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Author Topic:   Tribute Thread for the Recently Passed Greats
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1015 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 147 of 1282 (645088)
12-23-2011 4:06 AM


RIP Vaclav Havel
Surprised it hasn't been mentioned already, but today is the funeral of Vclav Havel, this country's first post-Communist President, and a man of unusual integrity and honesty for a politician.
quote:
Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate.
- Vclav Havel, 1936-2011

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1015 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 861 of 1282 (875274)
04-20-2020 8:31 AM
Reply to: Message 845 by RAZD
03-24-2020 11:56 AM


Re: Albert Uderzo, 92
But you have to read it in french to get the puns.
The English translators just wrote new puns. There's at least a pun per page in Asterix so rewriting them is the translator's main job.
The original English translators both unfortunately also passed away in the last decade.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 845 by RAZD, posted 03-24-2020 11:56 AM RAZD has seen this message but not replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1015 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(4)
Message 965 of 1282 (885306)
04-04-2021 11:25 AM


Thomas Cavalier-Smith
Not been here for a long time, but I wanted to drop in to note that Thomas Cavalier-Smith passed away a couple of weeks ago.
I first stumbled across Cavalier-Smith's work about 20 years ago, when I first became interested in understanding microbes and how they all fit together, evolutionarily. He was then proposing a grand scheme to explain exactly how everything was related and how eukaroytes evolved from prokaryotes. Several of his ideas turned out to be wrong, but this never appeared to cause him to break stride, and he was proposing new bold hypotheses to account for the evolution of all life pretty much continuously from the 1980s right up until a couple of weeks ago.
I don't mean to imply that all his ideas were wrong. While much has been rejected, a lot of his ideas have also become accepted as established fact. The scale of his influence is apparent if you look at the most recent consensus classification of eukaryotic life in the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology. Despite the fact that they reject Cavalier-Smith's names for the largest groupings of organisms, he is nonetheless cited as author of a staggering 113 clade names. This includes several clades fundamental to our understanding of evolutionary relatioships, such as Opisthokonta, Alveolata or Ascomycota.
Part of this, of course, is due to his slightly annoying habit of naming and defining every single clade that crops up in every hypothesis he comes up with. A habit made more annoying by his bull-headed insistence in using 'correct' terminology even when his views on correct have far diverged from what every other researcher uses. Reading his work sometimes involves substantial cross-referencing as you try to remember what the hell 'Eozoa' is supposed to be.
As mentioned, he kept at this right up to the end, publishing together with his wife a truly epic review article in Protoplasm last year (clocking in at almost 150,000 words) summarising his current views on the origins of the different domains of life.
The article emphasises the view he's argued for decades, that Archaea are not a branch of life equally ancient with Bacteria, but highly derived Bacteria that evolved from them within the last billion years. Archaea and Eukarya are, on this view, nested deep within Bacteria phylogenetically (though he strongly disputes the widely-accepted notion that Eukarya are nested withing Archaea, considering them sister groups).
Ever happy to throw away old ideas, he's abandoned the view that we evolved from gram-positive bacteria as no longer tenable. His new scheme has us branching within the PVC superphylum, specifically close to the Verrucimicrobian Prosthecobacter.
If you have a lot of free time to kill, this article is a fitting epitath, as it's Cavalier-Smith at his most Cavalier-Smithian. He boldly pontificates on an enormous range of biological topics; scathingly dismissing his own critics while explaining which of the ideas he had previously boldly pontificated for were now clearly wrong and why. And, of course, he names a whole bunch of new clades.
This was a long obituary, but I think I was reading Cavalier-Smith close to the time I signed up for this forum, so it seemed appropriate.

  
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