Boing Boing » obit

RIP, Henry Morgentaler, Canadian abortion pioneer

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 30 May 2013 00:11:06 +0000

Doctor Henry Morgentaler, who pioneered safe, legal abortion in Canada at great personal risk and cost, died today at 90. Canada is a better place for the work he did. Here's a photo of me and Morgentaler when I was 4 1/2 years old.

To his supporters, he was nothing less than a hero. "Canadian women owe Dr. Morgentaler a tremendous debt of gratitude for standing up for their lives and health at great personal sacrifice and risk," said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation.
"He survived numerous threats on his life, a clinic bombing and aggressive protests. Yet, he was not deterred," she said.
Judy Rebick, a former head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, worked with Morgentaler in the 1980s on the effort to legalize abortion.
"I think every women in the country has lost a major ally," she told CBC News. "He changed all of our lives by standing up against the abortion laws and eventually winning in the Supreme Court."

Morgentaler death rekindles abortion divide

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:45:43 +0000

Russell Brand's obituary for Margaret Thatcher is a beautiful and incisive piece of writing, and a good example of why he's not just another actor:

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children' (via @TimMinchin)

(Image: Anti-Margaret Thatcher badge, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dannybirchall's photostream)

RIP, John Paul Miller, a genius goldsmith and creator of many lovely gold crustaceans

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 01:24:24 +0000

David sez, "A quiet genius, jeweler John Paul Miller, recently passed away and a memorial service was held this past weekend in Cleveland. His jewelery is beautifully detailed and I thought the Boing Boing audience would enjoy his take [Google Image Search] on crustaceans and insects."

Yet the relative paucity of attention given to Miller during his lifetime should not belie the intrinsic importance of his spectacular achievements as a designer and maker of gold jewelry.
Decorative arts curator Stephen Harrison of the Cleveland museum, who organized the smallish but extremely important show in 2010, compared Miller to Rene Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany, two giants of late-19th-century decorative art in France and America, respectively.

Goldsmith John Paul Miller, a national treasure, will go down in history as one of Cleveland's greatest artists [Steven Litt/The Plain Dealer]

(Thanks, David!)

Aaron Swartz's politics weren't just about free technology: they were about freeing humanity

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:04:41 +0000

In a guest editorial on Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller reminds us that Aaron Swartz's politics weren't just about digital freedom: he saw free software and open networks as instrumental to eliminating corruption and corporatism in wider society.

In 2009, I was working in Rep. Alan Grayson’s office as a policy advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that eventually became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant fight on auditing the Federal Reserve that eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office to intern for a few weeks to learn about Congress and how bills were put together. He worked with me on organizing the campaign within the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to publicizing the 44,000 Americans that die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time there, which seems like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep their distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with much of his endeavors, simply let his curiosity, which he saw as synonymous with brilliance, drive him.
Aaron also spent a lot of time learning how advocacy and electoral politics works from outside of Congress. He helped found the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that sought to replace existing political consulting machinery in the Democratic Party. At the PCCC, he worked on stopping Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation (the email Aaron wrote called him “Bailout Ben”), auditing the Fed and passing health care reform. I remember he sent me this video of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, on Reddit, offering his support to Grayson’s provision. A very small piece of the victory on Fed openness belongs to Aaron.
By the time I met and became friends with Aaron, he had already helped create RSS and co-founded and sold Reddit. He didn’t have to act with intellectual humility when confronting the political system, but he did. Rather than approach politics as so many successful entrepreneurs do, which is to say, try to meet top politicians and befriend them, Aaron sought to understand the system itself. He read political blogs, what I can only presume are gobs of history books (like Tom Ferguson’s Golden Rule, one of the most important books on politics that almost no one under 40 has read), and began talking to organizers and political advocates. He wanted, first and foremost, to know. He learned about elections, political advertising, the data behind voting, and grassroots organizing. He began understanding policy, by learning about Congressional process, its intersection with politics, and how staff and influence networks work on the Hill and through agencies. He analyzed money. He analyzed corruption. Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html#kfgiaaCSrsDsAWCi.99

Aaron Swartz’s Politics

Aaron Swartz's memorial service

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 01:51:01 +0000

Here's a note from Aaron Swartz's family, with details about his memorial service in Chicago next week, and the charity they've nominated for donations in Aaron's name:

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.
Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.
Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
Aaron's funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Further details, including the specific time, will be posted at http://rememberaaronsw.com, along with announcements about memorial services to be held in other cities in coming weeks.
Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com

Remember Aaron Swartz (Thanks, Henry.)

