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Obit watch: June 16, 2024.

Sunday, June 16th, 2024

This is a nice tribute to Mike “Duke” Venturino from American Handgunner. Obit by the same author for GunMag.com.

Edward Stone, physicist. He was behind the two Voyager missions.

Dr. Stone was the program’s chief project scientist for 50 years, starting in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech. He became the public face of the project with the double launch in 1977.

…

“We were on a mission of discovery,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times in 2002. “But we didn’t appreciate how much discovery there would be.”
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to pass the heliopause frontier, where the fierce solar wind of subatomic particles yields to the force of other suns. Today, Voyager 1 is estimated to be 15 billion miles from Earth and traveling at a speed of 38,000 m.p.h., according to NASA. Voyager 2 crossed the border to interstellar space in 2018.

Posted in Guns, Obits, Physics, Science | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: November 10, 2023.

Friday, November 10th, 2023

Frank Borman, astronaut (Apollo 8, Gemini 7) and later head of Eastern Airlines.

“Trained as a fighter pilot and known for his lightning-quick reflexes and exceptional decision-making skills, Borman was one of the best pure pilots NASA had,” James A. Lovell Jr., who flew with Mr. Borman on both Gemini 7 and Apollo 8, wrote in “Lost Moon” (1994), a collaboration with Jeffrey Kluger recounting the near-fatal Apollo 13 mission, on which he flew.

…

Gemini 7 took part in a pioneering rendezvous 185 miles above Earth when Gemini 6A, carrying Capt. Walter M. Schirra Jr. of the Navy and Maj. Thomas P. Stafford of the Air Force, caught up to it and flew alongside it in orbit. That kind of maneuver had to be perfected in order for a lunar module to descend to the moon from an orbiting command ship and later blast off from the lunar surface, then rendezvous and link up with the mother ship for the trip back to Earth.
The Apollo 8 mission, carrying Mr. Borman, then an Air Force colonel; Mr. Lovell, then a Navy captain; and Maj. William A. Anders of the Air Force, was only the second manned flight in the Apollo program. Several unmanned test flights had followed in the wake of the Apollo 1 disaster. It was also the first manned flight employing the hugely powerful Saturn 5 rocket for liftoff.

…

When the astronauts neared completion of their orbiting, they began their second and last television broadcast. The bright moon, in the black sea of space, was visible outside a spacecraft window. Mr. Borman described it as a “vast, lonely forbidding expanse of nothing, rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone.”
The astronauts took turns reading from the Book of Genesis, telling of Earth’s creation. Mr. Borman concluded the telecast with the words: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

Statement from NASA. NASA biography page.

Posted in Obits, Planes, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 3, 2023.

Friday, November 3rd, 2023

Ken Mattingly, astronaut. NASA.

He was the command module pilot for Apollo 16 and commanded two shuttle missions (STS-4 and STS-51C). But he’s perhaps most famous for a mission he didn’t fly.

He was scheduled to be the command module pilot for Apollo 13, but was pulled from the mission at the last minute (after it was determined he’d been exposed to measles) and was replaced by Jack Swigert. We all know what happened next.

Commander Mattingly did not, in fact, develop German measles, and he played a significant part in the plan developed by the astronauts and mission control in Houston to get them home safely.
The three astronauts crowded into the undamaged lunar module, although it had been built to hold only two astronauts and was designed solely for landing on the moon and then returning to the orbiting mother ship.
Commander Mattingly read off a long and detailed list of instructions for the astronauts to follow as they used the lunar lander as a “lifeboat” to get them back toward Earth while short on power and food.

Interview with Mr. Mattingly:

Posted in Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 13, 2023.

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.

Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.

I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”

Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:

In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.

The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)

Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”

Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.

Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.

Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

…

Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.

Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities but always based on Ms. Norwood’s original concept.

Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).

In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”

…

Soon after writing her blog post, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of the NPR program “On the Media”: “If I were asked personally whether or not pouring water down someone’s nose and throat for 20 seconds constitutes torture, I would say personally that I think it does. I totally understand, though, that a news organization needs to be as neutral as possible, and putting out the facts and letting the audience decide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Media, Movies, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 18, 2022.

Tuesday, October 18th, 2022

General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.

When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.

…

Mr. McDivitt’s second and last space mission came in March 1969, when he commanded the Apollo 9 flight, a 10-day orbiting of the earth by a three-person crew. Mr. McDivitt flew with Russell L. Schweickart in a pioneering test of the lunar module, the prototype of the space vehicle that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon four months later. With David R. Scott piloting the Apollo 9 craft, the lunar module disengaged from it, orbited more than 100 miles away and then returned to it.

Official statement from NASA.

