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Obit watch: February 21, 2020.

Friday, February 21st, 2020

I can’t put this one any better than the paper of record did:

Sy Sperling, Founder of Hair Club for Men (and Also a Client), Dies at 78

Several people sent me obits for Lawrence Tesler:

Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Apple under Steve Jobs. But it was as a young researcher for Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work: helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.
Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott, developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.

…

The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.

…

It was Mr. Tesler who gave Mr. Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.

The NYT ran a nice obit for Kellye Nakahara Wallett. There’s also a very good tribute to her on Ken Levine’s blog.

Esther Scott, actress. (“Boys N the Hood”)

Ja’Net DuBois, “Willona Woods” on “Good Times” and co-writer and performer of the theme for “The Jeffersons”.

Bonnie MacLean, another one of the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic poster artists.

Posted in 1970s, Apple, Geek, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Scientific progress goes “Crap!”

Friday, February 7th, 2020

This is my favorite recent scientific paper:

Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?

That’s the actual title, of an actual paper (not an April Fool’s joke) published on January 14th, although it isn’t clear to me if it was peer reviewed or what other publication controls exist on the “ACS Publications” website.

I’m not a chemist, much less a graphene chemist, but I’ll try to summarize: Graphene (“an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms“) has interesting properties for catalyzing electrochemical reactions. The authors of this paper seem to feel that there’s been a recent trend of adding impurities (“doping”) graphine to see how it behaves, and discovering that pretty much anything scientists add increases the electrocatalytic properties of graphine. They also seem to feel that this trend has become absurd.

One may exaggerate only a little by saying that if we spit on graphene it becomes a better electrocatalyst.

But instead of whinging, they decided to prove a point, by doping graphene with…guano. Yes, bird crap. Thus the title.

Guano has a great advantage for doping over using synthetic chemicals. It is available at low cost, it contains a plethora of elements (including N, P, S, Cl, etc.), and its use for graphene doping can be handled by a nonchemist. We show that we can create high-entropy, multiple-element-doped graphene with outstanding electrocatalytic properties for two industrially important reactions: oxygen reduction used in fuel cells and hydrogen evolution used in electrolyzers.

I especially appreciate the author’s callback to Haber–Bosch: after all, the whole reason the Haber–Bosch process exists is because of an impending world-wide shortage of guano for fertilizer.

Posted in Birds, Geek | Comments Closed

We hanged one of those the other day…

Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

I totally missed this story until I went over to Derek Lowe’s blog. In fairness, I think a lot of other folks have, too, and the NYT headline didn’t help much:

U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding

It wasn’t just a “Harvard Scientist”. It was the chairman of the chemistry department. And he got taken away in handcuffs.

Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.

…

Dr. Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He appeared in court on Tuesday wearing the outfit he had put on to head to his office at Harvard: a Brooks Brothers polo shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. He appeared subdued as he flipped through the charge sheet. Mr. Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.

How much do you want to be that this is another example of “Really. Seriously. Shut the f–k up.“?

But wait! There’s more!

Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.
The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.

Derek Lowe’s blog entry has a link to the criminal complaint, which I haven’t read yet, but he summarizes.

I am having difficulty picturing the reaction in the Harvard administrative offices to the news that the chair of their chemistry department was being hauled off by the FBI.

(Subject line hattip: supposedly said by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to someone who introduced himself as a Harvard professor, referring to the Parkman-Webster murder case.)

Posted in FBI, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 26, 2019.

Thursday, December 26th, 2019

Death doesn’t take a holiday, but I do.

Now that I’m back…

Chuck Peddle. He was a key designer of the 6502 processor for MOS Technology.

“Chuck Peddle is one of the great unsung heroes of the personal computer age,” said Doug Fairbairn, a director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Virtually all of the early, successful, mass-market personal computers were built around the 6502, not chips from Intel or anyone else.”

One key reason for this is that the 6502 sold for $25 in 1975. The Motorola 6800 sold for $300.

Edward Aschoff, college football reporter for ESPN. The ESPN tribute makes it sound like he was a genuinely fun and well thought of guy. He was only 34 years old, and died after a short illness:

Mr. Aschoff had contracted pneumonia about a month ago, according to his social media posts. “I had a virus for two weeks. Fever and cough and the doctors think it turned into this multifocal pneumonia recently,” he tweeted on Dec. 5, noting that he rarely gets sick and had been taking antibiotics.