Quinn Norton on Aaron Swartz

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 19:50:14 +0000

Quinn Norton, who was Aaron Swartz's lover, remembers him:

We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it. I can only say I love him. That I will always love him, and that I known for years I would. Aaron was a boy, not big, who cast a shadow across the world. But for me, he will always be that person who made me love him. He was so frustrating, and we fought. But we fought like what we were: two difficult people who couldn’t escape loving each other.

My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.

Lessig on the DoJ's vindictive prosecution of Aaron Swartz

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 19:21:03 +0000

Larry Lessig's remembrance of Aaron Swartz, the young activist who took his life last night, is beautiful and angry, and expresses an important insight into the vindictive, disgusting behavior of the Department of Justice (and the complicity of MIT) in hounding Aaron:

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?
Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.
Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

Prosecutor as bully

RIP, Aaron Swartz

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 12:53:43 +0000

Click for ongoing posts about Aaron, his memorial service, his death, and the malicious prosecution brought by the DoJ against him

To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to "RIP, Aaron Swartz."

Update: Go read Lessig: "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."

My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.

I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.

This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.

Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.

The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.

He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.

I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote back:

First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.
He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.
(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)
also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like, ...) Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad. Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this... hope you're well

This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.

Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.

But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.

I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.

Goodbye, Aaron.

Click for ongoing posts about Aaron, his memorial service, his death, and the malicious prosecution brought by the DoJ against him

(Image: IMG_9892.JPG, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from quinn's photostream)

RIP, Kevin O'Donnell, Jr

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:02 +0000

Science fiction writer Kevin O'Donnell, Jr died last week; the Science Fiction Writers of America has a sweet, sad obit for him, written by John Barnes and John E. Johnston III. Our condolences to his family and all those who loved him. (via Making Light)

Remembering Sean "Vilerat" Smith, killed in Benghazi

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:07:20 +0000

Zack Parsons, author and Something Awful moderator, writes,

Sean Smith was one of the four men tragically killed in the consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11^th . He was a foreign services officer for the State Department. He leaves behind a wife and two young children. I knew him as “Vilerat” on the SA forums. He has been a moderator there since 2008 and he has posted there since 2002. He was also well-known in the EVE online gaming community.
I am trying to honor him and all of his contributions to our community and to the world by giving his family a helping hand with their expenses. I have started a fundraiser with the assistance of his friend on EVE and the SA forums, and the input of his wife, Heather, and I am trying to get the word out about it.

Farewell to Vilerat (Thanks, Zack!)

Retired NASA astronaut Alan Poindexter dies in watercraft accident

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 01:14:02 +0000

Alan Poindexter, 50, a U.S. Navy Captain who joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1998 and made two space shuttle flights, died this weekend in a WaveRunner accident. Before his space career, "Dex" flew combat missions in Iraq, then became a test pilot. He logged more than 4,000 hours of flying time in more than 30 types of aircraft. Snip from Reuters:

Poindexter and his 22-year-old son Samuel were riding on one WaveRunner and his older son, 26-year-old Zachary, was on another, spokesman Stan Kirkland said. "They stopped and apparently Zachary did not see them stop," Kirkland said. "He struck the right rear or the right stern of their personal watercraft. His watercraft went up and apparently struck Captain Poindexter in the back. Both Captain Poindexter and Samuel were ejected."

Both sons survived. More: Space.com, Reuters. Image: Poindexter commanding the STS-131 mission.

Below, videos: Poindexter commenting on the end of the Space Shuttle program, in 2010, and on the food astronauts enjoy eating while in space. Also, a NASA TV video recorded during STS-131, and Poindexter "flying" a shuttle simulator.

Obituary for a French superspy

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:00:08 +0000

The Telegraph's obit for Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld recounts the florid and exciting life of the aristocrat turned French resistance fighter turned UK special forces killer turned escape artist turned colonial enforcer in Indochina. In particular, La Rochefoucauld was a skilled escapologist, and ballsy as all hell about it:

Dropped into the Morvan with two British agents, including one radio operator, La Rochefoucauld teamed up with a Maquis group near Avallon led by a man who called himself The Pope. After destroying the electrical substation at Avallon, and blowing up railway tracks, La Rochefoucauld was awaiting exfiltration by the RAF when he was denounced and arrested. After a series of interrogations, he was condemned to death.
En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards. Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag. Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier.