His numerous awards included two NASA Distinguished Service Medals and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. For his service in the U.S. Air Force, he also was awarded two Air Force Distinguished Service Medals, four Distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air Medals, and U.S. Air Force Astronaut Wings. McDivitt also received the Chong Moo Medal from South Korea, the U.S. Air Force Systems Command Aerospace Primus Award, the Arnold Air Society JFK Trophy, the Sword of Loyola, and the Michigan Wolverine Frontiersman Award.

Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, Science | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 23, 2022.

Friday, September 23rd, 2022

Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.

Ms. Mantel was one of Britain’s most decorated novelists. She twice won the Booker Prize, the country’s prestigious literary award, for “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both of which went on to sell millions of copies. In 2020, she was also longlisted for the same prize for “The Mirror and the Light.”

She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.

Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.

In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.

…

The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.

Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.

The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.

John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.

And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:

Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.

Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.

Mr. Siegal, who started at The Times as a copy boy in 1960, was widely respected, often revered and sometimes feared in the newsroom. Though never the face of The Times — he worked in relative anonymity — he was something like its collective conscience, an institutionalist watching over a place whose folkways he was often called on to codify.

…

“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.

…

In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.

…

Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Science, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 21, 2022.

Wednesday, September 21st, 2022

Valery Polyakov, cosmonaut.

He was also a physician, specializing in space medicine. He volunteered for a mission to see how the human body would hold up in micro gravity on a proposed Mars trip.

Dr. Polyakov took off for the Russian Mir space station on Jan. 8, 1994, and returned to Earth 437 days, 17 hours and 38 minutes later, on March 22, 1995. He had orbited Earth 7,075 times and traveled nearly 187 million miles, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

That’s still a record.

He worked out while in space and returned looking “big and strong” — “like he could wrestle a bear” — Wired quoted the American astronaut Norman Thagard as saying.
Rather than be carried out of his capsule on his return, Dr. Polyakov walked on his own strength, sat down, stole a cigarette from a friend and began sipping brandy, according to “The Story of Manned Space Stations: An Introduction,” by Philip Baker.

Rev. John W. O’Malley, prominent Catholic historian.

He was prolific, publishing 14 books and editing eight more. He wrote in a breezy, precise fashion that managed to convey deep thoughts in simple terms, and many of his books sold as well among lay audiences as they did among academics. Several were translated into multiple languages.
“This approach is a form of correction to myself,” he said in a 2020 interview with Brill, his Dutch publisher. “I have to be humble enough to acknowledge that if the 10-year-old does not understand, it means that, deep down, I did not understand.”
Father O’Malley wore his learning lightly. Friends called him puckish. His personal page on the website for Georgetown’s Jesuit community lists the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini among his favorite artists, but also the outré filmmaker John Waters. (Father O’Malley was especially partial to Mr. Waters’s movie “Hairspray.”)
He was perhaps best known as a historian of the Jesuit order, which was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 to provide, according to conventional wisdom, the Vatican with a militant defense against the Reformation and to expand its influence through the founding of educational institutions.
Starting with “The First Jesuits” (1993), Father O’Malley showed that neither of those qualities were present at the order’s creation. By wading through thousands of letters written by Loyola and others, he concluded that the Jesuits were in fact designed as a pastoral project, intent on saving souls in the face of the dramatic social upheavals rocking Europe in the late medieval era, and only gradually took on their later reputation.

Arnold Tucker, Army quarterback.

At a time when college rules restricted substitutions, Tucker played not only quarterback but also safety, punt returner and kickoff returner. The one blemish on his team’s records was a 0-0 tie in a game against unbeaten Notre Dame in 1946 at Yankee Stadium.
That same year he earned first-team All-America honors and came in fifth in Heisman Trophy balloting — behind Blanchard and Davis, of course. (Davis won the trophy that year; Blanchard got his the year before.)
But before graduating in 1947, Tucker won the Sullivan Award as America’s outstanding amateur athlete. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears but never played professional football. For several years in the mid-1950s he was an assistant coach at West Point to Vince Lombardi, who went on to glory with the Green Bay Packers.

Blanchard and Davis were Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis, “Heisman Trophy-winning running backs remembered in football lore as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside”. They somewhat overshadowed Mr. Tucker, who actually died on January 10, 2019.

There was a paid death notice published online and buried in the pages of The Miami Herald that January. And at the end of the year The Associated Press listed Tucker (just his name and age) among the many “notable sports deaths in 2019.” But his death was otherwise not widely reported in the mainstream press, which had, almost 80 years ago, chronicled his (and Blanchard and Davis’s) gridiron exploits and later, when their time came, gave both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside substantial obituaries, Blanchard’s in 2009 and Davis’s in 2005.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Tucker’s daughter, Patricia Nugent, confirmed his death. And when asked why it hadn’t gotten much publicity, she said that she had never reached out to the national news media. The Times discovered he had died in seeking to update an obituary about him that was prepared in advance in 2010.

Maury Wills.

