Dynamic Subspace

Tag: obituary

  • Mark Cook (1972-2024)

    a watercolor illustration of a man wearing a hat and nike tank top. has a tattoo on his arm.
    Illustration created with Stable Diffusion.

    My cousin Mark Cook passed away suddenly on October 19th. I last talked to him for awhile outside NAPA Auto Parts with my dad a few weeks ago when I was in Brunswick. He had wanted to hang out while I was down visiting, but it didn’t work out for that to happen.

    Mark gave me some of my favorite memories growing up. We stayed up watching The Rat Patrol on late night television in his room once when I was five or six. He had a Boba Fett action figure before I did, so I always enjoyed playing Star Wars with him when I had the opportunity to visit him at his folks’ house on New Sterling Road. He was a great pal to go swimming with when we were younger. He taught me how to swim underwater with a face mask and flippers. When I asked my mom what we were getting Mark for his birthday back in 1983, she said that he had wanted Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers. I thought to myself that he had a very sophisticated tasted in music.

    Mark and I took different paths in life and work. When I visited home, I was interested to learn what new VW Beetle dune buggy project he might be working on, or how his family life was taking shape–especially after they moved in with his mom on Baker Hill Road in Hortense.

    Mark lucked out when he met his wife Heather, and then again, when they had their daughter Georgia. He was intensely proud of them both–Heather’s progression of degrees to become a teacher, and Georgia’s academic awards and accomplishments that reveal her potential for future successes. As he got older, he never had much to say about himself, but he was always ready to say what Heather and Georgia were up to. While Mark’s passing will be a trying ordeal for them, I know that they will endure and reach such illustrious heights that would have made him smile–in his uniquely beaming but understated way.

    Like his older brother Michael, Mark is gone way before his time. We were supposed to grow old and gray together–perhaps divided by time and place, but bound by old memories and good times.

  • Cherry Cox (1974-2024)

    Illustration of a woman with black hair and wearing glasses is smiling. A field of grass and flowers is in the background.
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Cherry Cox, wife of my cousin Ian and mother to Rowan, Ember, and Evan, passed away on October 1st. She was a singular person with a distinct inner light that revealed itself as a spiritual illumination that cuts through the darkness, a warmth that welcomed others around, and a perspective that favored others before herself. She is gone far too soon and dearly missed.

  • Remembering My Friend Greg Doke

    Jason Ellis on the left wearing a Boy Scout uniform and Greg Doke on the right wearing a scouting t-shirt. Other people in the image have been removed using Stable Diffusion and inpaint+lama.

    The photo above shows me (left) and Greg (right) as we’re about to leave for the 1989 National Scout Jamboree in Washington, DC. By that point, we had spent a lot of our early life together–same elementary school, Cub Scouts, Webelos, and then, Boy Scouts.

    On the long bus ride to the Jamboree, he assembled a plastic model kit of the USS Enterprise USS-1701-D. Imagine his determination to build that model while the bus is bouncing around on the roadbed and young boys are shouting and carrying on around him. He laid out his sprues in the flimsy cardboard box–full color lid inverted to hold the plain cardboard bottom–and applied bits of modeling cement from a metal Testors tube to bind and hold the bits together. I thought that he was out of his mind to build that model on the trip, but he wasn’t out of his mind–he was focused. It meant something to him. It gave him an escape and outlet from everything else going on around him. It channeled his love of Star Trek: The Next Generation into something tangible and real–bringing the utopian world on the screen into a moment of his real lived experience.

    Some years before that trip, I spent an afternoon with Greg at his house. We pulled out his older brother Jeff’s precious Star Wars toys–carefully preserved in their original boxes and meticulously stored in his bedroom closet–for otherworldly battles in outer space. We assembled the Kenner Death Star playset and strafed its villains with an X-Wing and the Millennium Falcon.

    Greg was an aficionado of great toy lines based on children’s cartoons. He had an extensive collection of action figures from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and he proudly showed off the Miraj with a full compliment of heroes from Silverhawks. I can safely say that I’m as impressed now as I was then. And, I was awfully glad we got to play with them together.

