State of Fear - Ten Years Later

Ten years ago, State of Fear was published. I remember the excitement when a new Michael Crichton book came out. I would clear my calendar because once I started reading a Crichton book I would do nothing else until it was finished.

Crichton’s career can be split into three stages:

1. The Andromeda Strain, which introduced his writing to the world.

2. Jurassic Park, which took Crichton from a genre writer to mainstream fame.

3. State of Fear, Crichton’s most controversial book

In November 2005, I had the rare privilege of participating in a month-long online discussion with Michael Crichton about State of Fear. It was hosted by the Barnes & Noble website. (Unfortunately, the discussion cannot be found online. Fortunately, I downloaded everything Crichton said.)

During the next few months, I’m going to explore State of Fear and the science behind it. I’ll also take a look the current state of climate and of climate science. What has changed in ten years? What hasn't changed? If any readers know of something in particular they would like to discuss, please email me at kahlessa at gmail dot com

Michael Crichton Speech - “Science Policy in the 21st Century”

On January 28, 2005, Michael Crichton gave a speech titled "Science Policy in the 21st Century" for the American Enterprise Institute. The video lasts an hour and 15 minutes.

The speech covers issues addressed in State of Fear, though much of what Crichton said can be applied to a number of other situations.

Documentary - The Real Jurassic Park (1993)

This documentary, narrated by Jeff Goldblum, contains some video clips of Michael Crichton.



Thank you, Derrick for bringing this to my attention!

Science Channel Project - The World of Michael Crichton

The Science Channel is planning a special— “The World of Michael Crichton"—that will air in 2012.

From the article in Variety:

"Before he was an entertainment icon, Michael Crichton was a man of science," said Science Channel g.m.-exec VP Debbie Adler Myers. "This will be an illuminating look at the remarkable life of a man who is synonymous with enthralling scientific drama but who also managed to maintain a very private personal life."

Complexity, Financial Markets, and Suspicious Graphs

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently watched a DVD of Michael Crichton’s 2005 speech to the Independent Institute.

I’ve viewed the speech before several times, but this time something caught my eye. Crichton’s speech was accompanied by slides. About 43 minutes into the speech, Crichton said:

Here’s a financial market, and we all know that if you were to make one single change, say, increase the price of crude oil or charge a White House aide with a felony, you could not be sure how the financial system would react. Nobody knows in advance. People make their businesses out of trying to figure it out, but nobody knows except for inside traders. And that’s the same for financial systems all around the world.

The slide shown during this was a photograph Chicago Board of Trade by Andreas Gursky. This was one of the artworks owned by Crichton that was auctioned off at Christie’s in May 2010.

A short time later I was reading the book No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos. It was Markopolos who discovered that Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and he warned the SEC several times, to great futility.

Markopolos was asked by his firm to replicate Madoff’s results, and in doing so, he realized the implausibility of those results:

At the bottom of the page, a chart of Madoff’s return stream rose steadily at a 45-degree angle, which simply doesn’t exist in finance…. Volatility is a natural part of the market. It moves up and down—and does it every day. Any graphic representation of the market has to reflect that. Yet Madoff’s 45-degree rise represented a market without that volatility. It wasn’t possible. (pp. 30, 35-36)

This made me recall not only Crichton’s speech, but also another infamous graph—the “hockey stick” graph. As Crichton explained in his speech “Science Policy in the 21st Century”:

In 1998, an American climate researcher named Michael Mann, along with his co-workers, published an estimation of global temperatures from 1000 to 1980….Mann's results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last one thousand years. As a result, his report achieved immediate and world-wide fame. It also formed the centerpiece of the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report, in 2001, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….The next chapter in the story began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, obtained Mann's data and repeated his study. They found numerous grave and astonishing errors in Mann's work, which they detailed in 2003.

Steve McIntyre, like Harry Markopolos, was skeptical when viewed the graph in question. From a 2010 interview:

In financial circles, we talk about a hockey stick curve when some investor presents you with a nice, steep curve in the hope of palming something off on you.

Just as Madoff’s return graph didn’t reflect reality, neither did Mann’s hockey stick.

Some useful links:

Climate Audit - Steve McIntyre’s blog

McIntyre and McKitrick Slide Show on the Hockey Stick

2004 Technology Review article on McIntyre and McKitrick

Michael Crichton - Independent Institute Speech DVD

Last night I watched a DVD of a speech Michael Crichton gave on November 15, 2005 for the Independent Institute at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. You can see Crichton’s speech on his website, but the DVD has much more.

The video on Crichton’s website runs 52:07, while the DVD runs 117 minutes and includes the entire event. In addition to Crichton’s speech, there are also short talks by:

Bruce Ames - Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley

Sallie Louise Baliunas - a research astrophysicist and former Deputy Director and Director of Science Programs at Mount Wilson Observatory. The recipient of the Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize and the Bok Prize, she received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University

William M. Gray - Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society

George H. Taylor - the State Climatologist for Oregon and Professor of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University

The DVD States of Fear: Science or Politics? can be purchased for $16.95 from the Independent Institute. It also contains a question and answer section with more remarks from Crichton.

The transcript for the event can be read online, but I highly recommend purchasing the DVD, as the transcript does not show slides and visuals from the other speakers’ talks.


Links and more info on Michael Crichton at:
Kahlessa's Corner

Who Said It: Carl Sagan or Michael Crichton?

See how you do on this:

Quiz - Who Said It: Carl Sagan or Michael Crichton?

Today we're contemplating a verbal battle between two dearly departed authors. In one corner, we have Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer, astrochemist, author, alien hunter and host of TV's "Cosmos." In the other, we have Michael Crichton, the author, producer, physician and lecturer responsible for all those "Jurassic Park" films. Both men loved science and helped popularize it with their work, but they strongly disagreed on issues such as global warming. So which one said the following quotes? It's the creator of "The Andromeda Strain" versus the creator of "Contact."

It's trickier than it looks. There are three possible answers so occasionally the correct answer is neither Crichton nor Sagan.

Links and more info on Michael Crichton at:
http://kahlessa.proboards80.com/index.cgi