Hairy Ticks of Dune

There's only room enough in this stillsuit for one of us! ... Wait, come back!

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Shami no sham!

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Dastardly Plot

Returning to more interesting matters...

Creating an Arrakeen texture for Celestia as faithful as possible to the map given at the beginning of Dune will require translating something like this


into something like the following.


Or, more accurately, into something like this:


This will involve measuring the coordinates of a massive number of points on the original map and converting them into points on the texture. A real PITA, in other words.

I've decided that the quickest, most efficient way to achieve this will be to write another single-purpose utility app. This one will take as input parameters the size of the map image, x and y coordinates of the map center point and point to be converted, map distance to a given line of latitude (probably 60 degrees N, in this case) and the size of the destination texture. It will output the x and y coords of the point on the texture.

Creating the texture will still take a considerable amount of time, but less than trying to do it by hand!

(Note: Since no map of the southern latitudes is provided and only limited information given in the books, I will leave the southern hemisphere essentially untouched.)

When the desert calls...

There is nothing to do but answer.


Then again...you could let the machine pick up.

I am hopping a thin line. The serene solitude of the desert beckons, all interest lost in the tumult of the souq.

To keep silent while waiting to see what will happen?
To try to win a battle that cannot be won?
Or simply to stop wanting to fight?

And then I reached a decision quite suddenly. One that I can live with.

Here is what I posted to the Dune Novels Forums:

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife...

...chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
-from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

I have spent the day sitting just outside the entrance to the sietch, watching the comings and goings, and wandering aimlessly among the nearby dunes, communing with the spirits of the desert. And have at last reached my own conclusion, made up my mind for myself.

I reject the "New Canon" in its entirety and will henceforth ignore its very existence. As far as I am now concerned, The Dune Chronicles consists of six books and six books only. It is complete as stands because it ends.

Unfortunately, one of the psychofants (surprising, a n00b at that...which leads me to suspect he is a sockpuppet) couldn't just take this as good news and leave well enough alone.

It takes all kinds.

Update: Following another exchange with "The Almighty Zeus", I have decided to start reading Hunters again. Expect a list of new inconsistencies (as I see them) and critique of other aspects of the novel in the next week or so (if all goes well).

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Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Preliminary Pictorial Review: 1 Pic = ?? Words

No progress with the reading today. I'm still just a little past half-finished, but thought I would offer this, by way of sneak peek at things to come.


The off-green American Express advert shows where I am at present. The Post-Its show passages which caught my eye for one reason or another, whether for possible inconsistency with previous material, unneeded repetition (I got it that Bell was overweight the first time, OK? When I want a list of all the synonyms for "fat", I'll consult Roget's, thank you), questionable usage of language, or unnecessary scientific inaccuracies, etc.

I really did give this one a chance (honest!), try reading it with an open mind. But after a while it just got too hard to ignore the little voice kibbitzing in my ear, so I went back and started marking the things that bothered me. I started with a half-used bundle of Post-Its (the yellow ones), went through it and have moved on to another (blue-gray). I'm wondering if I'm going to have to roust out any more.

I've mostly been occupied with other things today. But have to admit, I'm not looking forward to slogging through the remainder.

Note: In case it's not clear from the following post, I have stopped reading Hunters and do not plan to finish it.

Update: I've changed my mind again and have decided to finish reading it.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Siaynoq


As I walked to the park for the matsuri the other night, I was strangely reminded of the festival city of Onn.

* * * * *

Last night I decided to take a break and read a bit more of The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. And was reminded that space-opera collaborations can remain true to genre and be well written. (I reread The Mote in God's Eye—and most of the Ringworld series as well—while home in the States the summer before last. The earlier book is even more "space-operatic", but it didn't bother me all that much.)

Even though these books rely on fictional devices just as improbable as genetic memory and space-folding (e.g., the alien Moties and Alderson Drive), they remain true to to the limitations of their universe and ours, insofar as the latter are applicable. None of this "racing" about within and between star systems. A journey takes time, measured in hours, days, and weeks.