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld (via Kottke)

(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail of a larger image on The Telegraph)

RIP, Andy Griffith

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:58:58 +0000

Andy Griffith, TV star, comedian, raconteur and comedian, has died at 86. I grew up on Mayberry, and I can sing all the words to the Andy Griffith theme (and also the Beyonce mashup). I'll miss him.

BREAKING NEWS: Friend Says Andy Griffith Has Died

Neil Gaiman remembers Ray Bradbury

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 22:03:45 +0000

Neil Gaiman's remembrance of Ray Bradbury is very sweet and paints a picture of one of the field's great mensches:

Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when he was a boy of 11 or 12 he met Ray Bradbury. When Bradbury found out that he wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can't write one book and stop. That it's work, but the best kind of work. My friend grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.
Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.

A man who won't forget Ray Bradbury (Thanks, Deborah!)

RIP, Ray Bradbury

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:03:55 +0000

Ray Bradbury is dead. He was 91 years old. He wrote some of the most inspiring and beautiful stories I've ever read. He fought for libraries. He changed my life with a novel called Dandelion Wine, much of which I can still quote from memory. Every time I find myself wandering a city street alone at night -- every single time -- I think of his story Drink Entire. He did some stuff that disappointed me, but I never fell out of love with the art that he made. The world is much richer for the work he made, and much poorer for his passing.

From the AP obit:

“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” he said in 1982.
Bradbury’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1934. He became a movie buff and a voracious reader. “I never went to college, so I went to the library,” he explained.
He tried to write at least 1,000 words a day, and sold his first story in 1941. He submitted work to pulp magazines until he was finally accepted by such upscale publications as The New Yorker. Bradbury’s first book, a short story collection called “Dark Carnival,” was published in 1947.
He was so poor during those years that he didn’t have an office or even a telephone. “When the phone rang in the gas station right across the alley from our house, I’d run to answer it,” he said.
He wrote “Fahrenheit 451” at the UCLA library, on typewriters that rented for 10 cents a half hour. He said he carried a sack full of dimes to the library and completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.

Sci-fi master Ray Bradbury, author of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ ‘Martian Chronicles,’ dead at 91

One of the greatest days of my life was when Gardner Dozois reviewed my first professionally published story, "Craphound," and said of it that it had a "rich, Bradburian vein of nostalgia" running through it.

Update: Jenny Hart points out that Bradbury had a beautiful essay in The New Yorker last week.

(Image: Merry Christmas 2116 XVIII, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from seraphimc's photostream)

RIP, Erik "Possum Man" Stewart

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:03:15 +0000

Erik "Possum Man" Stewart was one of my oldest, dearest friends. He died last week, of a sudden and freak cerebral hemorrhage. It happened while he slept, and his housemates found him the next day, appearing peaceful and not distressed. The coroner believes that his death was instant.

Possum was the epitome of happy mutanthood. We were roommates off and on for more than a decade, and in that time, I was privileged to get a front-row seat for many of his delightful and odd experiments and outlooks. For one thing, he was obsessed with multidimensional space. From a very early age, he worked out a system for visualizing up to seven spatial dimensions. The system was very intuitive for him, less so for everyone else. He decided that the way to convey it would be through simple games that ramped up from 3D to 4D and onward. Back in the 1980s, he spent hours grinding away at his 386, writing an assembler and C program to run a 4D Pong. For a while, he worked at porting this to the Newton (I forget what it was about Newtons that made them seem appropriate for this project, but he had a reason -- he always had a reason). The project popped up, off and on, for many years.

Possum juggled. He made stereoscopes. After reading Understanding Comics, he became an avid creator of comics. He tried at one point to train his eyes to focus independently (because he wanted to be able to walk and read a book at the same time while paying attention to both), but gave it up when the optometrist ordered him to. He was accomplished at yoga, relished communal living, and was consumed with the idea of democratic, unstructured learning.

I met Possum at SEED alternative school in Toronto, where he was studying a wide variety of subjects, many of which he excelled at (he was often engaged in courses that he had no natural aptitude for, because pursuing that sort of thing made for a great challenge). He refused all grades and credits for his work, and eventually finished there and "graduated" while refusing a diploma as well. Quantifying learning cheapened it. The idea that one can become a 100 percent master of anything nontrivial is absurd on its face.

