychus, you say? Deinonychus is "Velociraptor" in Jurassic Park. They combined the real  Deinonychus’s scary body and wicked-cool claws with the spiffy name of Velociraptor for the movie. I mean, it’s Hollywood’s schtick to rewrite the facts of nature and science for box-office sales. Real Velociraptors were, if I remember correctly, about knee- or hip-height, and had fingers about as long as their forearms, with smaller claws, and were more snatchers than eviscerators. The morphology of their wrists, as well as the proportions of their forelimbs, are "adaptations" previously thought to only be part of the package-deal for flight in birds. Turns out the proportions of the forelimbs and shape of some of these wrist bones (and probably other stuff) is needed for both flight and snatch-n-run predation. The rest of their bodies was very obviously unrelated to flight; they were made for dog-eat-dog (Deinonychus-eat-Deinonychus?) life on the ground. So you get this piece-mealing of very purposeful traits "leading up to" or even concurrent with the emergence of powered flight capability in birds, and in close-but-separate branches of the family tree, rather than a clean, exclusivist monopoly of useful-for-flight morphologies marching towards the acquisition of avian flight. Being bird-like in some very key morphologies was not the sole province of birds. [Note to self: double-check this with labmates for any slight errors]. [Self: See Sarah’s comment below.]

Of course, as I recall it, the over-riding message of Jurassic Park was "Don’t mess with nature," which I disagree with. You gotta mess with nature in light of nature, and not dictate your terms to it; but messing with nature is critically important in general. As Sir Francis Bacon emphasized, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." It’s the purpose of that bubble-shaped boney structure sitting atop your vertebral column, the latter which also broadly supports a body that is the bipedal, terrestrial version of sushi. I like "Man tames Nature" themes, not "Nature tames Man" themes.

Still, fabulous music. Makes my cd-buying sense start to itch. Really badly. Argh!

And where the devil is the soundtrack to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies? That too is half the appeal of the movie (the other three-quarters being an amalgamation of ships, bad hats, heavy eyeliner, and subtle, witty retorts). 

[June 30: Methinks I spelled Caribbean wrong? Surely not Pirates. In any case, my labmate helped me fix this hole in my music library. And I’ll be watching Pirates 3 tonight. I’m looking forward to Pirates 5 and 9 and 24 and however many they make.] 

—
From Sarah:

Sorry to go all dino weenie on you(and even worse, I\’m about to correct your theropod comment, and even even worse, I\’m talking about dromaeosaurs), but velociraptors were very similar to the JP evil beasties in most aspects but size. And Deinonychus was, alas, also too small to be the nasty raptors in Jurassic Park. Deinonychus was about 4 feet tall at the most.

However, there was a dromaeosaur about that size, Utahraptor. It was named in 1993 and was about 6 feet tall. It\’s also one of the three dinosaurs that appear in every day\’s installment of Dinosaur Comics at http://www.qwantz.com

Some good reconstructions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Velociraptor_skeletal_by_Scott_Hartman.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Deinonychus-scale.png

http://www.marshalls-art.com/images/ipaleo/paleopg25/utahraptor_final300web.jpg

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001019.html