Wills set a modern major league record when he stole 104 bases in 1962, eclipsing the record of 96 set by Ty Cobb in 1915 and transforming baseball from the power game that had prevailed since Babe Ruth’s heyday. He set the stage for Lou Brock of the St. Louis Cardinals, who stole 118 bases in 1974, and Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s, who set the current record with 130 steals in 1982.

…

In his rookie season with the Dodgers, the team won the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox, who had their own outstanding base-stealer in Luis Aparicio. Wills stole 50 bases in 1960, his first full season, and went on to win the National League’s base-stealing title every year through 1965.
He was named the league’s most valuable player in 1962. He played on Dodger World Series championship teams again in 1963 and 1965 and a pennant-winner in 1966, teams powered by the pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.

…

He stole 586 bases (putting him 20th on the all-time major league career list) and had a career batting average of .281, with 2,134 hits — only 20 of them home runs. He was a five-time All-Star and winner of the Gold Glove award for fielding in 1961 and 1962. He remained on the Hall of Fame ballot for 15 seasons but was never inducted.

Posted in History, Obits, Religion, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Saturday, September 10th, 2022

The first two doctorates in computer science in the United States were awarded on June 7, 1965.

One of them was awarded to Irving C. Tang. I can’t find a lot of information online about him, though I think this might be his obituary.

The other one was awarded to Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Yes, that’s right: one of the first computer science PhDs in the United States wasn’t just a woman, but a nun. And a good Cleveland girl.

Sister Kenneth’s life took an interesting turn when, as a high school math teacher on the west side of Chicago in her mid-40s, she “read the signs of the times andas early as 1961 responded by enrolling at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire for her first workshop in computer education.” As Sister Kenneth told it, “I just went out to look at a computer one day, and I never came back. … It looked to me as if the computer would be the most revolutionary tool for doing math that I could get.”

This is a recent biographical paper about Sister Keller, who passed away in 1985. She sounds like a very interesting person: she had a long career teaching (at one point, she sat down with Buckminster Fuller to discuss “how computers could augment his work”) and as an administrator who pioneered the use of computers in administration. She was also an early advocate for microcoputers in education.

Sister Kenneth had a keen sense of humor. She was often recruited by phone to job openings around the country, and she would politely listen to the pitch. When the topic of salary came up, she would surprise the recruiter by saying, “You know, I couldn’t accept a salary since I’ve taken the vow of poverty.”

Posted in History, Religion, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 5, 2022.

Monday, September 5th, 2022

Great and good FotB RoadRich was kind enough to send over a couple of Frank Drake links: SETI.org. NASA’s astrobiology branch.

And, because that’s just the way these things work, the NYT posted an obit this afternoon:

Young Frank was good enough at the accordion to play gigs at Italian weddings, recalled his youngest daughter, Leila Drake Fossek. He was always interested in chemistry and electronics as well as astronomy. He attended Cornell University on a scholarship from the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1952.

…

In what he called Project Ozma, after the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Drake alternately pointed the telescope at a pair of sunlike stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, each about 11 light-years from Earth. That telescope, known informally as the Ozmascope, is now on exhibit at Green Bank. The only signal he detected with it was from a rogue aircraft radar, but the effort drew the public’s attention.
A year later, in November 1961, 10 scientists, including luminaries like the young Carl Sagan and John Lilly, who was trying to learn to communicate with dolphins, convened at the Green Bank observatory to ponder the extraterrestrial question. (They did so secretly, fearing professional ridicule.) After Dr. Lilly’s research, they called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
It was at Green Bank that Dr. Drake, who had planned the meeting, derived his famous equation as a way of organizing the agenda. It consists of seven factors, which range over all human astronomical knowledge and aspiration. Some are strictly empirical, like the rate at which stars are born in the Milky Way and the fraction of those stars with habitable planets. Others are impossibly mystical, like the average lifetime of a technological civilization — 1,000 to 100 million years was the guess. Multiply all the factors together and you get the putative galactic census.
In the realms in which astronomers have actually gotten new data, the old guesses of the Dolphins have held up well, said Seth Shostak, an astronomer and spokesman at the SETI Institute. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite and ground-based telescopes have verified optimistic estimates of the abundance of potentially habitable Earth-size planets, and scientists know from the Kepler mission that there could be 300 million of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
“These guys were either enormously lucky or amazingly prescient,” Dr. Shostak said of the Dolphins.
At the same time, scientists have discovered that life on Earth is tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. “There is so much evidence for lots of pathways to the origin of life,” Dr. Drake said.

Just for giggles, and since I don’t believe I’ve posted this before, here’s a paper I wrote back when I was at St. Edward’s on the Fermi Paradox, Drake’s Equation, and Clarke’s “The Sentinel”. (Yes, this was for an English class. Ask me about that class sometime.)

Moon Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans.

