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
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”.
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.