Jurassic Feathered Park
The wheel of time turns, the cycle repeats and another Jurassic Park movie is coming out this year. Feedback has faint hopes due to the presence of director Gareth Edwards, who proved in Monsters and Godzilla that he can direct films featuring huge creatures. But still, yawn.
While we all wait with bated breath, YouTuber CoolioArt is supplying dinosaur footage to keep us sated. They are using the animation tool Blender to redo key scenes from the original Jurassic Park, in order to give the Velociraptors feathers. So far, they have done the kitchen scene and the climactic scene in the visitor centre (just before, spoiler alert, the Tyrannosaurus rex saves the day).
Given the amateur nature of the project, the animations are really good. However, one problem remains: the raptors are still way too big. You see, despite his reputation for careful research, Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton was a bit prone to getting things badly wrong.
Crichton’s biggest scientific fail was arguably his 2004 climate change novel State of Fear. This features environmental terrorists who fake natural disasters to convince the world of the dangers of global warming. They have to do this because, in the universe of the book, all the scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are heating up the climate is flawed or faked.
There is even a series of pages entirely dominated by graphs from weather stations in the US that show local temperature declines, and which are meant to be more meaningful than the trend in the average global temperature for some reason. Crichton also recycles the myth that the warming trend is an artefact of “urban heat islands”. It’s like a terrible Reddit thread in book form.
Even Jurassic Park, Crichton’s most famous creation, wasn’t immune. He wanted to feature a dromaeosaurid dinosaur, as they were understood to be fast and intelligent hunters – contrasting with the lumbering T. rex. Unfortunately, the scariest ones had a name that Crichton didn’t think was cool – Deinonychus antirrhopus – so he used every detail of that species but incorrectly called them Velociraptor.
That’s why, in the books and films, an adult Velociraptor is about as tall as a human being. In reality, a Velociraptor was about as tall as a turkey. Feedback imagines that an angry Velociraptor could still cause problems for a human being, but it’s just not the same when the terrifying predator is about the size of the average toddler.
The irony is that the evidence that dromaeosaurids had feathers was pretty equivocal in the 1990s, so it was justifiable to present the raptors as featherless – but not to triple their height.
Which explains why CoolioArt has overdubbed some of the dialogue in the kitchen clip. When the girl whispers “What is it?”, a female voice dubbed over the boy’s now cheerily says “It’s a Deinonychus“. 10/10, no notes.
AI for rOAds
Sometimes, on a grey Monday when the column is due, Feedback can be found hastily scratching around for story ideas because nobody has done anything especially silly within sight of us. However, on Monday 13 January the following item dropped into our lap.
The UK government announced that it was going to “unleash AI” because of its “vast potential” to improve the country’s decaying public services. This vision of the future is called the AI Opportunities Action Plan. Feedback feels that the name could have used a bit of work: it abbreviates to AIOAP, which sounds like the Terminator movie Arnold Schwarzenegger will make when he’s 85 and an old-age pensioner himself.
The AIOAP contains a lot of proposals, one of which caught Feedback’s eye. According to BBC News, “AI will be fed through cameras around the country to inspect roads and spot potholes that need fixing”.
Like a rabbit caught in headlights, or, more aptly, like a driver heading straight for a pothole because they’re being tailgated and there’s no room to steer, Feedback found ourself staring blankly forward into space, stunned by the visionary nature of this vision.
It’s not that we doubt that AI could be trained to spot potholes. On the contrary: it would probably do it rather well. Instead, we are concerned that this might be solving a non-existent problem.
The BBC reported in March 2024 that English and Welsh roads are blighted by potholes, with a backlog of repairs estimated to cost £16.3 billion. That is a long way short of “Elon Musk buying Twitter” money, but it’s still roughly equivalent to the GDP of Jamaica. Furthermore, Feedback can attest to a deep familiarity with the numerous potholes in our local area, many of which have gone unrepaired for months.
The problem, in short, doesn’t seem to be lack of knowledge about where the potholes are. We wouldn’t have a backlog that would cover the cost of building several skyscrapers if the potholes weren’t being logged. This is doubly so for any road busy enough to have cameras on it.
Instead, the problem seems to be getting the actual repairs done. Feedback doesn’t see how the AI will help with that. No, we need to turn to genetics.
The only solution is an army of Ron Swanson clones to go and fill the potholes.
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