The same can be said of writing a good book. Or series.

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Monday, August 21, 2006

Marty and Daniel

I'm just a little over a fourth of the way through Hunters of Dune, but did a POSSIBLY BAD THING this morning when I finished my reading session and skimmed ahead quite a ways. All the way to the end, as a matter of fact. (Whether this was really a bad thing or not is something I have yet to decide. It might have been worse coming upon it after reading the whole thing.)

The true identities (oft discussed in certain quarters) of the old man and woman (Daniel and Marty) who appear in Chapterhouse: Dune came as a complete surprise. To me, at least. I gotta hand it to whoever came up with the idea, whether it was Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert and/or Kevin Anderson: this one came out of leftfield. And while it may not exactly be a mind-killer, it has certainly seriously wounded my interest in reading further.

At the very least, I think I will set it aside for a while and wait for everyone else to finish reading, to see what the general consensus is. I've plenty enough to amuse myself with working on the Celestia add-on, anyway.

Here's an interesting quote from Wikipedia, by the way:

Fanon is sometimes well known by creators and may even be accepted as true (or at least as reasonable an explanation as any) to something they have not explicitly explained. On the other hand, some creators of serial works introduce facts in subsequent installments of their work which invalidate specific fanon.


This article is also relevant, in a more general way.

Ciao for now!

Friday, August 18, 2006

Service you can't beat...even with a stick!

This morning I had to leave the ole Chigger Lair by 6:50 and hop over to Running Bare Park for another one of those neighborhood blockhead thangs. (Local version of Siaynoq this evening, and I was part of the workgang responsible for assembling the central stand for the taiko and caterwaulers...I mean, musicians.) We finished up and I got back to the Lair around 10:30. And guess what I found waiting for me!



Damn. Now that's what I call service! I may just have to change my view of the local branch of Amazon. I'm really glad I decided to take a changechance (again, after so long) with them and cancelled my order from the US!

A warm-hearted NYAH! to those of you still waiting!

(I just wish I didn't have such a busy schedule today and could devote more time to it! Oh well, all things in time!)

Edit note: As gohoubi for all our hard work the organizers gave each of us a can of beer and I, being the kind of person who, like a failed wannabe lawyer, has never been able to pass a bar in my life...or leave a free can of beer alone for long, popped it and had it down before I reached home and discovered it wasn't after noon like I thought [and as it would have been according to the original schedule...didn't take my watch] but only 10:30. By way of excuse for the blurry photo and misspelling!

Thursday, August 17, 2006

L'amour devant les dunes

Mourir devant, courir derrière
Se taire en attendant
En attendant que faut-il faire
Gagner la guerre ou simplement
Ne plus vouloir la faire
Dans cet enfer gagner du temps

Cacher dans un désert
Rêvant de l'océan
Les gens qui montent les vers
Partir pour un moment
S'éloigner prudemment
Du feu et faire
Aux sables émouvants
L'amour devant les dunes
L'amour devant les dunes

Danser devant dans la lumière
D'un jour éblouissant
Rire de l'enfer faire un enfant
Courir derrière un peu de vent
Avant qu'un peu de terre
Coule doucement
Sur la lumière


(Mes excuses profondes et sinceres à Patricia Kaas!)

試しに、日本語での投稿

今晩、仕事から帰る途中でこう考えた。

いわゆる「新デューン小説」の原文はあんまり好きではないが、もしかしてその日本語訳が名文で面白いかも知れない。

明日の午前中、平に用事があるのでヤマニ書店に依ってみようかと思う。役者はシリーズ全体同じく亡き矢野徹だから、一冊だけを買えば訳文の質が分かるはず。損することはなかろう。

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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Pleasure on the Stand

