Serendipitous conjunctions

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…happen pretty much daily, and enliven and inform and provoke. This morning’s thusfar:

(1) Cory Doctorow:

These are anxious times. I don’t know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there’s this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it’ll be months, possibly years, before things get back to “normal” (“normal!”).

(2) Bangladesh’s Energy Crisis worsens as US-Israeli War on Iran Drags on Zulker Naeen at Informed Comment (on the local consequences of Anthropocene crises, induced by distant events and system dependencies of global scope)

…The ready-made garment industry accounts for 84 percent of Bangladesh’s exports and employs millions of workers. When power cuts doubled to as much as five hours per day, factories faced impossible choices. Industry leaders described a nightmare scenario unfolding since the conflict began in late February. Running diesel generators during extended outages dramatically increased operating costs. In recent months, many textile and garment factories operated at only 40–50 percent capacity. These production losses threatened export orders. By early March, diesel reserves had fallen to just nine days of supply, measured at 115,473 tons as of March 4. The government scrambled to secure emergency shipments. Bangladesh received 5,000 metric tons through a cross-border pipeline from India’s Numaligarh Refinery. Officials were negotiating for an additional 30,000 metric tons from the Indian Oil Corporation.

(3) Will Trump’s Blockade of Hormuz spark Conflict with China? Juan Cole

…A big problem with a US attempt to serve as gate keeper for shipping through the Strait is that 90% of Iranian petroleum exports, totaling about 1.5 million barrels a day, goes to China. If the US does not allow those ships bound for China to transit Hormuz, that would actually be a blockade of Chinese commerce, which is an act of war in international law.

and (4)


(the video is almost 40 minutes, but it’s pretty much pure gold)

now that April’s here

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I continue to capture the Incoming to a page that points to links, the Continuing to Collect the Portentous and the Exemplary in its April iteration. Work on /lexicon and /lifebox continues, and I’m contemplating methods to corral Notes to Self, which I’ve been accumulating in various form factors for a very long time —scraps of paper in file folders, daybook/journal entries, notebooks of many types, and of course those yellow pads through most of the last decade. The blog has been a fitful presence since it began in 2004, but it hasn’t found its feet as a quotidian medium in the last few years. Alan Levine inspires me to keep at it.

A giant Project looms and slouches

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Sarawak has been a fascination for more than 60 years, and I’ve gathered books and papers and other materials pretty much constantly. It’s a challenge to corral the scattered bits into a single Project, and I’m not sure how much of the potential I’ll ever realize (many many other worthy projects… and tempus fugit at a downhill rate), but at least I have instantiated a workspace at oook.info

midFebruary

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I’ve been exploring the personal utility of NotebookLM (lots of links collected at /Jan26/NotebookLM.html, most of them paywalled at Medium), and collecting some of the proceeds under ontology and Accelerando. I’m not entirely sure where this attempt to use AI for my own purposes will lead. The February general links page and the February AI links page continue to accrete interesting sources, and perhaps NotebookLM will serve an indexing and querying function for those pages when the month ends.

Meanwhile, Kate is transforming my archive of beloved but no longer wearable t-shirts into quilts. The first (of a projected 4) is now pieced:

It’s now 3 weeks since the embuggeration episode detailed in the previous post; I can report that I feel entirely myself, and that the event was (as Don Laver put it) “inconsequential”.

embuggerance

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Here’s a report on my Adventure of almost a fortnight ago, sent out to friends and family and stored here for ready access:

The “AI Overview” of the term embuggerance, coughed up by google, is a good summary of the ambit of the term, and fits nicely with my thinking about the event described below and its consequences.

So in short:
On Saturday January 24th we were out to dinner with friends, well into the dessert course, when I experienced vertigo so sudden and arresting that I knew I couldn’t move and certainly wasn’t going to be able to get to the car, let alone drive. There happened to be an EMT person as a guest at the inn, and he asked all the right questions and summoned an ambulance, which took me to the nearby Pen Bay hospital ER, which led to 3 days as a guest in the hospital, and eventually to an MRI on Monday that found the cause to be an acute bilateral cerebellar infarction, basically a small stroke in the lizard brain. Such things are pretty rare, and not obviously karmic (that is, I didn’t earn or deserve it as far as I can see). It took about 24 hours before I could stand or navigate because of dizziness, but that passed gradually and by Tuesday morning I was mobile again. The CT scan at the ER showed no obvious cause, so they did the MRI on Monday which disclosed the small strokes.

So instead of the cataract surgery that I was scheduled for tomorrow, I’m at home and doing pretty much nothing for a while –reading, writing, watching videos, entirely mobile and needing no assistance to move around the house, unimpaired in physical and mental ways. Even stood on one leg while putting on socks this morning.

Of course Betsy and Kate get to do the household stuff like wood-hauling and venturing to the mailbox, and dealing with snow shoveling, and I’m periodically asked if there’s anything I need or want, but otherwise daily life is returned to normal. I don’t foresee any lifestyle changes as indicated or likely, but do vow to work more assiduously at curating collections and refining https://oook.info/lifebox.

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I seem to be back to pretty much normal now, I’m pleased to report, but enjoined to “take it easy”, which turns out to be quite pleasurable as a lifestyle.

yeah, well…

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So here it is, the beginning of November. A lot of work in /lexicon and /lifebox, and at the moment it’s not clear what the blog is doing, beyond helping me remember where I’ve put stuff. I may return to thinking of it as a way to keep like-minded others (whoever they might be) updated with my doings and discoveries and curiosities, but I have no idea if there’s anybody out there …

and now it’s nearly the end of August

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Lots of activity in the last couple of months, unrecorded in the blog. A lot of my daily link-farming is captured via my August 2025 page (Collecting the Portentous and the Exemplary)

Lately I’ve been thinking about Legacy and the where and why and how of collecting, curating, displaying. Today I looked through the homepage links (oook.info) and made a page of links to pages found/rediscovered that trace some of the ways I’ve used html to track my own thinking… some from W&L years, some from the last 20 years, and even one dating back to 1971. The page needs reorganization (perhaps chronological, maybe topical) and …explication, and it hints at further delvings into my past, so it’s just a start.