worms on the brain

[mellowtigger]

It seems like everyone is thinking about great worms these days.

I enjoyed this 16-minute video about the formation of sand dunes (which are cool, by the way), where I learned that a newspaper reporter was sent to investigate how engineers and ecologists were helping prevent the city of Florence, Oregon from being overrun by sand dunes.  That news article was never published, but that reporter was Frank Herbert, and the phenomenon he investigated became the novel Dune.

Which brings us to the new movie Dune.  I watched it twice online, and I enjoyed it.  I have one major quibble, though.  The primary conflict of the movie is based on the instantaneous travel around the galaxy granted by spice.  That travel supports the empire, so the empire requires spice delivery to flow, so control over the only planet known to produce spice is essential to maintaining the empire.  Instantaneous travel.  Which is exactly what happens in the movie, I suppose, because you never see it.  People are packing crates for travel from the wet world of Caladan... then ships are exiting the carrier towards the desert planet Arrakis.  That's it.  There is no transition.  It's instantaneous.  We never see the navigators.  We never experience the prime motivator for the whole saga.  Very disappointing.  The rest of the movie is good, though.

No Man's Sky has opened Expedition 4 for a few weeks as a kind of Halloween event.  It took me 16 hours to complete mine.  It has some fun rewards, like the worm pet and the worm-face version of a Vy'keen (normally a species with rhinoceros appearance).  Here are pictures of me and my pet in game.  No Man's Sky had giant worms for years already, but this Expedition features them in particular.  The Halloween timing with the release of Dune seems to be coincidental.

One of the archives (separate from the scrolls) that we reveal during the game expedition has this to say.  It's very similar to Dune and its reverence to the great worms.

"There are no requirements to become a sacrifice: no restrictions of status or age.  We are all equal under the great worms.  Anyone may enter the maw."

In vaguely related news, researchers are still pursuing the idea of deliberately infecting humans with worm parasites to help moderate our immune response in auto-immune conditions like Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and multiple sclerosis.  I just try to include turmeric and ginger in my diet while avoiding gluten, but I'm keeping an eye on this still-fringe concept.  Meanwhile, other researchers found how red blood cells intervene in severe infections that result in sepsis, so we may eventually get auto-immune treatments that don't rely on worms.