muad'dib on the beeb

BBC science news ran a story today about this little fellow called a Jerboa. The article claims that this is the first time this little fellow has been caught on camera, but I think they mean video as a google search yields many photos.


And of course I'm by no means the first to liken this small critter to Paul Atreides' name sake, the "kangaroo mouse" of Arakkis, but after a visit with my dad this week I've got Dune on the brain. He's reading the Prelude to Dune series again during some extended traveling, which I've never gotten to. I've only ever read Franks Dune novels, having heard lukewarm responses to Brians contributions. However I've always had an interest in reading The Butlerian Jihad, which chronicles the war between the humans and "thinking machines" which results in the ban on intelligent devices found in the later novels and the subsequent development of Mentats, the human logicians trained to replace computers.

Mayhaps I'll continue my ongoing saga of simply assembling a list of books for Santa this year as opposed to the obligatory kitchen gadgets, socks, and blank media I've been avoiding buying all year.