Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Obit watch: November 30, 2023, part 2.

Thursday, November 30th, 2023

Shane MacGowan. Pitchfork. NYT. THR.

I’ve never been a Pogues fanatic. I pretty much missed them when they were an operational band, and the first thing I ever heard from them was “Fairytale Of New York”. I think we can play that now. After all, it is the Christmas season.

Later on, I picked up some more Pogues by way of “The Wire”. Unfortunately, I can’t find a clip of a drunk McNulty (not the valued commenter here, the other one) repeatedly ramming his car into a bridge abutment while playing “Transmetropolitan”…

And Shane MacGowan was Irish, but I think I’d be willing to grant him honorary US citizenship just for this song, which should probably be the national anthem. (Well, either that, or “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”.)

Frances Sternhagen, actress. THR. Other credits include “Law and Order”, “Up the Down Staircase”, and “Communion”.

Obit watch: November 19, 2023.

Sunday, November 19th, 2023

I’m aware of Rosalynn Carter, but I think it’d be better to wait until tomorrow to post an obit roundup.

Captain Don Walsh (USN – retired). Regular readers of this blog might recall the name. For everyone else: on January 23, 1960, Lt. Walsh and Jacques Piccard descended in the bathyscaph Trieste seven miles under the ocean, to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, into the Challenger Deep.

Late in life, Dr. Walsh began to revisit his pioneering dive site. In 2012, at age 80, he advised the filmmaker James Cameron when he became the first person since Dr. Walsh and Mr. Piccard to make a dive into the Challenger Deep. “I feel so fortunate,” Dr. Walsh said at the time. “Dudes my age are mostly sitting in rockers passing around snapshots of grandkids and great-grandkids.”
He also advised the undersea explorer Victor L. Vescovo when he dived into the Challenger Deep in 2019. The next year, Mr. Vescovo once again made the dive; this time, he took Dr. Walsh’s son, Kelly, as a passenger. The two men spent four hours exploring the planet’s deepest spot.

He was 92. According to his son, he died “sitting in his favorite chair”.

Viktor Belenko passed away on September 24th, but his death was not widely reported back then. Mr. Belenko was the Soviet pilot who defected to Japan in his MIG-25 in 1976.

The MiG-25 turned out to be a paper eagle. Its giant wingspan was not for maneuverability but simply to lift the plane and its 15 tons of fuel off the ground. It couldn’t even do its job: Though it flew fast, it was no match for the American aircraft it was meant to take down.
Of great value, though, was what Lieutenant Belenko told the Americans about conditions and morale within the Soviet armed forces.
American officials had long believed that Soviet military personnel were chiseled supermen. Lieutenant Belenko revealed that they were often half-starved and beaten down, forced into cramped living spaces and subject to sadistic punishment at the tiniest infraction.
During a visit to a U.S. aircraft carrier, he was astonished that sailors were allowed unlimited amounts of food, at no cost. He once bought a can of cat food at a grocery store, not knowing it was for pets; when someone pointed out his error, he shrugged and said it still tasted better than the food sold for human consumption in the Soviet Union.

John Barron’s book MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko is available in a Kindle edition.

David Del Tredici, composer. I remember hearing the name a lot in the 80s and 90s when I was buying music, but I don’t think I ever owned a Tredici recording.

Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted. But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them. And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase “Bad Boy of Music,” Mr. Del Tredici could easily have adopted it himself.

But his fascination with Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books led him toward the lushness of a neo-Romanticism that erupted with full force in “Final Alice” (1975), a 70-minute score for soprano and a huge orchestra that was packed with hummable melodies, as well as just enough chaotic brashness to keep its late-20th-century provenance clear.
Some atonalists regarded “Final Alice” as a betrayal. But a PBS broadcast and a recording by the soprano Barbara Hendricks, with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which had commissioned the work), brought “Final Alice” to a large audience that embraced it enthusiastically — as did many musicians.

Some modernists looked askance at the work. But Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, found it heartening. After a Carnegie Hall performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1978, he wrote: “‘Final Alice’ may not be a profound score, and some of it is kitsch, but it does have life, imagination and — mirabile dictu! — audience appeal. People were coming out of Carnegie Hall humming and whistling the ‘Alice’ theme.”

