Hairy Ticks of Dune

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

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A Simple Poll

The following speaks for itself. (Bringing it to the top again!)






New Dune Novels

As a Dune fan who has read them, how do you feel about the Prequels and Legends books and the new "Hunters" sequel?












(Originally posted at 7:20 PM on 8/22/06. Previously reposted on 12/6/06.)

Monday, February 26, 2007

Saluti e benvenuto...

ai membri della Dune Italia!

(Ciao Rymoah!)

(Sorry, but my knowledge of Italian is very limited. I cheated and used Google Translate for the above. Sigh...)

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

StarGenOSX

I recovered a bit from my funky mood over the unlikelihood of Canopus being able to have a planetary system (what the hey, it's fiction, right?) and have been working on a Mac OS X version of the StarGen program that will hopefully be able to produce a realistic—however improbable—planetary system for the star.

Here's what the control panel of the app looks like at the moment:



Any suggestions as to an icon for the app itself?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Canopus in Agon: Lessing was more (accurate)?

I remember reading Doris Lessing's The Sirian Experiments not long after it came out in the early 80's, but can't recall reading any of the other books in the series. So I'm not sure how she described the Canopus system, if at all. (Or even if "Canopus in Argos" actually refers to the star Canopus.) Her approach may have better than Frank Herbert's in the long run, because it's starting to look like Canopus is the LAST star he should have chosen to spin Dune around.

Here's the deal: It's not certain whether the Canopus we know could form a planetary system in the first place. The star itself is massive, between 8 and 9 times the mass of Sol. And huge: its radius is 65 times that of Sol. And bright: its luminosity is 14,800 times Sol's.

That last is the most damning, because "bright" means it's giving off a lot of energy. Which means it's WAY hotter than our sun. Which pushes the star's habitable zone much farther out than most system formation simulations are geared to handle.

The other problem with big stars is this: they burn through their "fuel mass" much more quickly. So even if planets do manage to form around one, there's probably not going to be enough time for life to arise before the star goes supernova or fsssthpp.

I'll probably keep playing around with the software, just for something to do, but this isn't looking good at all....

The Amazing Shrinking Planet

I got a larger, clearer scan of the map in Dune and plugged the coordinates from it for Arrakeen and Carthag into the new texture point plotting app I'm working on and now have much more accurate latitudes and longitudes for the two cities:

Arrakeen: 62 ° 17 ' 27 " N, 27 ° 47 ' 52 " W
Carthag: 65 ° 31 ' 55 " N, 15 ° 6 ' 17 " W

The downside is that when I plug these new values into my great-circle distance app, the radius for the planet has to be reduced even more to get the distance between the cities to come out to exactly 200 km.

New radius: 1779.9274 km.

For comparison:

Earth: 6378.140 km
Mars: 3396 km
Arrakis: 1779.9274 km
Luna: 1737.53 km

That's not going to work at all. Verdict: Carthago movenda est!

Monday, February 12, 2007

Dune sunset

Ended up doing some more work on the Celestia texture tonight...mostly just creating a basic equirectangular grid for later placement of surface details. Still wondering what color scheme to use, but am considering doing some samples of images of Mars from NASA.

I plotted Arrakeen on the texture and exported a JPEG version and fired up Celestia. Arrakeen came out right exactly where it was supposed to, so I know my formulae for converting the latitude and longitude data from the map in Dune to the XY coordinates of the image are correct. (Or at least coincide closely enough with Celestia's translation of the same data: the program uses normal geographical coords for surface locations.)

While I had the program running I decided to snap a shot of a sunset from the surface.



Under the current set up, Arrakis orbits 15 AU from Canopus. This is probably no good, but a proper distance—just like the diameter to use for the planet—is another one of those details I'm going to have to just wing since there's nothing definitive in the books. I thought about using the StarGen program to generate a bunch of random systems and choose one that looked good, but it's written only to handle G-type stars similar to Sol. Canopus is thought to be about 8 or 9 times as massive...so I'm also looking at rewriting the program to handle larger initial parameters. (I'll have to check the books to see what current theory says about solar systems around more massive stars...can they form at all, or would they be similar enough to what we have in mind?!)

All rather a pain, but at least it keeps me in the sietch and out of the open desert, right?

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Hunters Lexicography

Apologies for the unintended hiatus. Fortunately—or not, depending on how you view things—my role as "instructor of broods" will required minimal attention during the next moon or so, meaning I will have more time to devote to my side projects here!

I've been wanting to get back to the Celestia texture project, for one, and there still remains the thorough bash...er, examination of Hunters. It will take a little time to get back into the proper frame of mind for both, but let's begin for the moment with a few lexicographical observations, shall we?

For example, the first 63 pages of Hunters (all I have scanned at the moment) contain 14,953 words. The total vocabulary (unique word-forms) is only 3,244 words. Ranked by number of occurrences (frequency in the text), the top 20 words are the following:

RankOccurrencesWordTotalCumulative
11040THE0.070.07
2386OF0.030.10
3371TO 0.020.12
4341AND0.020.14
5297A0.020.16
6212HAD0.010.18
7181IN0.010.19
8157HE0.010.20
9138HIS0.010.21
10133HER0.010.22
11127THAT0.010.23
12117AS0.010.23
13116FROM0.010.24
14107WAS0.010.25
15106WITH0.010.26
16100THEY0.010.26
1791THEIR0.010.27
1888ON0.010.27
1984YOU0.010.28
2083NOT0.010.29
Tot4275~30% of total (14953)

(If there are wide gaps of blank space before and after the table above...I think we may be seeing here another of those reasons why Blogger sucks? I'll fix the CSS when I have time. Futz. If not...ignore this!)

Now, that's not incredibly interesting, is it? Basically just a bunch of gammatical function or other low-content words. And not all that unusual, either. Later I'll do the stats for a similar quantity of text from the beginning of Dune, just for comparison, but I don't expect it to be very different.

The first word that marks this as a Dune-related text doesn't come until the 28th rank: SHEEANA, occurring 65 times (0.43% of the total) or about once per page. Next, at 31st is HONORED (as in "Matre") with 58 tokes (0.39%), followed at 35th by DUNCAN (55, 0.37%), at 36th by BENE (54, 0.36%), and at 40th by MURBELLA (50, 0.33%). MATRES ties with the verb form IS with 44 occurrences each (0.29%). ALL, MOTHER, NO-SHIP, and OLD tie with 38 occurrences. GESSERIT beats out TLEILAXU by just 3 tokens (36 times). SPICE, REBECCA, UXTAL, CHAPTERHOUSE, RABBI, and TEG all appear before the 100th top-ranking word, which is SCATTERING (22 tokens). The first 100 top-ranked words account, cumulatively, for 50% of the total text.

A grand total of 2,042 words (63% of the total vocabulary of 3,244) are used only once. This is only about 13% of the total text, however, and again, not that unusual for an extract of this size.

These are just some of the results from a quick analysis on just an initial part of the text. It's interesting to look at the frequencies of the words used, but other than the vocabulary (here, again, the total number of unique word forms used in the text), none of this information is terribly useful in evaluating the text. Some of the things I will be looking at once I have the entire book in analyzable format will include (but not be limited to):

  • composition of higher level elements (sections & paragraphs)
  • sentence length stats
  • sentential & phrasal structural complexity
  • anaphoric expressions
  • repetition (restatement & literal)
And I'll even try to make it all interesting...not just bludgeon you with it like this time! :)