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from the The-Force-will-be-with-you,-always. dept.
Submitted via IRC for cmn32480
Carrie Fisher, the actress best known as Star Wars' Princess Leia Organa, has died after suffering a heart attack. She was 60.
Family spokesman Simon Halls released a statement to PEOPLE on behalf of Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd:
"It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning," reads the statement.
"She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly," says Lourd. "Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers."
Source: http://people.com/movies/carrie-fisher-dies/
[UPDATE:]
Submitted via IRC for martyb
NPR reports: Actress Debbie Reynolds Dies A Day After Daughter Carrie Fisher's Death.
That means that Billie Lourd, who had a minor role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and was slated for a part in the sequel, Star Wars: Episode VIII, lost both her mother and her grandmother in the same week.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:17PM
Rubin was a medium size player, Fischer was a top billing actress, so she's gonna win.
Rubin pretty much is famous for two things. First is around the turn of the last century there is no ether confuses many people who aren't paying attention into thinking "we" have no net velocity, but she did a lot of work with cosmic background redshift or maybe it was galactic redshift but whatever the details don't matter. The other thing she's famous for is again more redshift doppler stuff hmm galaxies seem to be rotating so fast that they should fly apart unless they have shittons of dark matter or dark energy or something not glowing like a star creating lots of extra gravity to hold them together. Its interesting important stuff but someone would have figured it out sooner or later.
Now I'll throw out two possibly controversial analogies. Lets say Steve Jobs hung on alive till now and Widlar never turned into a drunk causing him to die extremely young. Now its true that Widlar ruled 60's era linear integrated circuits with his crazy yet brilliant current mirrors and band gap references and larger designs like some kick ass opamps for their day and a power supply chip that I actually used just 20 years ago and is still being made AFAIK. Bandgap references are stereotypical EE product where you take a pile of ridiculously non-linear components and wiring them up just so in opposition to each other, you get something shockingly linear or in the case of a bandgap reference, its a constant voltage regardless of, well, most anything, temp, power supply, etc. I chose Widlar because he's famous for two things, his mirror topology (there are others) and his voltage reference (again there are other, newer, better ones) which is similar to Rubin being mostly famous for two things.
Anyway in my analogy I guarantee if Jobs died yet again or whatever today and so did Widlar that Jobs will get all the coverage. Its just kinda how it is.
Something fascinating about Jobs, Fischer, Widlar all those folks had trouble with chemical abuse and died pretty damn young. So this is an interesting time to be alive in early Gen-X or whatever because healthy clean living pre-war hero's of the old days are finally getting around to dying while boomers who took very poor care of themselves are dying at the same time as ancient pre-WWII healthy people. Living a chemically enhanced lifestyle seems to cost between one and two generations of life. I'm too lazy to look it up but if Rubin had been an alkie like Widlar and died at 30 like Widlar I donno if she would have lived long enough (sober enough?) to have done anything famous.
Theres also an aspect of political correctness, Rubin was all feminist rah rah in her later years and if she were, say, a right wing man, I guarantee for political reasons we'd not be hearing about her at all. But because she was a woman in a man's field theres lots of popular science coverage implying she invented the universe, the galaxy, math, BS like that. Don't get me wrong, she was a cool minor player in the field. But just a minor player. Only getting the extra coverage in the news any other minor player would never get, because of her genitals.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:03PM
Props for mentioning Widlar. He along with Pease and Williams are the unsung heroes of the analog world.
But it strikes me as odd that you didn't mention Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie passed away Oct 11th, 2011. less than a week after Steve Jobs who passed away Oct 5th. He didn't get the same mention that Jobs did. Oddly enough, Jim Williams and Bob Pease passed away within a week of each other that same year in June. Pease on the 18th and Williams on the 12th. 2011 was a very sad year for the tech world.
I don't care to follow celebrities or anything about them. But those guys, with the exception of Jobs (no disrespect, I just don't care for him) were my celebrities.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 02 2017, @01:16PM
Dennis Ritchie
I wanted to find a guy who did two separate things of similar level that the press is confusing into one thing. So the Widlar-ian chimera of the current band mirror gap reference could be a thing in journalist land...
were my celebrities.
As a little proto-engineer I used to read Pease's column in that tech industry magazine who's name I long forgot. A collection of those would be the world's weirdest EE textbook. They used to be online at Nat Semi's website, er I think they were.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday January 02 2017, @03:28PM
Electronic Design. I used to get it way back and enjoyed his columns. Called Pease Porridge and always included his tag line: "Whats all this X stuff anyhow?"
An appropriate column: http://electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-widlar-stuff-anyhow [electronicdesign.com]