Posted in Geek, Media, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 21, 2019.

Saturday, December 21st, 2019

Junior Johnson, legendary NASCAR racer. NYT. ESPN. News and Observer. NASCAR.

“The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” by Tom Wolfe.

In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman—making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course, very few stock-car drivers have ever had anything to do with the whiskey business. A great many always lead quiet lives off the track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from Elmhurst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced these, the most daring men in sports.

Randy Suess. He and Ward Christensen built the first computer bulletin board system in 1978.

Posted in Cars, Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

I’m done.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have committed suicide than science fiction fandom.

If you think that’s a strong statement, well…

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Born Alice Bradley in 1915, she travelled the world with her parents as a young child. In 1940, after a brief unhappy marriage, she joined the women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and worked in intelligence. She married Huntington “Ting” Sheldon in 1945, and in 1952 they both joined the CIA. She later earned her doctorate and took up writing. She wrote short stories and novels, but it is the former that stand out as truly remarkable. With prose as subtle and precise as the most refined literary fiction, she penned imaginative tales like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” which became classics of science fiction and also important works of feminist fiction. Later in her life, she suffered from heart troubles and depression. Her husband went blind. She recorded in her diary in 1979 that she and her husband had agreed to a suicide pact if their health worsened. In 1987, she shot her husband, called her lawyer and told him that they had agreed to suicide, and then shot herself.
The award is being renamed because of this suicide. Although the prize was founded to recognize fiction “exploring gender,” the current board of the award see their expanded mission to be to “make the world listen to voices that they would rather ignore.” The issue is that some of these voices have decided that Sheldon killed her husband because she was ableist (that is, bigoted toward the disabled). Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, has tweeted in response: “The question has come up whether Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr) and her husband Ting died by suicide or murder-suicide. I regret not saying clearly in the bio that those closest to the Sheldons all told me that they had a pact and that Ting’s health was failing.” Phillips has also changed her Twitter profile to include the sentence, “Biographer of Ursula K. Le Guin and of James Tiptree, Jr., who was not a murderer.”

From Catholic Answers:

Yes, for many centuries the Church taught that those who took their own lives could not be given a Christian funeral or buried in consecrated ground. Nonetheless, in so doing the Church wasn’t passing judgment on the salvation of the individual soul; rather, the deprivation of Christian funeral rites was a pastoral discipline intended to teach Catholics the gravity of suicide.
Although the Church no longer requires that Christian funeral rites be denied to people who commit suicide, the Church does still recognize the objective gravity of the act…
As it does for all grave acts, the Church also teaches that both full knowledge and deliberate consent must be present for the grave act of suicide to become a mortal sin:

Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice (CCC 1859).

When a person commits suicide as a result of psychological impairment, such as that caused by clinical depression, the Church recognizes that he may not have been fully capable of the knowledge and consent necessary to commit mortal sin:

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide (CCC 2282).

(For those unfamiliar, CCC is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Those numbers are paragraph references: you can find the whole thing online here.)

Posted in Books, Geek, Religion | Comments Closed

William Gibson, call your office, please.

Monday, November 4th, 2019

The street finds its own uses for things.

The paper of record would like for you to know that “drones are increasingly being used by criminals across the country“.

Their first example is a guy who was using drones to drop IEDs on his ex-girlfriend’s property.

He has been indicted on charges related to making explosives and possessing firearms, but the only charge concerning his delivery method has been unlawful operation of an unregistered drone.

And they all moved away from him on the Group W bench.

Other examples are more in line with what you’d expect: drug smuggling and voyeurism. Buried in the article is a decent point: the question of who has jurisdiction over drones in flight and what can be done about them is kind of up in the air.

Where have we heard something like this before?

“It’s not like a car — it’s not necessary to register at sale,” Mr. Holland Michel said, adding, “A criminal will not register a drone.”

Posted in Explosives, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

70s television (and aircraft) geekery.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Those of us who are, shall we say, of a certain age, fondly remember “Baa Baa Black Sheep“.

By way of McThag (and thank you sir): a history of the Corsairs used in filming the show.

A total of eight Corsairs, of varied backgrounds, participated in the filming: four FG-1Ds, two F4U-7s, one F4U-1A, and one F4U-4. Five were combat veterans, two have turned hot laps at Reno, and two later became Oshkosh Grand Champions. Since the conclusion of Black Sheep in 1978, one FG-1D and one F4U-7 have been lost. Of the remaining six aircraft, four are actively flying, one is maintained in airworthy condition but not flown, and the last is awaiting restoration to airworthy condition.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2019.