Suzanne Shepherd, actress. Other credits include the LawnOrder trifecta (original recipe, “Criminal Intent”, Sport Utility Vehicle), “Uncle Buck”, and “Requiem for a Dream”.

What to do? What. To. Do?

Friday, November 17th, 2023

I could do three, maybe four, very short posts covering and updating about various news items.

Or I could do one post hitting all of those items, even though it wouldn’t be as organized as doing multiple posts. But it’d just be one post, and maybe slightly more substantial. So one post it is.

Obit watch: A.S. Byatt, noted British author (Possession).

George Brown, drummer for Kool & the Gang.

Non-flaming non-hyenas watch: Mike the Musicologist sent over a link (but I’m using the Post‘s instead) stating that the gun charges against NYC Councilwoman Inna Vernikov are going to be dropped. Turns out that her gun was unloaded and also missing the recoil spring assembly, so it couldn’t be fired.

“In order to sustain this charge, it must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the weapon in question was capable of firing bullets,” Brooklyn DA spokesman Oren Yaniv said in a statement. “Absent such proof, we have no choice but to dismiss these charges.”

This actually makes me feel less sympathetic to her. It seems like she was carrying the gun as a prop, not because she felt a need for protection. And that doesn’t strike me as being very smart.

Firings watch: Chris Partridge, linebackers coach at the University of Michigan. This does seem to be tied to the ongoing scandal.

There are somewhat more than hints in that article and this one that UMich has found out some things about what’s been going on that are causing tsuris.

Sources told ESPN that university leadership this week has shifted its tone from the stern rebuke of the league’s sanctions to a growing acceptance that the football program may be dealing with significant NCAA infractions that could include a failure to properly monitor the program on Harbaugh’s part.

Obit watch: November 2, 2023.

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023

Bobby Knight. NYT. ESPN.

Tribute from ESPN by Jay Bilas.

Knight’s acts of kindness were rarely publicized, and if I had publicized those I knew of while he was alive, he would not have liked it. Knight played for the legendary Fred Taylor at Ohio State, and near the end of Taylor’s life, Knight would sneak into Taylor’s hospital room to hold his hand. When a legendary basketball talent evaluator was having financial difficulty late in life, Knight paid his outstanding bills and rent, without telling a soul.

Don Laughlin. You may never have heard of him, but you’ve heard of the town he created: Laughlin, Nevada.

Taking chances seemed to come naturally to Donald. As a teenager, he stockpiled cash from trapping mink and muskrat and used it to buy mail-order slot machines, installing them himself in local pubs.
Demand was high, and before long he was making $500 a week (nearly $7,000 in today’s money).
The principal of the one-room schoolhouse he attended for high school was not amused. “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school,” Mr. Laughlin told The Review-Journal. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door.’”

David Mitchell. Here’s another person who you may not have heard of. I had, because this is a great story.

In 1975, Mr. Mitchell and his then-wife bought a struggling weekly newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.

In 1973, a grand jury raised questions about fiscal improprieties and child abuse by Synanon, which had once been widely respected but had devolved into an authoritarian cult that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — to become tax exempt. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco found that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, Calif., less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding what turned out to be $60,000 worth of weapons.
Mr. Mitchell began his own investigation that same year, joined by his wife; their one reporter, John Maddeen; and Richard J. Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. To them, it was a story in their own back yard that they couldn’t ignore.

The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.
In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security force had conspired to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon disbanded in 1991.

The Point Reyes Light won the Pulitzer for public service in 1979 for the Synanon stories.

The lawyer and the rattlesnake.

It was said to have been only the fourth time since the prizes were first presented in 1917 that a weekly or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. Mr. Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe.

One other aspect of the story I remember: most of the Pulitzer prizes come with a cash award. The public service prize does not. Which was sort of unfortunate, as the Light was a constantly struggling newspaper. (The Times blames Mr. Mitchell’s divorce from his second wife on the financial pressures involved in keeping the paper alive.)

Dwight Twilley, musician. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a music guy and rely on other people for music commentary, but the name rings a faint bell with me…

Obit watch: October 24, 2023.

Tuesday, October 24th, 2023

Dr. Donlin Long, big damn hero.

Dr. Long was one of the pioneers of the insulin pump.