Possum went on to co-found the AnarchistU project, a radical peer-education system wherein prospective teachers propose a course by posting readings and lectures to a wiki, and prospective students edit the wiki with the teacher until it gets to something they all want to participate in, then they find a room and start meeting. Everyone I've met in the AnarchistU orbit loves it, and Possum doted on it.

More than anything else, Possum was absolutely fearless. He was totally unafraid of seeming foolish or ridiculous, and was able to laugh along with other people when one of his experiments went comically awry. It wasn't that Possum didn't care about what other people thought -- he was one of the most compassionate people I've ever known -- but his own sense of self-worth wasn't based on what other people thought of him.

Possum was a glorious and frustrating conversationalist. Not being afraid of seeming stupid, he would cheerfully question anything you said that he didn't understand. He didn't seem to mind detours. He wasn't talking with you to get somewhere: he was talking to find out where he would get to. Any conversation with Possum Man was conducted on a narrow ledge over a deep chasm of meta, and at any given moment, he might happily plunge off the ledge, wearing wings he'd fashioned from wax and feathers, and take you with him for a swoop.

All of Possum's friends are in a state of shock, as is his family. He is being cremated, and the family has planned a celebration of his life in Toronto for June 27. We will gather to remember him at 2PM at the Mount Pleasant Visitation Centre, on the east side of Mount Pleasant cemetery. I've bought my plane ticket. A good many of Possum's friends are Boing Boing readers. If you know some of the people whose lives were touched by Possum, please pass this on to them.

Don Hutton, another of Possum's friends, set up this site as a place where photos and remembrances of Possum can be posted.

Goodbye Possum. Thank you for a lifetime of friendship, challenge, and inspiration. You juggled flaming torches at our housewarming party and we learned to scuba dive together. I never saw you angry, and I never saw you compromise on a matter of principle. There was never another like you.

RIP Jay Kay Klein: Fandom's Photographer Rests in Peace

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:01:04 +0000

Spider Robinson writes:

I just received word that Jay Kay Klein, THE photographer of science fiction and fantasy, passed away on Sunday morning, May 13, in a Catholic hospice (a "Francis House") in Syracuse, NY, at age 80, of esophageal cancer.
This sad news came to me today by phone from Craig Peterson, a local plumber and a great-souled man, whom Jay Kay originally hired to fix a bathroom faucet in his longtime home in Bridgeport, NY....and who then, miraculously, took it upon himself to become Jay Kay's final friend, exactly what he needed, helping him with his constrained living situation (Jay Kay's late wife had been a serious hoarder), plowing his driveway, and (all gods be thanked) helping him get his immense and precious collection of over 65,000 negatives of virtually everyone in our field over a 40-year+ period safely to the University of California's Riverside Libraries Eaton Collection of SF & Fantasy. Jeanne would have called Craig a true bodhisattva.
Craig's been going through Jay Kay's address book all day, calling people like Fred Pohl, Bob Madle, and me. He tells me an exhibition and celebration of Jay Kay's photos will be mounted at Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention (Aug 30-Sep 3), by Melissa Conway, the Head Librarian at Riverside Libraries, who now has charge of the collection.

He just forwarded me by email a copy of the obit notice he wrote up for Jay Kay. I attach it, and the photo he included of Jay with one of his own iconic photos of Isaac. (I'm not sure who took it. Craig, I think.) He also sent particulars for Melissa Conway, which I'll paste below.
I met Jay Kay at one of Ben Bova's legendary parties. I am attaching a photo he took of me--not that there'll be any shortage of his photos in BOING-BOING's archives! It was taken only minutes after I was introduced by Jim Baen to Robert A. Heinlein, before the 1975 Nebula Banquet at which Robert was given the first-ever Grandmaster Award. (And just as I'm about to mail this, Craig sent along another shot I can't resist including, of Jay Kay with what appears to be a rare photo of a beardless Samuel R. Delany.)
Craig mentioned that at one point while he was helping Jay Kay shovel through his wife's incredible store of hoarded stuff, they found a small fortune in GM stock. Jay had had no idea it existed, and continued to live like a man of limited means. God knows what his treasure trove of photos is worth, even just in dollars.
Science fiction owes Craig Peterson an incalculable debt. It's only thanks to his hard work those 65,000 negatives reached the right hands in time. I exchanged long snailmail letters with Jay Kay twice in the past couple of years, and knew he was in extremely poor health. He wrote by hand, because, he said, it hurt his fingers too much to type, and sadly his handwriting was incredibly bad. But I could tell he badly needed a friend, and made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to scare up a volunteer who lived near enough to help. I can't express how happy I am to know that Fate sent Craig Peterson to fix Jay Kay's bathtub faucet. I understand Jay Kay left Craig his awesome collection of vintage guitars, and I am very glad. He says they were the topic of the first conversation he and Jay Kay ever had, that day he came to fix the faucet.
Let's hoist a glass in memory of Jay Kay Klein, my friends. I never left his company without a smile on my face. Somebody call Gordy, and Randall, and Ted, and Isaac, and we'll all pass the guitar round in his honour. Science fiction's most acute and astute eye has closed for the last time. But what it saw, we have forever, thanks to photography and the kindness of Craig Peterson.
Jay Kay was one of the gods, when I first entered the field, and he was so kind to Jeanne and me. She was just crazy about him, and also about his photos. So am I.
--Spider