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”

If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?

Dr. Paul Polak, a former psychiatrist who became an entrepreneur and an inventor with a focus on helping the world’s poorest people create profitable small businesses, died on Oct. 10 in Denver. He was 86.

…

In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.

…

His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.

…

By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.

Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.

Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?

Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.

Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.

I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.

She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.

…

The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Geek, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Clippings.

Friday, October 18th, 2019

I went back and forth on linking this one: as I’ve said before, I don’t really like ESPN. But this morning’s Linkswarm (with the Deshaun Watson article) pushed me into it.

Profile of Sabrina Greenlee, mother of Houston Texans receiver DeAndre Hopkins.

Every time the Houston Texans play at home, DeAndre Hopkins’ mother, Sabrina Greenlee, sits in the same spot in the end zone, close enough to the field to hear the ball smack against the turf. It’s Week 2, and Houston is playing the Jacksonville Jaguars; she’s flanked by her two daughters, sitting perfectly still as the countdown clock ticks down to zero. When it’s time for the home team to run through the gate, a massive flamethrower erupts nearby. Greenlee recoils, and her eyes, which are the same cloudy shade of white as an overcast sky, glisten from the heat. A few minutes later, Hopkins emerges from the tunnel — he’s always the last player on offense to come out, Greenlee explains — and she smiles.
She can’t see her son, but she knows he’s there.

This is old, but still interesting, and it just came across the Hacker News Twitter: I survived the “Destroying Angel”.

I felt queasy. It was the same feeling I had when I had food poisoning. Before I had any more time to assess my state, I realized I needed to get to the bathroom. I barely made it to the royal throne when I started heaving my guts out. The vomiting reflex was strong. The pressure of the strong contractions forced stuff out both ends of the GI tract, uncontrollably. I had a severe case of vomiting and diarrhea. At that point, deep down I knew I had made the big mistake: I HAD EATEN AMANITA VIROSA, AKA, “THE DESTROYING ANGEL”.

Amazingly, the author lived. Without a liver transplant.

I found out that of three people admitted in 2006 to Strong Memorial with Amanita poisoning, I am the only one to have survived; 66% died.

I think part of the reason I like this is that it reminds me of one of my favorite Berton Roueché “Annals of Medicine” essays: a first-hand account by a professional snake handler of being bitten by a red diamond rattlesnake. If you’re a subscriber, you can read that on the New Yorker web site here.

Posted in Geek, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2019.

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.

Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).

Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.

What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.

He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.

Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.

…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 11, 2019.

Friday, October 11th, 2019

The Francis Currey obit provoked a lively and delightful string of comments. Please go read them, if you haven’t already. And my thanks to Lawrence, pigpen51, and thinkingman.

I held this one from yesterday because I didn’t want to detract: Karen Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers.

In 1983, Ms. Pendleton was a passenger in a car accident that injured her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Eight years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno; she went on to earn a master’s in psychology there.
After the accident, she became an advocate for disability rights — she served on the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped — and worked as a counselor at a shelter for abused women.

…

Ms. Pendleton was often reminded that fans of the Mouseketeers felt great affection for the show. In 1986, when she was a judge for a beauty pageant for women in wheelchairs, she met a woman with polio who said she had been abused by her parents.
“She said, ‘Being able to see you on “The Mickey Mouse Club” was the only happy part of my childhood,’” Ms. Pendleton recalled in 1995. “My eyes just filled up with tears.”

Bjorn Thorbjarnarson. This is one of those obscure but interesting obits: Dr. Thorbjarnarson was a surgeon who specialized in operations involving the biliary tract. Among his patients: the Shah of Iran.

Dr. Thorbjarnarson led a team of surgeons in removing the shah’s gallbladder, a portion of his liver and several gallstones blocking a bile duct — all under highly unusual circumstances.
“Armed guards controlled the traffic to the patient’s room, and all blinds were always down,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson wrote in a letter in response to “The Shah’s Spleen: Its Impact on History,” an article in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, in 2010. “Threatening calls were received by nurses attending, but none to me. Outside, the hospital was surrounded by a howling mob, controlled by barricades, calling for the shah’s head.”

He also operated on Andy Warhol, and was sued.