In addition to the insulin pump, Dr. Long, as an expert in relieving chronic pain, also had a collaborative hand in introducing, in 1981, the first battery-powered, rechargeable, implantable electronic device to stimulate peripheral nerves to relieve pain, according to Johns Hopkins. The device, known as TENS, for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator, became a standard medical tool.

He was a neurosurgeon.

As an accomplished practitioner of skull base surgery, Dr. Long was also instrumental in the first successful separation of twin infants born conjoined at the head. The operation, performed in 1987, involved 70 surgeons, nurses and assistants and lasted 22 hours.
The twins’ brains were separated, and one of the infants’ skulls was closed by Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, whom Dr. Long, the founding chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had recruited to the university…
…Dr. Long, Dr. Carson’s mentor, closed the other boy’s skull during the operation.
Drs. Long and Carson had just one hour to accomplish final separation, to reconstruct the divided brain cavities and veins, and to restart the hearts in the infants, both of them boys.

And he was a mentor to people other than Dr. Carson:

Many of the surgeons trained during Dr. Long’s tenure at Johns Hopkins were hired as full professors, as leaders of neurosurgery departments at hospitals and universities, and as heads of professional associations.
“Neurosurgeons everywhere stand on his shoulders,” Dr. Connolly said.

Remembered for his equanimity, his role as a mentor and his can-do passion, Dr. Long often told his children and grandchildren, “There is no try, only did and did not.”

Elizabeth Hoffman, actress. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Cutter to Houston”, “Blue Thunder”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Angelo Bruschini, guitarist for Massive Attack.

Obit watch: October 12, 2023.

Thursday, October 12th, 2023

Walt Garrison, legendary Dallas Cowboy, rodeo competetor, and Skoal endorser.

His best season was 1971, where he scored 10 touchdowns and had 1,174 total yards, and it was capped off by a 24-3 Super Bowl victory over Miami. He was named to the Pro Bowl that season.
A knee injury Garrison suffered while steer wrestling in 1975 ultimately ended his NFL career. He retired from Dallas as the third-leading rusher and fourth-leading receiver in team history.

Phyllis Coates, actress. Other credits include three appearances on “Perry Mason”, “Midnight Caller”, “The Untouchables”, and “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”.

Jeff Burr, director. IMDB. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Michael Chiarello, celebrity chef.

Rudolph Isley, of the Isley Brothers.

Rudolph left the Isley Brothers in 1989 to pursue becoming a Christian minister. However, he has often reunited with his brothers over the years, including when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, an honor that was presented to them by Little Richard.

Obit watch: October 6, 2023.

Friday, October 6th, 2023

Dick Butkus, one of the greats. ESPN.

At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, good size for his era, Butkus stuffed running plays up the middle. He was also speedy and mobile enough to drop back and foil opponents’ pass plays. He was cited as a first-team All-Pro five times and was chosen for the Pro Bowl game eight times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.
Sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, so the number of times Butkus smothered opposing quarterbacks remains unrecorded. But he was considered to have intercepted 22 passes and recovered 27 fumbles while playing for the Bears from 1965 to 1973.

Butkus was chosen by the Bears in the first round, third overall, in the 1965 N.F.L. draft and by the Denver Broncos of the American Football League in its second round. He went with his hometown team, a storied N.F.L. franchise owned and coached by the future Hall of Famer George Halas. In his rookie season, he intercepted five passes and recovered seven fumbles.
But the Bears fell on hard times during Butkus’s years. They won 49 games, lost 74, tied four and never reached the playoffs. In his last few seasons, Butkus played on with a badly injured right knee despite having undergone surgery. In May 1974, having retired, he sued the Bears for $1.6 million, contending that the team had not provided him with the medical and hospital care it had promised in a five-year contract he signed in July 1973. The case was settled out of court.

He also did some acting.

IMDB.

Joe Christopher, one of the original 1962 Mets.

He was a part-time player in 1962 — the perfectly awful “Amazin’ Mets,” as their manager, Casey Stengel, called them, had a 40-120-1 record that season — when he got batting tips from a Mets coach, the renowned Rogers Hornsby, who hit over .400 three times in the 1920s.
“He was sitting in hotel lobbies,” Christopher recalled in an unpublished interview in 2010 with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times. Christopher recalled Hornsby telling him that the secret of hitting was “don’t let the pitcher jam home plate” and “it’s not about contact, it’s impact.”