CRAIG PETERSON'S OBIT FOR JAY KAY:
Jay Kay Klein, 80, of Bridgeport NY passed away peacefully at Francis House in Syracuse NY Sunday morning. Jay was a 1953 graduate of Syracuse University and retired from the General Electric Corporation and Carrier Corporation. Mr. Klein was well known in the World of Science Fiction Fandom, both for his eidetic ('photographic') memory, as well as for his brilliant work as a photographer. In attending many science fiction conventions throughout the years, Mr. Klein took photographs of several thousands conference attendees, including many famous science fiction authors. He numbered science fiction (or 'SF' writers Isaac Asimov, Fred Pohl and Forrest J Ackerman among his close friends. Recently, 65,000 negatives of photographs spanning the last 40 years of Science Fiction conventions and other items having historical significance were shipped to The University of California, Riverside Libraries Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the world's largest 'SF' collection. An exhibition of a selection of Mr. Klein's photographs will be on display at Chicon 7--the 70th Science Fiction Convention, Chicago, Illinois, August 30-September 3, 2012. Mr. Klein was predeceased by his wife of 57 years, Doris (Do you have her maiden name?) Klein on October 5th 2011. Jay has is survived by his cousin, Rita Globerman, of New Salem, New York. No calling hours / burial private in Bridgeport cemetery. A celebration of Mr. Klein's life is being planned for his friends at the Chicon 7 convention.
Written by Craig Peterson, May 14, 2012/edits and additions Melissa Conway

Melissa Conway, Ph.D.
Head, Special Collections & Archives
P.O. Box 5900
UCR Libraries
University of California
Riverside, CA 92517-5900
951-827-3233
951-827-4673 FAX

Alternate mailing address:
Special Collections & Archives
UCR Libraries
3401 Watkins Dr.
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

RIP, Donald "Duck" Dunn

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:53:00 +0000

The incomparably rhythmic bass player Donald "Duck" Dunn, who was the soul of Booker T's rhythm section and the heart of the Blues Brothers' band, is dead. He died on tour with Steve "The Colonel" Cropper, also of the Blues Brothers, in Japan. He was 70.

His friend and fellow musician Steve Cropper, who was on the same tour, said Dunn had died in his sleep.
"Today I lost my best friend," Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. "The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live".
Miho Harasawa, a spokeswoman for Tokyo Blue Note, the last venue Dunn played, confirmed he died alone early Sunday. She had no further details.

Booker T bassist Donald Dunn dies in Tokyo aged 70

Sendak-ian Avengers

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:52:27 +0000

DeviantArt's ~AgarthanGuide created this Maurice Sendak/Avengers mashup: "Two things on my mind today: RIP Maurice Sendak. Yay Avengers. Okay- I put together some wallpapers using the original- I tried to make them as big as possible and cover the major aspect ratios. You can download them here. Enjoy!"

Avengers on Parade (RIP Maurice Sendak) (via Super Punch)

When Art Spiegelman visited Maurice Sendak

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:39:35 +0000

"Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!" Art Spiegelman drew his experience of hanging out with Maurice Sendak in 1993 for the New Yorker, and the magazine has "unlocked" the archival link in honor of Sendak's passing today.

(via Neil Gaiman)

RIP, Maurice Sendak

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:59:07 +0000

Beloved children's author Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, is dead at 83. Here's some of what The Guardian's Michelle Pauli has to say about him.

The wild things of Max's imagination were based on Sendak's own relatives. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents and was aware, in his early teens, of the death of much of his extended family in the Holocaust. The terrors of his childhood specifically, and childhood more generally, flow through his work. "I refuse to lie to children," he said in an interview with the Guardian last year. "I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."
Sendak also said that the term "children's illustrator" annoyed him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person," he said.

