[PeterAlan]

The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson; the link shows the extraordinary range of his activity.

[y66]

Stanley Dudrick

Quote

As a 7-year-old, Stanley J. Dudrick was so impressed with the compassionate care that his mother received when she had a life-threatening fever that he decided right then and there to become a doctor.

But as a young resident in the early 1960s, he began to have misgivings about becoming a surgeon when three patients who had undergone operations that were technically successful nonetheless died in the hospital.

Rather than change specialties or even abandon his chosen career, however, Dr. Dudrick decided to devote himself to discovering what caused their deaths.

He eventually did, finding the answer to be deceptively simple. But more than that, he perfected a treatment — one that has been credited with saving the lives of millions of premature infants as well as those of adults with a wide range of ailments, including cancer; severe bowel, kidney and liver diseases; and burns.

The cause of the three deaths that had so motivated him, he concluded, was severe malnutrition. The patients had been unable to eat or to absorb enough nutrients to sustain life.

Malnutrition had often gone unrecognized as a direct or contributing cause of death because death certificates typically cited an underlying disease, like cancer or liver failure.

By the late 1960s, experimenting first on beagle puppies, Dr. Dudrick developed a treatment called total parenteral nutrition, or TPN, which bypasses the intestinal tract when a patient cannot receive food or fluids by mouth and instead injects nutrients — liquid carbohydrates, electrolytes, fats, minerals, proteins and vitamins — directly into the circulatory system through a vein.

Dr. Dudrick, who never patented any of his techniques, wishing them to be universally available, died on Jan. 18 at his home in Eaton, N.H. He was 84. The cause was complications of a number of medical conditions, including kidney failure, his sister, Irene Brown, said.

“He was the developer, largely single-handedly, of total parenteral nutrition, a technique now taken for granted but a long-awaited pipe dream” when Dr. Dudrick began his research in the 1960s, said Dr. Steven J. Scheinman, president and dean of the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pa. That intravenous technique, he said, “has saved the lives of tens of millions of people across the world.”

Dr. Scheinman ranked Dr. Dudrick with Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis, who pioneered antiseptic medical procedures; William T.G. Morton, who popularized anesthesia during surgery; and Alexander Fleming, who is credited with the discovery of penicillin.

Dr. Dudrick went on to hold senior administrative posts at Geisinger, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Houston and Yale.

He was in his 20s, working as a surgical resident, when he encountered the unexplained deaths at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Consulting with his mentor, Dr. Jonathan Rhoads, Dr. Dudrick often conducted research after midnight, when his shift was over, as he searched for a deterrent.

He initially used the TPN technique to keep the puppies alive from six weeks old until adulthood. Then he successfully treated six adults.

In 1967, he used the intravenous method on a three-and-a-half-pound newborn girl with a small bowel that was almost completely blocked. By feeding nutrients through a vein, his medical team increased the child’s weight to six and a half pounds over six weeks, and she developed for a year as if her gastrointestinal system was functioning normally.

Dr. Dudrick said his first adult emergency case was a 52-year-old woman who, at 5-foot-2, had dropped to 49 pounds after stomach surgery. She was fed intravenously, starting at 500 calories a day, gradually reaching 3,000.

“In two months, she was up to 79 pounds, and a month later she was sent home eating normally and weighing 100 pounds,” Dr. Dudrick recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1977. “She’s been between 104 and 110 ever since. A true nutritional save. And nutrition was all the treatment she got — no medicine and no fancy operation.”

The intravenous delivery of concentrated nutrients proved successful over time in stimulating and restoring normal bodily functions, including the immune systems of patients with malignant growths.

The technique has not only increased the chances of survival after operations; it has also spared many patients surgery — often because a diagnosis of malnutrition had not been contemplated and nutrition was not considered a remedy.

“It’s senseless to pay $200 to $300 a day for intensive care and then not pay the extra $50 to $100 for nutrition,” Dr. Dudrick told The Times. “It’s like buying a Mercedes without any wheels on it.”

[Aberlour10]

Max von Sydow a Swedish actor. One of his most memorable film roles include Knight Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal the first of his 11 films with Bergman which includes the iconic scenes in which he plays chess with Death.^[

[Winstonm]

RIP world coronavirus victims.

[kenberg]

I see that Max von Sydow has died.
The Seventh Seal came out in 1957, I was 18. I was stunned.
I was not at all sheltered growing up but I had very little experience with literature, drama, and such. The idea of a knight returning from the crusades to play chess with death as he and his squire saw horrors and confronted spiritual mysteries and reckoning was far outside of my experience.
I saw it at the Campus movie theater, on Oak Street in Minneapolis, near the U of M. Meaning that I remember the experience. I talked to friends, then I went back to see it again. I was stunned again.
Death won.
In the movie, it was by trickery.
As you can tell, I like the movie.
Best wishes to him.

[Cyberyeti]

Albert Uderzo https://www.bbc.co.u...7xx5DRf1NwCEzW8

[barmar]

Cyberyeti, on 2020-March-24, 10:09, said:

Albert Uderzo https://www.bbc.co.u...7xx5DRf1NwCEzW8

Isn't it sad that now death notices have to say that it was not linked to COVID-19? He was 92, it was just his time to go.