In June, when he was hitting .307, he talked about getting a chance to play full time.
“I always knew I could hit, but nobody up here believed me,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always hit well in the minors, but when I got to the majors nobody had any confidence in me.” He added, “They just wouldn’t give me a chance to play regularly. There was always that worry that if I went 0 for 4 I’d be on the bench the next day.”
He finished the season at .300, 16th best in the National League and only the third time a Met had reached that level. (The Mets’ Ron Hunt hit .303 that season.) He also led the Mets with 76 runs batted in and was second in home runs with 16.

He had a career batting average of .260, with 29 home runs and 173 R.B.I.

Keith Jefferson, actor. IMDB.

Russell Sherman, pianist.

Mr. Sherman, who gave his last recital at 88, made his name performing virtuoso works such as Franz Liszt’s daunting “Transcendental Études.” Referring to the composer’s reputation as a showman, Mr. Sherman told The New York Times in 1989 that he was engaged in a “lifelong battle to reconstitute Liszt as a serious composer.”

Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.
On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.

Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”
Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.

Mr. Sherman married Wha Kyung Byun, a Korean-born former student of his, in 1974; she began teaching at the New England conservatory in 1979. They sometimes celebrated their anniversaries by performing together.

Obit watch: September 27, 2023.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Brooks Robinson.

In his 23 seasons with the Orioles, from 1955 to 1977, Robinson became known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner for his ability to snare just about anything hit his way.
Charging topped grounders or bunts, backhanding smashes, ranging to his left or his right, he won 16 consecutive Gold Glove awards as the American League’s leading fielder at third base. Only the pitcher Greg Maddux, with 18 Gold Gloves, has exceeded Robinson’s total.Robinson played on four pennant-winning teams, two of them World Series champions. He was the most valuable player of the 1970 World Series, in which the Orioles beat the Cincinnati Reds in five games, for his spectacular plays and for his hitting: He had a .429 batting average and hit a pair of home runs. (The Orioles also beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games in the 1966 Series.)
Robinson had 2,848 hits, 268 home runs and a career batting average of .267. He was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, when he hit 28 homers, had a league-leading 118 runs batted in and batted .317, all career highs. But he was best known for his fielding.
Robinson was named an All-Star every season from 1960 to 1974. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, his first year of eligibility, with almost 92 percent of the votes.

Edited to add: Dave Barry on Brooks Robinson.

Phil Sellers. He was a dominant player for Rutgers in the 1970s:

He was called “Phil the Thrill,” and, with Sellers leading a team that also included Eddie Jordan, Mike Dabney and Hollis Copeland, Rutgers kept improving. During Sellers’s junior year, when he averaged 22.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game, Rutgers had a record of 22-7 and played in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, losing in the first round.
Rutgers was undefeated in 26 games during the 1975-76 regular season, Sellers’s senior year. Late in a conference tournament game against St. John’s University that preceded the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, Sellers clashed with his coach, Tom Young.
“Give me the ball,” Young recalled Sellers saying when he described the incident to The New York Times in 1983. “I said, ‘Phil, we’re going to run our offense.’ He said it three times, ‘Give me the ball.’”
Sellers scored six points in the next 90 seconds, and Rutgers won.
Rutgers then won its first three games in the N.C.A.A. tournament, despite subpar scoring performances from Sellers, to raise its record to 31-0. But the Scarlet Knights lost the semifinal game to Michigan, 86-70, with Sellers scoring only 11 points against the strong defense of Michigan’s Wayman Britt.
Sellers’s college career totals of 2,399 points and 1,115 rebounds are still Rutgers records.

Terry Kirkman, of the Association. This is another one of those groups that was a little before my time – though I have heard of Terry Kirkman – so I’m going to leave comment on this up to my music consultant.

Obit watch: September 22, 2023.

Friday, September 22nd, 2023

Stephen Gould, tenor best known “as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner”.

Bayreuth Festival website.

Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.
He first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.
“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”
He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”

Obit watch: September 11, 2023.

