[ExI] another fun story, part four of two

[Keith Henson]

 I don't look a Facebook that often, but Rudy was hawking a book there
last week.

Damian and Vernor Vinge were both tragic losses.

Keith

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 3:36 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> The pleasant memories of an evening with Damien Broderick and Rudy Rucker led me to discover that Damien had passed (damn.)  This caused me to become worried about Rudy, who is about the same age as Damien, so I looked into that.  The good professor is alive and well as far as the internet knows, but there was a comment about his having suffered a stroke in 2008.  He recovered, but the experience led to some deep introspection.  He was only 61 yrs then.  Warranties on life’s subsystems begin to expire in one’s seventh decade (how well I understand that.)  One is never sure how much time is left on the old game clock.
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> After his stroke, during recovery at home, Rucker asked himself what were his top priorities in life, what did he want to do most.  He asked himself if he had time to write only one more book, what would he write about?
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> As many of us might do, he chose to write an autobiography.  His is called Nested Scrolls.
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> I ordered a copy and have started reading.  That man has TALENT!  He is a most compelling writer.  Once in a very long while you meet a person like that, a true polymath: he is good at everything he does, good enough with language to sell his words, great cook, artist, mathematician, computer scientist, great conversationalist, easy to be around, super nice guy.  Any good writer’s best work is often his memoirs (examples are many) or fictionalized versions, in novel form (examples are even many-er) but it is easy to tell when a good writer is writing a topic he knows so well, because he was there.
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> spike
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