[Cyberyeti]

Two very different British icons https://www.bbc.co.u...rmula1/52261216 and https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52262490

[PeterAlan]

The mathematician John Horton Conway died on Saturday.

The link covers his well-known work, and I won't elaborate on that. He taught me two courses - Graph Theory and his own Number system (later popularised as 'Surreal Numbers' by Donald Knuth) - more than 40 years ago, and I have great memories of them, in particular the second: it was late 1974, whilst the theory was still being developed in certain respects.

[mycroft]

-*-
--*
***

Godspeed, sir.

[PeterAlan]

Robert May.

[PassedOut]

Richard Penniman

Quote

By 1956, he was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station in Macon (a job he had first taken a few years earlier after his father was murdered and Little Richard had to support his family). By then,;only one track he’d cut, “Little Richard’s Boogie,” hinted at the musical tornado to come. “I put that little thing in it,” he told RS in 1970 of the way he tweaked with his gospel roots. “I always did have that thing, but I didn’t know what to do with the thing I had.”

During this low point, he sent a tape with a rough version of a bawdy novelty song called “Tutti Frutti” to Specialty Records in Chicago. He came up with the song’s famed chorus — “a wop bob alu bob a wop bam boom” — while bored washing dishes. (He also wrote “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” while working that same job.)

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2020-May-09, 10:47, said:

Richard Penniman

I was at a Little Richard concert in my youth, it was before concerts became such huge affairs. IIt was on the upper floor of a firehouse. there was a stage area where he and his group were playing, the rest of the floor was either for dancing or standing at the edge. It was terrific. The numbers went on as long as the musicians wanted them to go on, played in whatever way they wanted to play them

The social environment was informal, to put it mildly. I was well under 21, the legal drinking age, and I rarely drank. Somewhere along the way I went over to a small booth and ordered a 7-up. I was asked what I wanted in it. I said 7-up. The server looked at me as if I was hopeless and poured me a 7-up. Another guy was wandering around, asking if I wanted to buy a half pint of whiskey for a buck "Good stuff, I drink it myself" he assured me. I declined.

Did I say the music was great? The music was great.

I sort of missed the 60s, studying math and all that, but the 50s could be good as well.

I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight
I asked my friends about her but all their lips were tight
Lucille, please come back where you belong

Rest in peace

[y66]

Annie Glenn

[hrothgar]

Roland Wald has passed away

Roland's work in promoting high quality free vugraph's via BBO can not be over emphasized.

He provided an incredibly valuable service to the game and the community.

[y66]

Larry Kramer

[y66]

Dennis Nagle

Quote

In his youth, Dennis Nagle resembled Dennis Hopper’s character in “Easy Rider”: same bushy counterculture mustache and long hair, same pirate’s smile and wild glint in his eyes. And like the film character, Mr. Nagle embraced 1960s-style hedonism full on.

He was a big proponent of marijuana and psychedelics. He spent the ’70s living in England, where he ran with a fast crowd in London and, his oldest son, Alex, said, made his living in the illegal drug trade. By the time the ’80s rolled around, he had fathered four children with four women.

As disorganized as his personal life was, Mr. Nagle had the focused technical mind of an engineer. He could fix anything. He loved visual art, and throughout his life he built light boxes, attaching LEDs to tiny motors to create hypnotic patterns of light. A wellspring of knowledge lived within him.

“He taught me how to change the brakes on my car and told me all about Andy Warhol’s Factory,” said Alex Nagle, who knew his father only as a mythic character until, at 18, he tracked him down in Los Angeles. Dennis Nagle had moved there from England and was working for a company that did sound and lighting for rock concerts.

Mr. Nagle died on April 24 at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass. He was 78. The cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, his youngest son, Michael, said.

It was while living in Los Angeles and raising Michael that Mr. Nagle began to settle down. When Michael enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, Mr. Nagle followed him east to Cambridge, Mass. Father and son roomed together there.

In 2007, Mr. Nagle found a job as workshop manager and instructor at M.I.T.’s D-Lab, which uses design and technology to assist people in the developing world. Mr. Nagle, still a character (now with long, lush white hair), became the “shop gnome,” as he called himself. He brought order to the lab, made colorful tool boards and used his mechanical skills to teach students how to build things. He retired in 2015.

In an online tribute to him, Amy Smith, the founding director of D-Lab, described Mr. Nagle as “a fiercely loyal mentor to many students over the years and was a staunch supporter of the need to balance creativity and order, fun and work and anarchy and kindness.”

[Cyberyeti]

A sad loss, somebody who was an international bridge player, but that was not his major claim to fame, he was one of the all time great West Indian cricketers, Sir Everton Weekes. I met him at the bridge table, absolute gent.

https://en.wikipedia.../Everton_Weekes

[Aberlour10]

Ennio Morricone, influential composer of music for the international cinema, over 50 years, from "For the Few Dollars More" to "The Hateful Eight"......

[Cyberyeti]

Another musician, best known for the devil went down to Georgia in this country https://en.wikipedia...Charlie_Daniels