Monday, September 11th, 2023

Mangosuthu Buthelezi. I went back and forth about noting this, as I’m pretty far from being an expert in South African politics in the 1990s. What pushed me into it was that Lawrence posted a good obit at his site, which I encourage you to read.

Charlie Robison, noted Texas country musician. All the “local” obits I’ve found pull from the same AP obit.

Obit watch: September 7, 2023.

Thursday, September 7th, 2023

Dr. Ferid Murad, Nobel prize winner.

He shared the prize in 1998 with Dr. Louis J. Ignarro and Dr. Robert F. Furchgott for their work on nitric oxide.

The researchers, working separately but in close communication, pressed ahead, and by the end of the 1980s had established that nitric oxide worked as a sort of signaling agent in the cardiovascular system, similar to hormones or neurotransmitters.
The discovery made possible a wide variety of drugs, most famously Viagra, which facilitates erections by increasing blood flow to the penis. It also saved the lives of countless premature babies, whose underdeveloped lungs needed stimulation, and patients with cardiovascular disease, which restricts blood flow.

Gloria Coates, composer.

Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”

Gary Wright, musician.

Marcia DeRousse, actress. Other credits include “The Fall Guy” and “St. Elsewhere”.

Giuliano Montaldo, Italian director and writer. IMDB.

From the “not quite an obit” department: Stephen Wolfram on Doug Lenat.

Obit watch: September 4, 2023.

Monday, September 4th, 2023

Somebody out there is listening to me.

NYT obit for Marilyn Lovell (archived).

On Christmas Day 1968, while Mr. Lovell was on the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon, Ms. Lovell answered her door to find a representative from Neiman Marcus carrying a large box with moon-themed décor. In it was a mink coat and a note The New York Times would later describe as “the most romantic card in the universe”: “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon.” Ms. Lovell did her household chores that day in pajamas and her new mink.
On that mission, Mr. Lovell named a triangle-shaped mountain on the lunar surface Mount Marilyn. It would later serve as a landmark for astronauts, and in 2017, after campaigning by Mr. Lovell, the name was officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

When Ms. Lovell’s 12-year-old daughter, Susan, became hysterical on seeing a priest at their door, Ms. Lovell found a way to soothe her. “Do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?” she asked her daughter, according to Mr. Lovell’s memoir.
Reporters with notebooks, microphones and television cameras filled up the Lovell family lawn and driveway. She fielded a call from President Richard M. Nixon: “I just wanted you to know, Marilyn, that your president and the entire nation are watching your husband’s progress with concern,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring Jim home.”

When parachutes were seen on TV billowing out from the spaceship, guiding it safely to the ocean surface, a couple of famous astronauts in Ms. Lovell’s living room, Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, opened champagne. President Nixon called with a new message: “I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
She replied, “Mr. President, I’d love to.”

NYT obit for Douglas Lenat (archived).

Running across dozens of computers, Eurisko could discover possibilities that Dr. Lenat — and other humans — had not. But it needed help from human judgment. Machines could not be truly intelligent, he realized, unless they too had common sense.
The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project. But he was determined to try.
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many leading researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.

My favorite Dr. Lenat story is partially in the article: the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron story.

In brief: Game Designers Workshop used to (still may) run a contest where you had a trillion “credits” to design the best possible fleet, according to the rulebook. The contestants were pitted against each other until one fleet won. Dr. Lenet fed the rules into Eurisko and iterated until it came up with what seemed to him to be an optimal strategy. He entered the 1981 tournament with his Eurisko designed fleet…and won.

The next year, GDW changed the rules. Dr. Lenet fed the revised rules into Eurisko, entered the tournament again…and won.

What the NYT obit doesn’t say: The third year, GDW told Dr. Lenet that if he entered the tournament with one of his weird computer designed fleets, they’d just cancel it completely. According to the Traveller wiki, he agreed to accept “the title ‘Grand Admiral’ as consolation.

Steve Harwell, former lead singer of Smashmouth. THR. Pitchfork.

Not much to say about this, really. 56 is awfully young, but all the stories go out of the way to mention his issues. And I was never a big fan of the band, with the possible exception of “Walkin’ on the Sun”.

Gayle Hunnicutt. Other credits include “Mister Roberts” (the TV series), “Get Smart”, and “Marlowe” (the 1969 movie with James Garner). (Hattip: Lawrence.)