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Mon Aug 24 10:00:01 UTC 2026
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Slept from twelve-thirty to eight without waking.
Mostly sunny in the morning, then becoming partly cloudy.
Highs in the mid 70s.
Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph.
# Work
* 12:00 PM Cynerge office hours
The rest of the GrowHub team is traveling to the nursery conference in Idaho today.
(I'm not going because travel funding didn't get approved for my contract.)
# Home
* [x] 2:00 PM grocery delivery
* [x] text Rob and Kate a session summary with XP and treasure
* [ ] schedule second shingles vaccine, if not done (First dose was 2026-05-01.)
* [ ] make appointment for dental cleaning
* [ ] call Dr. Lipson to add refills on prescriptions
* [ ] art!
* [ ] study and think about art
* [ ] work to develop a fast cartoon style that I consider fun and attractive (Look at Adventure Time, Evlyn Moreau, maybe Tove Jansson!)
* [ ] exercise
* [ ] hack on Secret Base
* [ ] play with solo Shadowdark Ars Magica stuff
* [ ] study something
* [ ] D&D Lament game prep
* [ ] include hook to Vecna (?)
* [-] A way to find descriptions and directions to interesting locations on the planes. (Or maybe that's on the beholder's ship?)
Read more of Palaces of Crows.
Took out trash.
A nice, cool, sunny day.
Another sour espresso this morning.
Even on the finest grind setting, my old grinder doesn't seem to get fine enough.
Fortunately, my new Fellow Opus 2 grinder is supposed to be delivered today.
Gah, a tree branch has started scraping against the siding under the roof, near the chimney, on the north side of building 2489 when the wind blows in a certain way.
Not quite finger nails on a chalk board, but not far off.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-who-lived-with-dozens-of-children-from-the-south-pacific
> Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as “Father of America.” Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country’s eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world.
> Luwi and the other children followed Gajdusek wherever he went, and he often photographed them. “One of us would carry his film, another the camera case, and a third the tripod, and then we’d set it up,” Luwi said. “I had never seen my face before”—there were no mirrors or reflective metals in his village—“and when Carleton showed us his shots we would all be giggling at the type of faces we were carrying around. It was, ‘Oh, I have this kind of forehead, I have these kinds of big eyes.’ ”
> The first time Luwi used a pencil and paper was at the encouragement of Gajdusek, who always brought writing supplies, along with marbles and tennis balls, when he came to Waieti and to other hamlets nearby. He collected hundreds of drawings by children in the eastern highlands who were holding a pencil for the first time in their lives. Having never been exposed to pictures, the children invented their own visual vocabulary. They did not initially compose human figures. Instead, they drew geometric patterns, almost as if “ ‘weaving’ or ‘braiding’ their way across the paper,” Gajdusek wrote. (The drawings are saved at the National Library of Medicine, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of correspondence, journals, and photographs.)
> Gajdusek wrote in his journal almost every day, sometimes trailing off as he fell asleep, transcribing thoughts as they turned to dreams. In his house in Waieti, he kept books by Jean Piaget, John Locke, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hume, and Henry James. The “constant fingering through the stack of books and magazines I brought here,” he noticed, “has produced an aura about the word and writing which is so intense as to be bewitching.” The children began demanding lessons in numbers and the alphabet. They sat on the floor of Gajdusek’s house, using cargo boxes as desks. “Thus I come to study the ‘primitive’ and ruin it with my own sophistication!,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal. “Damn it!”
> His grandmother had already died of kuru, a disease that mostly afflicted women and children. “They said we have to be fearful, because kuru sorcerers were moving around the community,” Luwi said. The sorcerers, it was thought, targeted their victims by stealing bits of their hair, clothes, nails, or feces, and wrapping them in a bundle with leaves. Then they said a spell, beat the bundle with a stick, and left it in muddy ground. As it rotted, the intended victim was supposed to simultaneously deteriorate until death.
>
> Kuru had become so prevalent that in some hamlets there were three men for every woman. For a time, the Fore held almost daily mass meetings to try to ban kuru sorcery. (Other illnesses were also thought to be caused by sorcery, but with a different technique.) “You men are trying to wipe us out,” a woman said at a meeting in 1962. A man asked, “Where will you find wives from in the future—if women are completely finished?” There were calls for sorcerers to come forward and repent. In one village, men confessed their acts of sorcery and then put their hands into soapy water, promising that they would never do such things again. But, when kuru deaths continued, there were doubts that the men had told the truth, and the meetings stopped.
>
> Shirley Lindenbaum, an anthropologist working in the region with her husband in the sixties, remembers a neurologist asking, “What do adult women and children of both sexes do that adult men don’t do?” She and her husband responded, “They ate the dead.” Men generally abstained from human flesh, because it was thought to sap their strength. But Fore women and children ate dead kin as a mourning ritual; it was a way, as one Australian patrol officer put it, to incorporate the dead into themselves and “lessen not only the sorrow, but even the idea, of loss.” Lindenbaum and her husband began to suspect that kuru was somehow transmitted through cannibalism.
> As colonial administrators and missionaries had penetrated the highlands, the practice of cannibalism had ended and kuru had begun to recede. When new cases emerged, it was in people who had been exposed to the disease years before. “The scientists never cured anybody,” Luwi told me. “The only remedy they could find was telling people, ‘You have to change your life.’ ” He associated the end of the epidemic with the coming of churches and schools.
Servings: grains 4/4, vegetables+fruit 4/5, dairy+meat 4/4, nuts+beans 0/0.5
Lunch: left-over pizza
Afternoon snack: banana
Dinner: Thai
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