"I refuse to lie to children," is probably the best kids'-author manifesto statement ever.

Maurice Sendak, father of the Wild Things, dies at 83

(Image: Wild Things, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from maxbraun's photostream)

RIP, Moebius

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:35:37 +0000

Jean Giraud, the comics artist who worked under the name Moebius, has died at the age of 73. Moebius defined the style of Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, a surreal, madcap, sometimes grotesque science fictional visual style that is often imitated but which Moebius himself produced to high spec and in such great amounts. On Tor.com, art director Irene Gallo remembers him: "He was a particular favorite among his fellow artists. Many creatives and readers will mourn his passing." Neil Gaiman also has words on his passing:

I couldn’t actually figure out what the Moebius stories were about, but I figured that was because my French wasn’t up to it. (I could get the gist of the Richard Corben Den story, and loved that too, and not just because of the nakedness, but the Moebius stories were obviously so much deeper.)
I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing).
I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up.
I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren’t actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn’t matter. The damage had long since been done.

I recently reviewed The Incal, Moebius and Jodorowsky's bizarre, classic, lately reprinted science fiction comic.

RIP, Anne McCaffrey

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:23:56 +0000

One of the greats of science fiction and fantasy literature, Anne McCaffrey, is reported to have died. She will be missed. Our condolences to Todd McCaffrey and the rest of her family.

Obit for Michael S Hart, ebook inventor and Gutenberg Project founder

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:44:55 +0000

In this week's Observer, a heartfelt obituary from John Naughton for Michael S Hart, founder of the Gutenberg Project, and inventor of ebooks:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault. He never made much money, repaired his own car, had scant faith in medicine and built most of his own electronic gear from stuff he picked up in garage sales. On Saturday mornings over breakfast in the local diner, he would work out the optimum route to cover the maximum number of garage sales that day; it was his version of the travelling salesman problem in mathematics.
In his obituary of Hart, his colleague Gregory Newby described him as an "unreasonable" man, in George Bernard Shaw's celebrated use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

So farewell Michael Hart, the genius who freed up literature

(Image: Brewster Kahle)

RIP, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:15:59 +0000

As Mark posted yesterday, Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who invented ebooks when he keyed in the text of the Declaration of Independence in 1971, has died. He was 64. He was a copyfighter and a hero of the Internet revolution. Michael honored me by including my books in the Gutenberg archive, and was a challenging and invigorating correspondent.

Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world. The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.
In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job." He had this advice for those seeking to make literature available to all people, especially children:
"Learning is its own reward. Nothing I can say is better than that."
Michael is remembered as a dear friend, who sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good.

E-book pioneer Michael Hart dies

(Image: The Outlaw Michael Hart, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from benchilada's photostream)

RIP, Jack Layton

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:08:38 +0000

RIP, Jack Layton, former Toronto councillor and present head of Canada's New Democratic Party. He was as good a politician as Canada ever had, and better than anyone who's been on any of the ballots I've been allowed to tick for many, many years. Layton died from ~~prostate~~ cancer; he announced his prostate cancer diagnosis in February 2010, and stepped down in July. He was 61.

Layton died at his home in Toronto early on Monday surrounded by his wife and children, his family said in a statement.
His left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) surged to become the official opposition for the first time in May's elections.

Jack Layton, Canadian opposition leader, dies aged 61

(Image: Jack Layton, Leaders Tour - Tournée du Chef - Jack Layton, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mattjiggins's photostream)

RIP Paul Meier, father of the randomized trial

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:21:40 +0000

David sez, "Paul Meier, who had an extraordinarily high impact/fame ratio, passed away this weekend. Meier is probably best known for the introduction of randomized trials into the evaluation of medical treatments, though his creation of the Kaplan-Meier Estimator likely had as much of an impact due to its importance in all things actuarial."

As early as the mid-1950s, Dr. Meier was one of the first and most vocal proponents of what is called “randomization.”
Under the protocol, researchers randomly assign one group of patients to receive an experimental treatment and another to receive the standard treatment. In that way, the researchers try to avoid unintentionally skewing the results by choosing, for example, the healthier or younger patients to receive the new treatment.

Paul Meier, Statistician Who Revolutionized Medical Trials, Dies at 87 (Thanks, David (dr at BB))