At dinner last night, whom should I espy but loyal reader Mysterious Mike Linksvayer. (After that, it is fitting that Mike’s page leads me to a guide to spices.)
Afterward my party went to a cinema for Lawrence of Arabia, which none of us had seen before. Unfortunately the sound was muddy enough to obscure some of the dialogue. We left at intermission (how many movies have an intermission?); it was already ten p.m.
In one scene where Lawrence sits meditating on a dune, my eye was caught by aeolian (wind-made) ripples in the sand, with a period of about half a foot; I’ve seen orbital pictures of dunes that looked just like those ripples. Can’t recall whether they were on Earth or on Mars. If on Earth, then: hey, fractal self-similarity! If not, perhaps the sizes of the grains or the differences in gravity and atmosphere make the difference in scale.
One of the Bedouins says of a particularly nasty patch of land, “This is the Sun’s Anvil.” I wonder: would nomads know about anvils? Where did their knives come from?
I once heard someone on television refer to Lawrence‘s director David Lean as “David Lynch” – director of another film that had something to do with sand.