Tag obituary

Goodbye Dave.

I don't know why, it could be the cold weather or just coincidental, but December is fast becoming the month so many good Jazz and Blues musicians of ol' pass away. Oscar Peterson, for example, in 2007. Or James Brown a year earlier. This time it's Dave Brubeck. 'Take Five' is the piece most identify him with, and 'popular' doesn't even begin to describe its appeal and success --- recognizable by so many generations in the fifty one or so years of its existence. Yet his work goes well beyond than this single track that everyone feels so familiar with. After all, who, in their right mind, could possibly forget 'It's a Raggy Waltz', 'Blue Rondo A La Turk' or 'Take The A Train'. Dave was undoubtedly one of the great pioneers of his time.

The depth of everything that's involved

JBQ's writings on Dennis Ritchie's death find me in total agreement and are worthy of a citation. dmr was a legend and his contribution, concise as meaningful, simple yet immensely powerful, has --- and still does --- shaped computing (and much of modern life) as we know it. C may not be 'modern' anymore, it may have been relegated to systems programming, high performance libraries and embedded computing for the most part, but it is still an immensely powerful tool, a foundation upon which countless other technologies have sprung since the late 70s. UNIX, once considered a dying breed still powers, in the form of Mac OS X and Linux, the vast majority of smartphones, most servers connected to the internet and numerous other devices, from printers, to desktops, to routers. It is hard for a non-technologist to comprehend dmr's contribution as it is for a technologist to overstate it.
Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they're created, it's impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that's involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy's law says that they simply shouldn't possibly work. For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all. [...] That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can't imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie's influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.

Goodbye Steve.

It took less than an hour before most of the world’s mainstream (and alternative) media posted their canned obituaries. This time it’s for Steve Jobs; his death a long time coming. Feared, loathed, inspiring and adored like few of his contemporaries, he led a life full of contradiction; from his early Buddhist ideas and bohème […]

Naïve Brilliance

If anything can be said in retrospect about Robert McNamara is not that he was hawkish, evil, corrupt or duplicitous, but that despite his sophistication, the statistical prowess and scientific rigour that he showed in his work, his all-around intellectual capacity (or perhaps, in a way just because of all these) he exemplified the naïve brilliance that often accompanies highly intelligent people that fail to take that macroscopic view and consider where they place their focus and energy and why they do so. His 2003 'apology' film, the Errol Morris documentary 'The Fog Of War', as well as his 1995 'In Retrospect' book, both indicate that wisdom came late to McNamara; a clear and very welcome difference, nevertheless, to most of his contemporaries.

Oscar is gone.

Oscar Peterson, one of the great Jazz pianists of the latter half of the 20th century and a marvellous pianist in general, died today. I was first exposed to his work by listening to Eloquence. My last musical encounter of his work was his 1994 album Side by Side, with Itzhak Perlman, a record full of covers of old american classics, recorded in a few days, without rehearsals and mostly consisting of the first takes. His death is a huge loss to the jazz community and a reminder that his generation, those largely responsible for what jazz is all about, is gradually passing away.

Goodbye Professor.

This Friday I was informed that a member of my research group at Imperial and a friend, Professor Patrick Purcell passed away. I last saw him this past December while visiting London and, despite our efforts, we did not manage to meet, but for a few minutes in some corridor at the university. Our meeting […]