Warhol’s estate continued a private investigation, however, and in 1991 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the hospital (now known as NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center) and individuals involved in his care. At a trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that year, the estate’s lawyers argued that doctors and nurses had neglected Warhol’s postoperative care and given him an unsafe amount of intravenous fluids.

…

Lawyers for the hospital, as well as for Dr. Thorbjarnarson and Dr. Denton S. Cox, the attending physician and Warhol’s longtime doctor, contended that Warhol had been well enough to watch television and make telephone calls from his hospital room as he recovered. An autopsy gave the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, which the hospital argued was related to Warhol’s poor health and not caused by medical error or negligence.

I know it is an obit (De mortuis nil nisi bonum) and it is from the NYT, but i do think the paper makes a good case that Dr. Thorbjarnarson and the hospital weren’t responsible for Warhol’s death. Warhol was a gravely ill man who was deathly afraid of hospitals (being shot by Valerie Solanas will do that to you). He put off treatment until he couldn’t any longer, and even tried to talk Dr. Thorbjarnarson into treating him at Warhol’s home.

“Dr. Thorbjarnarson refused Warhol’s entreaties and found himself justified three days later, when the sick man was at last on the operating table,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding, “The surgeon found a gallbladder full of gangrene.”

The case was settled out of court.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Quick notes from the forensic beat.

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

Both by way of Hacker News.

“Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol’s home by zooming in on her eyes“.

Gil Grissom, call your office, please.

Ken Thompson’s UNIX password has been cracked.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to add a dictionary of common chess openings to your hashcat runs?

Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »

Well, how do you like them apples?

Saturday, October 5th, 2019

I went over to GT Distributors this morning for Glocktoberfest. Oddly, while it isn’t terribly far from my office, I don’t make it over there that often: they tend to be more police and tactical oriented, and have less on the vintage S&W side. (Bill Orr, the founder, is a highly respected member of the S&W Collectors Association. It’s just that vintage Smiths aren’t their main line of business.)

But I had some Glock related stuff I was kind of looking for, and thought I’d swing by and check out Glocktoberfest.

Of course, they were doing door prize drawings. I went ahead and signed up, even though I never win door prizes. Then I browsed a little and waited for the door prize drawing at the top of the hour.

I’ve got my ticket out and am listening to them call the numbers. As I said, I never win door prizes, but hope springs eternal, right?

Then they called my number.

Well, okay, then. I don’t want to make a big deal about it: this was one of the hourly door prizes, not the big final prize (a new Glock). But the hourly prize was one of those snazzy 5.11 Tactical RUSH 24 backpacks. It’s kind of like walking into some place, hanging out for a bit, and then someone hands you a $100 bill right out of the blue.

(And I did pick up a few relatively small items: they were selling used Glock 22 and S&W M&P .357 SIG/.40 standard capacity magazines for $10 each. At that price, I figured I’d pick up a couple of each as a hedge. I also picked up some of the tchotchkes they were giving away for free, a Glock 42 magazine +1 mag extension for experimental purposes, and some FMJ .380 auto.)

They did take my photo for promotional purposes (with my enthusiastic consent) but I don’t see it on Facebook yet. I hope I didn’t break the guy’s phone…

Posted in Endorsements, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 3, 2019.

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019

Bill Bidwill, owner of the Arizona (formerly St. Louis) Cardinals.

Under Bidwill’s ownership, the Cardinals toiled in mediocrity. They had five winning seasons from 1972 until Ken Whisenhunt was hired as head coach in 2007, Michael’s first year in charge. The Cardinals went to their first and only Super Bowl the next season.

I’m wondering if we’re going to see an NFL team for sale soon, and if that’s going to result in a possible relocation. LA and Las Vegas are off the map…but with the St. Louis Rams gone, and a past history for the Cardinals there…?

John Rothman. Kind of an obscure figure, but interesting: he pioneered electronic access to the NYT archives.

Working on the index led Mr. Rothman to think about how computers could store, sort and deliver abstracts of Times content to users at the paper and other locations, like public libraries, universities and major corporations. He proposed the Information Bank — the Times Index writ large — in 1965 and began working on it with IBM the next year.

…

In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper’s archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper’s in-house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that “once the basic methods” of searching the Information Bank were mastered, “retrieving the information is quite simple.”
In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

I’ve been running behind, so for this historical record: Jessye Norman.

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