“They were passing segregation laws every other day, and the one hand that would go up and say no was his,” recalled Norman Francis, a longtime friend and the former president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans. In the fall of 1952, Mr. Francis became the first Black student to be admitted to Loyola Law School, also in New Orleans. When Mr. Francis arrived early on the first day of classes, Mr. Landrieu was one of three white students who approached him.
“Those three guys walked up to me and said, ‘We want you to know that if you ever need a friend, we’re going to be your friend,’” Mr. Francis said in an interview for this obituary in 2013.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Science | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 2, 2022.

Friday, September 2nd, 2022

Earnie Shavers, boxer.

Fighting during boxing’s — and particularly the heavyweight division’s — golden era in the 1970s, Shavers recorded a 74-14-1 record throughout his career, with 68 of those wins coming via KO.

…

Lauded by his opponents for his overwhelming power, Shavers fought in two heavyweight title fights, suffering defeats in each. In 1977, he lost to Muhammad Ali for the WBA and WBC belts at Madison Square Garden via unanimous decision, but earned the GOAT’s praise after the bout.
“Earnie hit me so hard, it shook my kinfolk in Africa,” Ali said after the fight.

I am seeing reports that Frank Drake, noted astronomer (famous for the Drake Equation) has died, but I don’t have a reliable source to link to.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author. (Nickel and Dimed.)

Posted in Books, Science, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 12, 2022.

Friday, August 12th, 2022

Bill Pitman, one of the members of the Wrecking Crew. He was 102.

In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything — television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.
“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in L.A., the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”
Jumping from studio to studio — often playing four or five sessions a day — members of the crew accompanied the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee and scads more — nearly every prominent performer of the era.

There’s an interesting mixture of obit and feature story in the NYT about Mario Fiorentini, who died at 103.

Mr. Fiorentini, whose father was Jewish, was one of the last survivors from the resistance groups who fought the German forces that had taken control of northern and central Italy in 1943. About 2,000 partisans who fought in the war are still alive, said Fabrizio De Sanctis, the president of a local branch of A.N.P.I., “but the pandemic and the heat this summer have been dealing harsh blows,” he added.
On Wednesday evening, two partisans and old friends of Mr. Fiorentini — Gastone Malaguti and Iole Mancini — paid their respects and for several minutes stood silent guard next to his coffin.

According to the NYT, he was the most decorated member of the resistance. He was also a passionate mathematician.

“Remember,” he told Mr. De Sanctis, the local A.N.P.I. official, “the resistance to Nazi fascism is the most beautiful page of our history, but mathematics is more important.”

(Alternative link for those who might want one.)

Kamoya Kimeu. He was a Kenyan fossil hunter who worked closely with the Leakeys.

Most paleontologists go years between uncovering hominid fossils, and the lucky ones might find 10 in a career. Mr. Kamoya, as he was called, who had just six years of primary school education in Kenya, claimed at least 50 over his half-century in the field.
Among them were several groundbreaking specimens, like a 130,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull, which he found in 1968 in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. The discovery pushed back paleontologists’ estimate for the emergence of human beings by some 70,000 years.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Science | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Wednesday, July 27th, 2022

James Lovelock, Gaia theory guy. He was 103.

But his global renown rested on three main contributions that he developed during a particularly abundant decade of scientific exploration and curiosity stretching from the late 1950s through the last half of the ’60s.
One was his invention of the Electron Capture Detector, an inexpensive, portable, exquisitely sensitive device used to help measure the spread of toxic man-made compounds in the environment. The device provided the scientific foundations of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” a catalyst of the environmental movement.
The detector also helped provide the basis for regulations in the United States and in other nations that banned harmful chemicals like DDT and PCBs and that sharply reduced the use of hundreds of other compounds as well as the public’s exposure to them.

I’m setting aside, for the moment, the arguments over the legacy of “Silent Spring”. Folks are welcome to discuss that in the comments if they’d like.

Later, his finding that chlorofluorocarbons — the compounds that powered aerosol cans and were used to cool refrigerators and air-conditioners — were present in measurable concentrations in the atmosphere led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer. (Chlorofluorocarbons are now banned in most countries under a 1987 international agreement.)
But Dr. Lovelock may be most widely known for his Gaia theory — that Earth functioned, as he put it, as a “living organism” that is able to “regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state.”

Personally, I think Gaia is a bunch of hooey. But the man did science, and deserves props, even if I don’t necessarily agree with everything he said. Also, he was married to the same woman for 47 years, until she passed.

He first met his second wife, Sandy, at the age of 69.

The Choco Taco. I’ve always liked those, but it’s been a while since I’ve had one. Cause of death is given as COVID related supply chain issues. But I’ve seen assertions elsewhere that it was cancelled due to “cultural appropriation”. I’m not sure how serious that claim is…

Posted in Food, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

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