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Another RIP post, one of far too many lately, but there's no particular reason you should know this one. He was my paternal grandfather, and he wasn't terribly well at the end (to the point of having a DNR order in his notes), but while it wasn't really surprising, it's still not ... ok. How can it be?
It's due to him that my family has it's name. As my paternal grandfather, and using standard English name inheritance, that's the way it works. Still, it's not quite true. When he and his Merchant-Navy crewmates left port for the last time in nineteen-forty-something, he was named Fernand Schneider ("Schned-airrr"). While they were at sea, German forces captured their home port, and they eventually put in at an English port, where they joined the war effort. Given that his (French/Belgian) name was spelled the same way as a popular German name (Schneider: "Schneye-der"), and there was a war on and all, he decided to change it and, looking out the window, noted it was a lovely summer's day. That, as they say, is all she wrote, and that's the story. The truth is probably pretty similar.
I didn't see him very often, and I didn't know him very well. Nonetheless, I'm sad he's gone.
Don S. Davis, who is probably best known for playing Major General George Hammond of Stargate SG-1, has died at the age of 65 from a massive heart attack. This makes me sad.
Consensus among the fandom is that he was "a southern gentleman with a big heart, a no-nonsense attitude and all the love and respect one could imagine". That certainly came out in the character of George Hammond. The character has been in my awareness for a very long time (after all, I grew up with SG-1, really), and I think there's a little of him in me, as there is of so many role models down the years. That character, the little spark of life that made it more than a name on a page, could never have existed without Don to give it life, and the benefit of his experience.
M-day: -11 (slight mishap regarding people moving out on time)
This may or may not be news for all of you. Still, some of the more linguistically / AI-oriented readers may have been aware of Alex the parrot. Alex was ... really quite impressive; he lived and worked with an animal psychologist named Irene Pepperberg for over thirty years, and in that time demonstrated the most advanced understanding of language ever seen outside the higher primates. His vocabulary was a little over 100 words, but more interestingly, he seemed to actually understand what he was saying (to a certain extent - his conversations were symbolic and comprehensible, if not English per se).
On the 7th of September, he died unexpectedly in what could be considered middle age for his species. The research in which he assisted has benefited mentally-handicapped people (by developing a communication model that can be used with only partial understanding) and advanced human understanding of language and linguistic processing by a considerable amount. He was not human, and to anthropomorphise him would be wrong, but I am of the opinion that his death is still a great loss, since another twenty or thirty years of Alex-based research could have had some very interesting results indeed.
Alex: 1976-2007
Baen Books has been a feature of the background to my life since I began university. The concept was simple: essentially a 'pulp' sci-fi publishing house in that their overheads were low and their product quality passable but non-stellar (by which I mean mildly weak bindings, low-quality grainy paper and so on). The difference was that their founder and editor-in-chief, Jim Baen, had an eye for quality and a knack for selecting authors from the mass that flooded his mailbox that would not only go on to great things, but bring great things back to the company, since many chose to remain with his publishing house after hitting the big-time. Lois McMaster Bujold and David Weber are two of their better known proteges.
The business model was simple: low overheads, and a decent cut of the profits for the author. For particularly successful series, and always with the author's consent, Baen would release the first few books of the series completely free online, with no DRM or locking of any kind, a practice which led many readers to buy the entire series (myself included on more than one occasion). The publishing house and Baen himself always maintained close ties with the fans, leading to their being treated more as friends and reviewers than suppliers in that any book supplied by Baen tended to be a cut above the rest.
Today, Jim Baen suffered a fatal stroke. It wasn't that much of a surprise, since he had an earlier stroke at the end of last week. There was a detailed plan at Baen for the company's continuation after his death, which is being followed. A leader, a finder, a maverick visionary has departed the sci-fi fen, and I suspect we will not see his kind for a while.
I'm writing too many damned obituaries of late.
Alan Kotok, pioneer of digital video games, chief architect of the PDP-10 and lifelong member of the TMRC is dead at the age of 64 as of May 26th this year.
A visionary, a renaissance man and one of the leaders of the W3C, he will be remembered.