rironin

I'm not sure that I like this approach. His odds of survival may be less than 20%, but I'm pretty sure he wants to live. Getting heavily into debt is like rooting for the cancer to win, and guaranteeing that if he does survive, he'll be financially fucked.

It's so simple when you explain it, but that would probably never have occurred to me. Neat.

Seems like one of the better plans might be to try to change the rice rather than the weed. If you could breed a variant of the rice that looks different without the food-bits being different (like a differently colored stalk or something), then you could get ahead of it.

The extant weed would adapt to the different color of course, but you could switch the colors periodically, as it started to match whatever you were using. Sounds like that'd work decently well...

I think Shai Hulud is completely made up though.

It actually isn't, at least not entirely. In later books the worms are also referred to as Shaitan, so I think we can infer that the "Shai" in Shai Hulud is related.

Shaitan is the Islamic term for the devil, and I can only assume the word Satan grew out of it EDIT: satan was originally a Hebrew word.

So, Shai Hulud still has at least partially Arabic roots.