Sir Edmund Hilary has died

Sir Edmund Hilary has died at age 88. He was the second man to scale Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World, known in English as Mount Everest. Chomolungma's resident goddess is Miyo Lungsangma, the mother goddess of earth.) The first man to scale the mountain was Tenzing Norgay, Sir Edmund's Sherpa guide.

Sir Edmund was 33 when he completed his famous climb. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the people of Nepal.

Author Jane Rule has died

Jane Rule, a writer of excellent novels, has died at age 76. Here's a link to a good obituary by Philip Marchand, the books columnist for the Toronto Star.

"She was the first Canadian woman writer to write about being gay as if it was part of the normal life," Toronto novelist Susan Swan said last night from her Toronto home.

"There was no self-consciousness about it. There didn't seem to be any need for her to wave a political flag. This female character as a lesbian ��� you picked that up by reading the story. You weren't reading the story to find out what it was like to be a lesbian."

Her novels:

Rule's first novel, Desert of the Heart, a love story involving two women in Reno, Nev., was published in 1964, and made into a movie, Desert Hearts, in 1986. Her debut novel was followed by This Is Not For You (1970), Against the Season (1971) and perhaps her best-known work, The Young in One Another's Arms (1977), a tale of residents in a Vancouver boarding house who recreate family bonds while living and working together on Galiano Island. In all, she authored a dozen books, including three short story collections.

In later years, Rule was famous for the swimming pool she built on her Galiano Island property, which open to neighbourhood children under her watchful eye.

Other books by Jane Rule include Outlander, Lesbian Images, Theme for Diverse Instruments, After the Fire, Memory Board, Hot-eyed Moderate (essays), Inland Passage, Contract with the World.

Detained at Customs recounts her testimony at the Little Sister's Bookshop trial:

���Whether I were testifying at this trial or not, my name would come up over and over again as that woman whose books are seized at the border, and I have no defence against it. And I bitterly resent the attempt to marginalize, trivialize and even criminalize what I have to say because I happen to be a lesbian, I happen to be a novelist, I happen to have bookstores and publishers who are dedicated to producing my work.���

Alex the grey parrot has died

Alex, the parrot who taught the world how much language a 'mere' bird can learn, has died unexpectedly at the comparatively young age of 31. This is devastating for his researcher, Dr. Susan Pepperberg, who has spent thirty years working with him.

"As early as 2002, Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words and in 1999, he could "identify 50 different objects and understand quantities up to 6; he could distinguish 7 colors and 5 shapes, and understand the concepts of 'bigger', 'smaller', 'same', and 'different', and he was learning 'over' and 'under'," according to the New York Times."

Dr. Pepperberg will continue her work with his young avian colleagues, Wart and Griffin.

To read about Alex and his accomplishments, please read "Alex... dead at 31" at Scientist, Interrupted.

I mentioned Alex and friends in August of last year in "African Grey Parrots."

Stanley L. Miller has died

Stanley L. Miller has died. Working under the supervision of Harold Urey, he ran the first experiments that produced the molecular building blocks of life from hydrogen, water, methane, and ammonia. Blog commenter Zeno sums it up:

The experiment showed definitively that chemical compounds associated with organic life could be generated in the absence of life. If Miller and Urey made assumptions about the early earth that are no longer generally accepted, that's entirely beside the point. Since the Miller-Urey breakthrough, their seminal experiment has been run under many different assumptions about primeval environments and the results confirm the original key finding: precursors of organic life can arise in many different circumstances.

Read an interview with Dr. Miller.

Guns and culture - a bad combination

My reaction to the terrible shootings at Virginia Tech was, "Oh, no, not again!" Years ago I realized that as long as we keep shipping oil around the world in tankers, there will be oil spills somewhere, sometime, so it makes no sense to react to each one as an unexpected disaster.

The Belfast Telegraph reviews some of the facts about guns and murder rates in the U.S. Other countries, such as Switzerland, have a culture that lets them handle guns without killing each other. But as with the evolution of sex ratios, each population must be considered separately. What works with sage grouse (1:1 ratio) does not work with thrips mites (1:7 to 1:15).

It's too bad that there's no simple mechanism for a school or an employer to put someone they're concerned about on a "Don't sell guns to" list that the police could distribute to gun retailers, whether at shops or "gun fairs." Ah, hindsight is 20-20. It's too bad that so few mass murderers give as clear signs as Cho Seung-Hui.

