I’ve said before that I have a high bar for linking to ESPN. This clears that bar, especially since I think the story is kind of buried.
“How fears over CTE and football outpaced what researchers know”.
Nut graph:
Beginning of a CTE backlash? Or ESPN positioning themselves for a possible partial buyout from the NFL?
Sliman Bensmaia. He wasn’t somebody I’d heard of before his obit was published, but he sounds like a person whose passing leaves a hole in the world.
Dr. Bensmaia was a neuroscientist. His specialty was the sense of touch, and how it worked.
Dr. Bensmaia was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the 2000s when the Defense Department, faced with a mounting number of wounded veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, committed $100 million to prosthetics research.
Scientists were making enormous strides in the field of brain-controlled prosthetics, but giving users of such devices a sense of touch was still largely uncharted territory. Patients could not actually feel what they were doing: whether a material was rough or smooth, if it was moving or stable, even where their limb was in space.
Dr. Bensmaia (pronounced bens-MAY-ah) saw his task as taking the next step: understanding how the brain receives and processes information through touch, which in turn could allow prosthetics to perform more akin to an organic limb.
…
He and his team would connect electrodes to areas of the monkeys’ brains, poke spots on their hands and then analyze where the brains received that sensory information, as well as how the animals reacted. They then used electrodes to simulate those pokes, in an attempt to mimic the experience.
“When you imagine moving your arm, that part of the brain is still active, but nothing happens due to the lost connection,” he told the magazine Wireless Design and Development in 2014. “The idea behind the project was to stick electrodes in the brain and stimulate it directly to produce some percepts of touch to better control the modular limb.”
Most scientists focus their labs on either pure or applied research. Dr. Bensmaia’s group — some two dozen undergraduates, grad students, postdocs and technicians — managed to do both. He employed neuroscientists, but also teams of engineers and computer programmers.
“He ran his lab like a small company,” David Freedman, a neurobiologist at Chicago, said in a phone interview.
Such coordination was necessary for the complicated work Dr. Bensmaia engaged in. The sense of touch involves a wide array of finely measured inputs — pressure, heat, movement, hardness — all of which are communicated to the brain through some 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections.
…
Dr. Bensmaia was 49.
Terry Funk, noted professional wrestler.
He also did some acting, including “Road House”: IMDB.
Nancy Frangione, actress. Other credits include “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, “In the Line of Duty: A Cop for the Killing”, and “Matlock”.
This isn’t quite an obit, but Stephen Wolfram wrote a really long (35,000+ words) remembrance of his friend Edward Fredkin. (Previously.)
Mark Lanegan, singer. (Queens of the Stone Age, Screaming Trees)
The Amazing Johnathan (John Edward Szeles).
…
Gary Brooker, of Procol Harum.
Arthur Feuerstein. He’s probably one of those people you’ve never heard of, but the obit fascinates me (for reasons that will become apparent shortly).
Mr. Feuerstein was a chess player. A really good chess player. How good?
Over his career, Mr. Feuerstein had a record of one win, one loss and three draws with Mr. Fischer.
More:
At the 1956 United States Junior Championship, he took third, behind Mr. Fischer. He then edged Mr. Fischer for the United States Junior Blitz Championship, in which each player had five minutes for the entire game.
The third Rosenwald tournament, played in October 1956 at the Manhattan Chess Club, is usually remembered because of Mr. Fischer’s remarkable win against Donald Byrne, Robert’s younger brother. But Mr. Fischer finished in a tie for eighth, while Mr. Feuerstein was third — just behind Arthur Bisguier, another New York prodigy, who had won the United States Championship two years earlier.
Then, in the 1957-58 championship, Mr. Feuerstein tied for sixth with Arnold Denker, a former champion, and Edmar Mednis, a future grandmaster. Mr. Fischer, who was then only 14, won the championship, beating Mr. Feuerstein in the process for the first and only time…
The NYT obit describes the 1950s as being “a golden age for the game in the United States, particularly in New York City”. It would probably have a limited audience, but I’d read a book about this time in the chess world.
Anyway, Mr. Feuerstein didn’t want to turn pro. He thought professional chess was “too unstable and too poorly paid”, so he went into the corporate world. But he continued to play as an amateur.
Then, one day in 1973, Mr. Feuerstein, his wife, and their dog were driving to their vacation home. They got hit by a semi.
The dog was killed. Mrs. Feuerstein broke her back and spent six weeks in a cast.
Mr. Feuerstein suffered a horrible head injury. The doctors on his case gave his wife an extremely negative prognosis.
Then one day Mr. Feuerstein woke up, pulled the breathing tube out and began trying to talk. A nurse called Alice, who rushed to the hospital. She found him playing chess with the neurosurgeon, who had also been called.
Years later, in a profile that appeared in 2012 in Chess Life, the magazine of the United States Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, Alice Feuerstein said her husband, after waking, did not even know what a toothbrush was. But, Mr. Feuerstein recalled, “I remembered everything about chess, even my openings.” He also recalled that he had won that game with the doctor.
This isn’t a miracle story. According to the obit, Mr. Feuerstein was never able to work full-time again.
But he did return to competition at something approaching his pre-accident ability, sometimes beating grandmasters, and he remained a master-level player into his late 70s.
He played his last tournament in October 2015, when he was nearly 80, and scored 50 percent, with one win, one loss and a draw.
