#gennaro

I'm not going to point out every bit of sexism in this book. It's just sad how truly accurate this is. Gennaro has only ever spoken to Alan and he assumes, with no evidence, that Sattler is too.

Gennaro’s really very good in this chapter. He lays out what the experts are here to evaluate, and gives them the key pieces of negative information that they need to be aware of, that indicates that dinosaurs may have escaped to the mainland and be posing a danger.

Malcolm’s right about the graphs - with those kind of fluctuations (and a small sample size), you don’t want to read too much into the monthly changes; it’s statistical noise, not periodicity. But I think he’s wrong that dinosaurs couldn’t be implicated in the general upward trend: again, these are very small numbers, we know the dinosaurs are causing infant deaths, and even if they’re only causing about two deaths a month that would still be enough to explain the rise. That doesn’t take hundreds of dinosaurs.

Regarding Malcolm’s broader point about complex systems, you don’t really need complex math or chaos theory to draw that conclusion. But he exaggerates about the impossibility. For example, consider a Biosafety Level 4 lab, the kind that the US Centre for Disease Control has at its main facility. The CDC can and does prevent diseases from escaping from there to the outside world, because there are very extensive precautions and controls. But Hammond is trying to replicate that kind of system - nothing gets out, ever, and no one is endangered - in a tourist attraction, where lots of movement in and out is integral to its purpose. Even now, before the guests have arrived, food and supplies have to come in in by boat, waste presumably has to leave by boat.

A system set up that way, with piles of uncontrolled variables, needs some degree of resilience, something in between “absolutely nothing goes wrong ever” and “disaster”. And the park doesn’t have that - and wouldn’t even if it were more competently managed.