    Even earlier, I remember being sick in elementary school. I might have missed a week of school. When I returned to classes, I didn’t have a lot of get-up-and-go. Greg became my companion during PE–we would walk the track beside Glyndale Elementary School. While we walked, we talked about all sorts of things–things that I can’t recall but feel like something important, meaningful, revelatory.

    An even earlier memory is of Greg, me, and a bunch of other boys pretending to be Transformers in the expansive field behind Glyndale. Sideswipe was my preferred character. Greg, however, took it to the next level as Megatron–nailing his character’s raspy electronic voice and striking an imposing silhouette with his arm canon raised.

    The last time that I saw Greg was June 16, 2018. I had visited his parents Wayne and Faye–my Boy Scout Scoutmaster and Cub Scout Pack Leader respectively. Greg happened to be home, so I got to catch up with him some, too. Our lives had diverged in significant ways, but he was still the same determined and playful guy I had know in my youth. However, I also sensed there was a gap between who we were and who we had become that couldn’t be bridged in a brief visit.

    Greg passed away last Monday on 1 Jul. 2024–about six weeks shy of his 47th birthday. Looking at his LinkedIn profile, it seems like he was still moving forward–starting his own company and getting certifications in cybersecurity, which makes the unexpected news that much harder to bear. Even when the bonds of friendship have frayed with time, we still can’t help wanting our old friends’ dreams come true and feeling heartbreak when they don’t.

  • “Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.”

    Donald Sutherland’s portrayal of Oddball in 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes is one of my all-time favorite performances. His character was straightforward and never pretentious about his role as a tank commander in the best war heist movie: “I only ride ’em, I don’t know what makes ’em work.” But his Dude-like abiding had its limits when money was involved: “We see our role as essentially defensive in nature. While our armies are advancing so fast and everyone’s knocking themselves out to be heroes, we are holding ourselves in reserve in case the Krauts mount a counteroffensive which threatens Paris… or maybe even New York. Then we can move in and stop them. But for 1.6 million dollars, we could become heroes for three days.” He played up to people’s expectations when they framed him as crazy: “Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.” Nevertheless, he was almost always upbeat, especially when he was backed by someone putting it on the line, too: “Crazy! I mean like so many positive waves maybe we can’t lose! You’re on!”

    Donald Sutherland will be missed.

  • Lynn Conway, the VLSI Revolution, and Hacking Pedagogy

    Illustration of Lynn Conway and a copy of her textbook with Carver Mead: Introduction to VLSI Systems. Image created with Stable Diffusion.
    Illustration of Lynn Conway with a copy of Mead and Conway’s Introduction to VLSI Systems. Conway’s likeness is based on Charles Roger’s photo on Wikipedia, which he released under a CC BY-SA 2.5 License. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    This past weekend, The New York Times ran an obituary for Lynn Conway, half of the namesake for the Mead-Conway VLSI Revolution and co-author of the groundbreaking textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980). She died at the age of 86.

    What is so cool about the Mead-Conway VLSI chip design revolution was not only that it was the paradigm shift that made possible the next step in microprocessor design and fabrication by enabling electrical engineering and computer science students to do the work that was previously the domain of physicists and the high tech industry, but also that it was a under-the-radar pedagogical hack. Conway writes in the October 2018 issue of Computer:

    "With all the pieces in place, an announcement was made on ARPANET to electrical engineering and computer science departments at major research universities about what became known as "MPC79." On the surface, while appearing to be official and institutionally based, it was done in the spirit of a classic "MIT hack"--a covert but visible technical stunt that stuns the pubic, who can't figure out how it was done or what did it. (I'd been an undergrad at MIT in the 1950s).

The bait was the promise of chip fabrication for all student projects. Faculty members at 12 research universities signed on to offer Mead-Conway VLSI design courses. This was bootleg, unofficial, and off the books, underscoring the principle that "it's easier to beg forgiveness than to get permission" (p. 69).

    While this was a huge contribution to the development of the computer industry leading into the 1980s and beyond, it was only one of her many accomplishments–innovating an out-of-order queuing processing system for IBM only to be fired in 1968 when she began transitioning to become a woman, starting her career over and eventually making her way to Xerox PARC, later joining the University of Michigan as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and serving as associate dean of engineering, and becoming a transgender advocate later in life. She was recognized with many awards and honorary doctorates for her contributions to the field as an engineer and educator.