March 2011

Budajafy

Before I rant off, I have to say this: Jurassic Park is probably my 4th favorite movie of all times (the first three being the original Indiana Jones movies, hehe)

It’s got a really breathtaking score by John Williams (he’s a genius, by the way), a great cast and the right combination of humor and suspense. I can’t praise that movie high enough.

That being said, here’s a few things that bug me, in no particular order:
(and I know, they can’t really breed dinosaurs, but let’s assume that they can 😉

#1 – “Even the word “Raptor” means: bird of prey”

Dr. Grant explains why he thinks dinosaurs (in this example, Velociraptors) “learned how to fly” (read: turned into birds). His last argument is, and I quote: “And even the word “Raptor” means: bird of prey”.
That’s no argument at all. If my parents had called me Raptor, would I have been born with wings or would my children be? I don’t think so.

#2 – Dr. Grant has to ask Tim for a dinosaur’s name?

Come on, Dr. Grant has been studying and digging up dinosaurs for years and he has to ask Tim (who as far as I know from the movie has read about two books about dinosaurs or has just learned how to read, for all I know) what the name of the Gallimimus dinosaur is?
If he doesn’t know that, how is he qualified to endorse “Jurassic Park”?

#3 – How come these genius scientists don’t know that some frogs can change sex?

Now, you have those absolute genius scientists who figure out how to create dinosaurs from over 65 million year old DNA. Fine.
But they manage to pick a particular South African frog species that can spontaneously change sex in a “single sex environment” to fix the gaps in the DNA sequence to create the dinosaurs? Couldn’t they have gone with some other frog? Isn’t that something you should consider for security reasons?
Actually, they must have had a discussion about that, because Dr. Wu says “Actually, they can’t breed in the wild. That’s one of our security precautions. There’s no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park”.
So if they had a discussion, at least one of those brilliant scientists certainly must have known that the frog they were going to use could spontaneously change sex.

I guess this is to underline what Dr. Malcolm says when they first arrive on the island. “You took what others had done and before you knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and now you’re gonna sell it” and “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should!”

#4 – The case of the suddenly disappearing earth matter

In the scene where the T-Rex first breaks out, there’s a huge “bug”, to speak in a software developer’s terms.
At first, the ground inside the fence is at the same level as the ground outside the fence, where the cars are. But when the T-Rex pushes the car over the fence down into the tree (with Tim inside), there’s at least a 20m difference in the ground level. How could that happen? The car was turned over by the T-Rex, sure, but in the same place, so it hadn’t been moved to somewhere else.

 

I believe that’s all of them. At least the ones I can remember from the top of my head.
How about you – do you agree? Disagree? Have some other moment you weren’t satisfied with in the movie?

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ScreenFloat

It gives me huge pleasure to announce the immediate availability of ScreenFloat – an app to increase your productivity on your Mac!

What Is ScreenFloat

ScreenFloat lets you create screenshots that float above all other windows. This way, you do not need to resize or move windows around just to keep a piece of information visible on your display.

 

It also lets you store information for later use with the built-in Shots Browser, which lets you categorize and manage shots you’ve taken with the use of tags, smart categories and categories (which are basically smart folders or ordinary folders).

How to use ScreenFloat

ScreenFloat gives you customizable keyboard shortcuts to do its stuff.

 

By default, cmd-shift-2 will let you create a floating shot and cmd-shift-1 opens the Shots Browser. Creating a floating shot works the same way as creating a selective screenshot (which is cmd-shift-4 by Mac OS X’s default).

What else is there to say about ScreenFloat

It comes with a system service. Which means, when you select text in any Cocoa application (like Safari orTextEdit), you can invoke ScreenFloat’s service to create a floating shot from that. This also has a customizable keyboard shortcut for the user’s convenience. ScreenFloat resides either in your Dock (by default) or in your menu bar.

Availability and Pricing

ScreenFloat is available exclusively on the Mac App Store, a demo is available through the website. You can get it for just €5.99/$7.99! For updates on ScreenFloat, you can follow @screenfloatapp or @eternalstorms on twitter!

 

Let me know what you think in the comments or by eMail!

Thank you and take care, Matthias

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