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Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #900 on: August 16, 2008, 09:05:46 AM »
Have you read the Dune books and if so did you understand what they were about after book 1?  I didn't get the sequels.

Yeah, I understood them, though reading wiki entries and watching the miniseries has improved my understanding a bit. 

In 'Dune Messiah', Muad'Dib has to survive and overcome various plots by his enemies and expresses his despair at how he's become trapped by his own prophecies and by the religious and political system he's created, which he's no longer in control of.  His original goal was to lead humanity along a 'golden path'; a chain of events which would avoid the stagnation and extinction of the human race, but he knows this would have a terrible personal cost to himself, so he starts looking for a way out.  When his children are born, he loses his prescience, since he only foresaw the birth of a daughter and not twins, and having been previously blinded in a stoneburner attack, he finds his way out.  Without his prescience, he's now blind, and under Fremen law, he must walk into the desert to die, which he duly does, leaving the children in the care of his sister.

In 'Children of Dune', the children have reached adolescence and Leto, the male of the pair, is having prophetic visions that he doesn't fully understand.  Alia, their aunt and regent, who gained the memories of all her ancestors as a foetus when her mother drank the water of life in the first book, loses her sanity and becomes possessed by her ancestor-memories.  Seeing this, the twins, who also were born with the memories of their ancestors, worry that the same fate will befall them.  As Alia becomes more violent and oppressive in her rule and rebellion grows, in part spurred on by 'the Preacher', a blind man from the desert who preaches against the religion of Muad'Dib and calls for a return to the old and pure ways, the twins are attacked in a plot by the deposed house Corrino and Leto ends up captured by a rogue tribe of water-thieves, who force-feed him spice esscence in an attempt to make him insane like his aunt.  Instead, he overcomes his ancestor memories and achieves prescience, much as his father did in the first book through drinking the water of life.  Now prescient, he can see the golden path that his father abortively took, and decides to take up the task himself.  To do this, he knows he'll need to live for far longer than a normal human lifespan, so he uses his new-found control over his own biochemistry and his spice saturation to merge a layer of sand trout, larval sandworms, onto his skin, beginning a long transformation into a human-sandworm hybrid that will live for thousands of years.  The sand trout give him super-human strength and reflexes, enabling him to easily escape his captors, and he returns to the imperial palace and deposes Alia, taking up the throne as a God Emperor so that he can lead humanity along the golden path.

In 'God Emperor', Leto, who's now transformed into a large sandworm creature with a human face and vestigial limbs, has rendered humanity completely sedentary and helpless through his control of a stockpile of spice, with no more spice production being possible due to the sandworms being extinct due to Arrakis having been terraformed into a moist, green world.  He knows he must bring his stewardship of the human race to an end in order to set it free and complete the golden path, and to do this, he uses a Duncan Idaho ghola and one of the descendants of his sister to assassinate him by collapsing a bridge and dropping him into the river below.  Leto has by this point begun reversing the terraforming of Arrakis, changing it back to a desert planet, and his death completes the process and begins a new spice cycle, as the sand trout leave his body upon contact with large amounts of water and begin the process of encapsulating the water to make Arrakis dry enough for adult sandworms to survive.  Later books deal with the details of the aftermath of his death, and how it leads to mass-famine throughout the empire and a scattering of humanity into unknown space, but I haven't read those.

(Most details omitted.)
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14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #901 on: August 16, 2008, 09:06:37 AM »
Holy shit, if the date is correct that means nobody has asked Peter a question in over a year. 

How are you doing Peter?

I'm ok.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline DirtDawg

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #902 on: September 24, 2008, 07:04:39 PM »
Jimi Hendrix: When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. 

Ghandi: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

The end result of life's daily pain and suffering, trials and failures, tears and laughter, readings and listenings is an accumulation of wisdom in its purest form.

Offline Tom/Mutate

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #903 on: October 27, 2008, 04:39:48 PM »
What did you study at uni?  Did you pass?

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #904 on: October 27, 2008, 06:05:14 PM »
I studied geography, and got a BSc.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline odeon

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #905 on: October 28, 2008, 04:16:56 AM »
Had enough of the electrodes yet?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

- Albert Einstein

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #906 on: October 28, 2008, 04:51:14 AM »
Nope, but I'm taking a break until I come up with a design that's less likely to make holes in my skin.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline Parts

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #907 on: October 28, 2008, 07:32:33 PM »
How high an amperage will you go
"Eat it up.  Wear it out.  Make it do or do without." 

'People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.'
George Bernard Shaw

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #908 on: October 28, 2008, 08:35:49 PM »
At the moment, I'm getting skin damage above about 1.5mA, but I think that's mostly a problem with electrode design, and I've made some new electrodes that I think will work better, but haven't tested them yet.  If I get that sorted out, I'll experiment and see what, if anything, happens at higher amperages, but 1-2mA is already fairly noticeable.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline Parts

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #909 on: October 29, 2008, 04:05:13 PM »
Be careful
"Eat it up.  Wear it out.  Make it do or do without." 

'People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.'
George Bernard Shaw

Offline Pyraxis

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #910 on: October 29, 2008, 04:36:51 PM »
1-2mA is already fairly noticeable.

Noticeable in terms of hurting yourself, or are you actually getting some of the intended effects?
You'll never self-actualize the subconscious canopy of stardust with that attitude.

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #911 on: October 30, 2008, 02:35:34 PM »
1-2mA is already fairly noticeable.

Noticeable in terms of hurting yourself, or are you actually getting some of the intended effects?

Noticeable in terms of giving me white flashes in my visual field when I close or open the circuit, probably through stimulation of my retina or optic nerve, improving my focus, making me more relaxed and giving me an itching-stinging sensation under the electrodes and redness of the skin.  I think a pulsed approach would reduce the dermal irritation and damage, but I've not gotten around to building a circuit for that.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline Tom/Mutate

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #912 on: November 02, 2008, 12:08:33 PM »
Do you have any tips about how I should act toward women whom I want to be attacted to me?

Offline Peter

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #913 on: November 02, 2008, 12:16:31 PM »
Not really; you might try asking someone who's more successful with women.
Quote
14:10 - Moarskrillex42: She said something about knowing why I wanted to move to Glasgow when she came in. She plopped down on my bed and told me to go ahead and open it for her.

14:11 - Peter5930: So, she thought I was your lover and that I was sending you a box full of sex toys, and that you wanted to move to Glasgow to be with me?

Offline Tom/Mutate

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Re: Ask Peter anything
« Reply #914 on: February 01, 2009, 11:27:14 AM »
I'm about one quater way through "Heretics of Dune" at the mo - so far it seems somewhere halfway between the readability of book one and the politics heavy nature of the other sequels.  Seems like a fresh new setting though.