The BMJ, formerly named The British Medical Journal, published this notice today, in which they regretfully bury a recent new policy: Reversing our decision to charge for placing a BMJ obituary February 23, 2021 At the beginning of February, we introduced a new policy to charge a fee for people wishing to place an obituary […]
Tag: obituary
The Strangeness Correction About Murray Gell-Mann
This strangeness correction appeared in today’s New York Times: OBITUARIES An obituary on May 25 about the physicist Murray Gell-Mann overstated a law about the conservation of a quantity in physics called strangeness. It is conserved in strong interactions and electromagnetic interactions but not in weak interactions. It is not the case that “like energy, strangeness must […]
A Grizzly-Bear-Suitably Heroic Obituary of a Modern Don Quixote
Troy Hurtubise meets his destiny in a grand obituary, written by Tom Hawthorn, in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail. Here are some highlights: Troy Hurtubise combined the fevered imagination of a mad scientist with the foolhardy bravery of Evel Knievel in his quest to design a suit impervious to bear attack…. The fanatical mission was […]
Famous, Fast Approach to Death: Obits in NYT
Some people achieve fame, then live so long that the fame fades and their eventual death goes largely unremarked upon. Those people are not the subjects of this new study: “Death in The New York Times: the price of fame is a faster flame,” C.R. Epstein and R.J. Epstein, QJM, epub 2013. (Thanks to kiltish […]
History of facts (various versions, with an obit)
There’s more than one history of facts. There’s “The History of Facts“, the doctoral-level course at Central European University. There’s the recent book A History of the Modern Fact, by Mary Poovey [pictured here], and the much older book A History of Facts, by Ebenezer Hinds. And now there’s an obituary of Fact. (HT Dan Falk)
Obit of Jerry Lettvin (plus Leary/Lettvin video)
Janelle Lawrence’s obituary of Jerry Lettvin appears in today’s Boston Globe. Lawrence captures quite a bit of the Jerry-ness. It begins: MIT professor emeritus Jerome Lettvin [pictured here, around 1960] was best known for his work on the 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.’’ His measurements of “bug detectors’’ in frogs’ […]