RIP

[storm5510]

Originally Posted by tServo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Fontana

Besides writing episodes for Star Trek, she was the writer who largely created Spock's backstory: his parents and his conflicted youth on Vulcan. She also contributed to the Vulcan culture.

She was a pioneering female writer when there were few women in that field.

She hid her gender by using her Initials, D.C. It was felt by some that using her name might cause an uproar. This was the way things were in the 1960's with discrimination being the order of the day, every day.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by storm5510

She hid her gender by using her Initials, D.C. It was felt by some that using her name might cause an uproar. This was the way things were in the 1960's with discrimination being the order of the day, every day.

Link to an interview with her (parts 2 and 3 are findable via the obvious edits to the URL):

"I also found out that, as a woman, it was hard to sell action adventure scripts – despite the fact that they were all I had written and sold to date! Eventually, I started using “D.C. Fontana” as a byline I could get a spec script read without a pre-judgment based on gender."

[Dr Sardonicus]

Ex-Fed Chair Paul Volcker

Paul Volcker, who as Federal Reserve chairman in the early 1980s elevated interest rates to historic highs and triggered a recession as the price of quashing double-digit inflation, has died, according to his office.

He was 92.

Volcker took charge of the Fed in August 1979, when the U.S. economy was in the grip of runaway inflation. Consumer prices skyrocketed 13% in 1979 and then by the same pace again in 1980.

Working relentlessly to bring prices under control, Volcker raised the Fed’s benchmark interest rate from 11% to a record 20% by late 1980 to try to slow the economy’s growth and thereby shrink inflation.

Those high interest rates made it so expensive for people and companies to borrow that the economy weakened steadily. By January 1980, a recession had begun. It lasted six months. A deeper and more painful downturn took hold in July 1981. It endured for 18 months and sent unemployment up to 10.8% in November and December 1982, the highest level since the Great Depression.

[rogue]

Rene Auberjonois, better known as Odo to Star Trek fans.

[kladner]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...-sesame-street
Caroll Spinney, who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street for nearly 50 years, has died. He was 85.

Sesame Workshop, which makes the beloved US children’s show, said Spinney died at home in Connecticut. He voiced and operated the puppets, both key characters, until he was well into his 80s.

[Dr Sardonicus]

George Laurer

WENDELL, N.C. (AP) — George J. Laurer, whose invention of the Universal Product Code at IBM transformed retail and other industries around the world, has died. He was 94.
<snip>
Laurer told WRAL he was still in awe of the invention, which was celebrated on its 25th anniversary at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

"When I watch these clerks zipping the stuff across the scanners and I keep thinking to myself ... 'It can’t work that well,'" he said.

The UPC system created a PR nightmare for George H.W. Bush when he was campaigning for reelection in 1992. He was doing a public appearance, buying stuff in a grocery store. Just a regular guy, right? Wrong! They showed a clip on the news. When he was at the checkout, and saw the cashier using a laser scanner to read the bar codes, he didn't know what it was!

[Jan S]

Marie Fredriksson

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/o...ette-dead.html

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by rogue

Rene Auberjonois, better known as Odo to Star Trek fans.

Married to the same woman for over 50 years ... it's always struck me how length of Hollywood marriages appear to have a strongly bimodal nature, lots of actors married briefly and multiple times but also quite a few of these "love of my life" ones. He also guested - sans Odo makeup - on Star Trek: Enterpise, episode 1.20, Oasis. (The little exchange between Tucker and T'Pol quoted on that page is very funny.)

---------------------

And re. Paul Volcker, this up on NC today:

Misunderstanding Volcker | Naked Capitalism: "A reappraisal of Volcker, who was more hostile to workers and less hard on financiers than the press would have you believe."

[storm5510]

Originally Posted by rogue

Rene Auberjonois, better known as Odo to Star Trek fans.

He was in The Patriot with Mel Gibison, Heath Ledger, Chris Cooper, and many others.

[kladner]

Thanks for the Volcker piece, Earnst.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Jeanne Guillemin

On April 2, 1979, a day with a northerly breeze, a man named Vasily Ivanov stepped outside in the Soviet city then known as Sverdlovsk to walk his dog. Days later, he fell ill, along with dozens of other people in his town in the Ural Mountains. Their symptoms at first suggested pneumonia or the flu, but soon a darker reality emerged.

"All the soft brain tissues were permeated with blood," Faina Abramova, a physician who examined Ivanov’s body, later told the Los Angeles Times. "In more than 30 years of work, I had never seen anything of the kind happen to flu patients. What I was looking at was utterly different."

Ivanov was one of at least 64 people killed in an anthrax outbreak that the Soviet government for years blamed on contaminated meat. U.S. intelligence officials doubted the account, but only in the early 1990s were their suspicions confirmed through sleuthing led by a husband-and-wife team of American researchers, Matthew Meselson and Jeanne Guillemin.

Dr. Guillemin, who has died at 76, spearheaded the fieldwork revealing that the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk — now Yekaterinburg — was not the result of infected beef, but rather an accident at a laboratory known as Compound 19, where the Soviet military conducted research on biological weapons in violation of an international treaty that had taken effect in 1975.