Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Finding Muad'Dib

It started when a friend of ours posted a link on Facebook about The Mind Museum, which is a project to create a world-class science museum here in the country. While the museum is targeted to open at the end of this year, they're still open to sponsorships from major corporation and even individual patrons. In fact, they came up with a pretty interesting system for it:


So for as little as P1,000, you have the option to sponsor a star or a periodic element or something like that. Of course by now most of the "good" stuff are taken like all the planets in the solar system and some of the more notable galaxies. While we puzzled over what might make a good "investment" in this regard, something popped into mind.

Paul Atreides: What do you call the mouse shadow on the third moon?
Stilgar: We call that one
Muad'Dib.

In Dune lore, Muad'Dib is the kangaroo mouse of the planet Arrakis / Dune. But it's also the name that Paul eventually adopts as his Fremen name, or formally Paul Muad'Dib. While Dune is probably more special to me than it is to Tobie, he does understand why this is so important to me and he even went as far as taking time to read the book (which is no small feat!)

And so we ended up sponsoring this galaxy:


Technically this refers to the Mice Galaxies, which are two spiral galaxies (NGC 4676A and NGC 4676B) that are in the process of colliding and merging. So it now seems all the more fitting that they're two galaxies merging into one. The process is somewhat violent and it will mean the two ceasing to be individual galaxies eventually, but the end result will be something amazing and special in its own right.

So there you have it - our virtual galaxy sponsorship. It'll be visible on the website of the museum for as long as possible and once the museum is open our names will be listed as sponsors.

Pretty cool, huh?


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3 comments:

  1. Can I just say that this is sooooooooooo cool of you two to actually do this.
    Gay geeks are so awesome!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haha, well thanks for letting us know about this in the first place. =)

    ReplyDelete

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