Pressing his nostrils against the displayport of the Barns & Noble mega-store, Lookat stared at the damned and metamorphosized trees before him. Wood, once called trees and home to the holey woodworms, the only natural source of the pulp material, perverted into paper for perusal and transported to this place, this place where the newest book about the outcome of the visions of God Emperor Leto II, the Great Tyrant and son of Paul Muad'DIBA, who was himself the son of Duke Leto I of House Atreides, one of the many aristocratic houses which ruled a futuristic yet feudal universe, and Jessica, his Bene Gesserit witch concubine and, unbeknownst to him, daughter of his arch-enemy the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen of House Harkonnen, who ruled Giedi Prime, a planet orbiting Ophiuchi B and not a nice place to live or even visit, as well as being brother of St. Alia of the Knife and husband to the tragic Chani, who dies giving birth to twins, one of whom was Leto II, known as the God Emperor or Dur or Guldur or "Goodtime Lee" to the other frequenters of Selim's Bar and Grill in downtown Keen, would soon go onto the new offerings stands....

Ask this of a thing: What is it in and of itself? What is its individual make-up, its essence, form, and matter? Its purpose in the world? Its duration?

'Cause Glenda and the Munchkins want to know: Are you a good book? Or a bad book?

(Or short story in the case of the original upon which the above was based, of course.)

Mac OS X Program: GreatCircleDistance

Spent a good part of today coding this:



I wish I'd done this before wasting so much time trying to work out the formula (which is a beech!) by hand.

Oh well, live and learn.

(It was kinda fun programming in Objective-C again. Even though I'd forgotten how much of a bitch it can be, too!)

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Visualizing Arrakis

Over the last few days I have been reworking parts of Rassilion's Canopus add-on for Celestia, trying to make it more faithful to the information contained in the Dune novels. The first order of business was to try to determine the size of the planet Arrakis itself.

Using the map at the beginning of Dune and some basic trig, I recalculated the radius of the planet as being 1005.0344 km...which is obviously too small. I created city locations for both Arrakeen and Carthag and fired up Celestia to check the results.



When I "landed" at Arrakeen and pulled up the information on Carthag, it showed as being about half the expected distance of 200 km. I used the value given to recalculate, plugged that in and tried again. This time the two cities were the proper distance apart. The new radius is 1996.2935 km...which is better, but still too small when you consider these:

6378.14 - Earth
6162.47 - Arrakis (Rassilion's original figure, source unknown)
6128.00 - Arrakis (Figure given in The Dune Encyclopedia)
6052.00 - Venus
3396.00 - Mars
2240.00 - Mercury
1737.53 - Luna (Earth's moon)
1151.00 - Pluto
487.500 - Ceres (Largest Solsystem asteroid)

I need to search through the books and see if there isn't something I've missed that can help clear this up. Obviously, the map has to be abandonned for this purpose. (But I plan to use it later for plotting details of the northern polar region where most of the action in the novels takes place.)

(Notes about image above: The lines on the surface of the planet show latitudes of 60 and 75 degrees N and the longitude of Arrakeen, 26W. The black line is the prime meridian, passing through Observatory Mountain. The reddish haze along the rim is an atmospheric effect. Also, you can see one of the two moons above the curve of the planet.)

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Dune is a classic scifi novel

In the same sense that Forbidden Planet is a classic scifi flick. Both have become outdated in light of the advances in our knowledge since they were released.

With the problems with the Duniverse setting and the nature of the worms and the dependence of the plot on elements such as prescience and genetic memory, I'm wondering if Dune shouldn't be reclassified as primarily science fantasy.

I'm not saying that it's not a great novel. Only that I am less willing of late to suspend my sense of disbelief and that my enjoyment is thereby lessened.

Ah well.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Prescience from Spam Essence?

A message from Gilbert(us Albans?! No,) Guevara was waiting in the In-box just now, entitled

"Better Future, Worm-gnawed"

How cool is that, for a Dune fan?!

Only Fiction

Thinking too seriously on various aspects of the Duniverse is sure to weaken the suspension field and likely to bring the ole disbelief crashing down onto the hard surface of the sietch floor. And all the dust devils whirling in the sandbox no longer amuse as they once did.

Anyway, the real world has proven far more interesting of late....