Whipped Cream Difficulties

Dr. Alan Hale, the Hale in the Hale-Bopp comet.

I really like Dr. Hale’s telescope. If I had space and time…

(Thomas Bopp died in 2018.)

Jane Yolen, noted writer. I don’t have much I can link to (Lawrence tipped me off to this, based on a Facebook post) but Michael Swanwick posted a very nice tribute on his blog.

David Hockney, noted artist. He’s one of those people that even I had heard of, and I’m very much an outsider to the art scene.

Cleve Moler.

In the early 1970s, computing was at an impasse. Scientists knew that computing power and memory had the potential to be nearly limitless. At the same time, fields like engineering and biomedical research were running up against quantitative problems far too complex for humans to solve with pen and paper.
Computers could, in theory, help with those problems. But especially early on, working with them was extremely difficult, requiring a deep understanding of FORTRAN, the first high-level programming language, along with hours spent writing the necessary code.

…

In the 1970s, he played a central role in developing two libraries — essentially collections of prewritten code — within FORTRAN, called EISPACK and LINPACK, which provided a standardized set of shortcuts.

…

Starting in the late 1970s, he developed MATLAB, an interface that allowed students to engage directly with a computer, at first through a Teletype machine. His invention was akin to a super-calculator that was able to quickly process mountains of data without the need to program each calculation in advance and without going through the process of creating punch cards.

…

The advent of the personal computer gave every engineer access to a powerful computational device. MATLAB offered a relatively simple way of unlocking those computers’ full potential.
“I was lucky in that the things that I was personally interested in were useful to other people,” he told Scientific Computing World magazine. “I didn’t invent MATLAB to be used by a lot of other people. I put things into MATLAB that I found useful, and other people have also found them useful.”

There’s a fun little note in the obit involving a movie based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, but I am leaving that as an exercise for the reader.

Princess Bajrakitiyabha Narendira Debyavat of Thailand. She was 47.

According to reports, she collapsed while training dogs for a competition in December of 2022, and had been in a coma since that time.