June Callwood, social activist & author, dies at 82

June Callwood, who has been fighting cancer for four years, has died. She will long be remembered for her sense of justice. Callwood was the author of thirty books and started fifty social organizations. Callwood once said,

���If you see an injustice being committed, you aren't an observer, you are a participant.���

Ransom Myers, marine biologist, has died

James Hrynyshyn, of Island of Doubt, has this to say about a legendary marine biologist:

Ransom Myers had a habit of telling people what they didn't want to hear. In the 1990s, his employers in the Canadian government didn't like it when he told them overfishing was to blame for the collapse of the northern cod stocks. Three years ago it was the U.S. federal government, in a classic example of its anti-science bias, that removed his recommendations on the importance of habitat protection from a report on west coast salmon stocks. But he kept telling it like it is.

Just a week or two ago I summarized an important paper in Science about the cascade of damage that we caused to an ocean ecology by overfishing sharks. I didn't realize that the author was Ransom Myers.

Kurt Vonnegut, author, dies at 84

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of novels such as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5, died of brain injuries yesterday after a fall some weeks ago.

Slaughterhouse 5, although a novel, was based on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was firebombed on Feb. 14, 1945.

He wrote in a flat style that he himself called graceless. But he had big ideas. His final moral conclusion was that we must be kind to one another.

Here's another, very complete, obituary of Kurt Vonnegut from the Charlotte Observer.

Hat tip to the Science & Politics Yahoo group (formerly Science Week). PZ Myers at Pharyngula has an article, "So it goes". Image at Kurt Vonnegut's web site.

A much greater loss for me, of an excellent and subtle (and still active!) writer, occurred last year, but did not get nearly as much publicity: Octavia E. Butler.

Canada's first weatherman, Percy Sattzman, dies

Percy Saltzman, who brought the idea of dynamic weather reporting to television and made it happen, died at age 91 after a brief illness. Mr. Saltzman received the Order of Canada in 2003.

Steve Irwin, "Crocodile Hunter," dies at 44

I've enjoyed watching The Crocodile Hunter, full of Steve Irwin's boyish energy and enthusiasm, the way he'll swarm up a tree bare-legged, even as I wince at the chances he takes. Yet a similar show, with an experienced wildlife expert handling similar creatures, but who sensibly holds venomous snakes at the head with a tool instead of dangling them by the tail, does not get the publicity nor the TV ratings.

Steve Irwin was stung in the chest by a large stingray. He and a cameraman were in the water. Unfortunately, the stingray lashed out instead of fleeing. Steve was struck near the heart and died almost instantly.

Here's an article from The Courier-Mail, Brisbane.

My sympathies are with his wife, Terri, and his children.
Here's Steve as I'll remember him:



For Washington State University, he wore something other than his usual khaki shorts. He visited their hibernating grizzly bears. In this picture, he and Dr. Lynne Nelson of WSU hold the grizzly cubs.

Tags: science, Steve Irwin, deaths in 2006, 2006, obituaries

Losing a "Man's Best Friend"

Carl Buell (Olduvai George) records the passing of his long-time friend and commensal, Tito. It reminded me of my cousin Paul and his Siberian husky, Silish, who went everywhere with him.

Carl Buell creates wonderful, realistic illustrations.

Octavia E. Butler, science fiction author, dies at 58

I wasn't sure where to put this; but science fiction writers inspire us to look up from the gutter to the stars. They sometimes teach us science, or sociology, or people smarts, tactics, or even, rarely, economics. They make us think. At their best, they write full-blown genuine literature about people and human problems, ethics, morality, justice, and courage in the cold, hard universe. Octavia Butler was one of those.

I had read some of her stories without becoming aware of her as an author to look for. When I woke up and noticed who was writing, I cherished her and looked forward to collecting everything she'd written and then waiting, year by year, as she completed her works. I didn't know until very recently that she was black. I did know that Octavia Butler was a writer who, like James Tiptree Jr. and Connie Willis, transcended space opera, wisecrackers in greenface, shaggy-alien jokes, and easy answers. There will be no more new stories from that subtle mind. I'll miss her.

Here's a link to her short story "Amnesty".

Her books include the Xenogenesis series (links to more books).

Tags: science, Octavia Butler, science fiction, deaths in 2006, 2006, obituaries

Doctor who developed 40 vaccines started by reading Darwin

Maurice Hilleman, who died April 11, 2005, was credited with saving as many as 25 million lives through his work in developing vaccines to prevent diseases. He has been called "the man who saved your life."

He got his start towards science by reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, which had somehow been overlooked by a committee bent on sanitizing the library.

Here's his obituary.