Cancer got him at 86.
Linda Carlson, actress.
She was the TV station owner on “Newhart” and a judge on “Murder One”, among other roles. I was not aware there was a 1993 “Beverly Hillbillies” movie, nor did I know there was an attempt at an “African Queen” TV series. She also did an episode of “Space: Above and Beyond” and appeared in “Honey, I Blew Up The Kid” for those of you looking for genre credits.
Pat Martino, jazz guitarist. This is a little outside of my usual beat (ha!) but it sits at a point I find fascinating: the relationship between music and the brain.
In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.
On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.
“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”
Cutting to the chase, he had brain surgery, but was left with total amnesia.
“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.
“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”
His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.
“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”
By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.
…
In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.
“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”
The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).
His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”
On the road, more later, but:
Hundley, you magnificent bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK!
NFL teams that still have a chance of going 0-16:
Cleveland
Edited to add 12/11: Man, that was a squeaker, wasn’t it?
I was actually in the middle of a Bass Pro Shop in San Antonio with Mike the Musicologist and RoadRich when I pulled out my phone to check the game status…and saw Green Bay was down by 7 points with 47 seconds left to go.
“Oh, heck,” I say. Then I look at the game details and see that Green Bay is in scoring position…and get a little happier. By the time we’ve checked out and left, the game is in overtime and I’m watching the updates on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network’s webpage as we head down the freeway to our next stop…
…so that was my Sunday. How was yours?
San Francisco won, and is now 3-10. I’ll have more to say about that in a minute. The New York Football Giants lost, and are now 2-11 and nicely positioned for a good draft pick. Might I suggest Baker Mayfield?
And Cleveland’s next three games are:
* Baltimore in Cleveland, which I think is a win.
* Chicago in Chicago, which worries me: as I’ve said, da Bears are da Bad. But they did beat Cincinnati, which is more than can be said for the Browns, and they will be playing at home.
* Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. I think this is also a win unless Pittsburgh has everything locked up at this point, and decides to play their second and third teams.
ETA2: Oh, yeah. About that SF game. What the hell, Houston?
Yes, we’re late. We got tied up on Tuesday.
But, in our defense, TMQ isn’t timely this week either.
After the jump, 2,000 words, no pictures (except the header), and one subject in this week’s TMQ…
Beth Howland passed away December 31st of last year, but her death was not announced until yesterday, in keeping with the wishes of her family.
She played Amy in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Company”, and had a slew of other roles. Ms. Howland was perhaps most famous as Vera on “Alice”.
I kind of wonder if she was typecast after “Alice”: the obit says she worked “sporadically”.
Also:
(Wouldn’t “After Alice” be a great idea for a new TV series? Linda Lavin is still alive: she could have taken over the diner from Mel. Polly Holliday is still alive, too: she could be working the counter, and then you cast someone to play Vera’s daughter, who works as a waitress…Hollywood types, you know where to reach me.)
The AV Club is reporting the passing of Burt Kwouk, who sounds like a very cool and interesting guy. He was in three Bond films, but is perhaps best known as Cato in the Peter Sellers “Pink Panther” movies. (Edited to add: NYT obit.)
Not exactly obits, but worth noting in my opnion: both Bubba Smith and Dave Mirra have been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
And so we come to the end of Gregg Easterbrook’s first season writing TMQ for the New York Times. What does he have in store for us this week? Would you believe neuroscience and the evils of the NFL? Well, yes, you probably would believe that.
After the jump, this week’s ultimate TMQ…
This is your yearly reminder: if you use the Amazon search box on the right hand side of the page to buy stuff, I get a small kickback.
Said small kickback, as you all know, goes to purchasing toys for crippled orphans supporting this blog, mostly by enabling our purchases of Robert Ruark and Jack O’Connor books, along with other crap in general.
(Speaking of Ruark, I’m reminded that I have two historical notes coming up back to back before the year is over. One of those should be of some interest to Lawrence…)
(And speaking of Lawrence, I would be remiss if I did not note, as I do every year, that books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for the holidays, especially if you have SF or horror fans on your shopping list.)
I believe I recommended Amy Alkon’s Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
Another book that was loaned to me by a friend, and that I’ve almost finished – I will be purchasing my own copy, so I have no qualms about recommending it – is Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
I don’t see a shipping date for Archer Season 6
cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra
Edited to add: Also. If I’ve managed to irritate you, please consider supporting the fine folks at Popehat through their Amazon link instead.
Also also: I haven’t given them any money, but I’ve always been kind of fond of the HouChron‘s “Goodfellows” program.
Also also also: the Reason Foundation is having their annual fundraising drive. And they will accept bitcoins, too.
NYT. Michiko Kakutani appreciation. LAT. WP. A/V Club.
“The Oliver Sacks Reading List” from The Atlantic.
I like what Kakutani says, and I don’t think I could say it any better:
Dr. Sacks was a personal hero of mine. Unlike most of my personal heros, I actually did get to meet him once. He probably wouldn’t have remembered it, even if he wasn’t famously “face blind”…
Dr. John P. Craven, a hugely important figure in Navy history.
Dr. Craven shows up frequently in the many recently published histories of the US Navy during the Cold War. His own book, The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea
Oliver Sacks is dying. I don’t want to write this obituary now; I plan to wait until I have to.