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John McCarthy Has Died

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Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#74

Post by SkyMarshal »

gonzo wrote: post #26

McCarthy's wife died in 1977 in a climbing accident http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-Vera.h...

Very interesting. Off-topic thought, but...

"So she joined the group to climb Annapurna, and was part of the second team to attempt the summit. You go up in pairs, so you do pairwise summit attempts - these Himalayan style things where you do base camps. So she was working her way to the upper camp as the first summit team was coming down between the topmost and the second topmost. They passed, and then she was lost - she and her partner were lost. We're quite sure they fell. They were roped together; we think one fell and took the other with them."

As I was reading that I was thinking, 'why twos? that's not enough to anchor someone if they fall through an ice crevice or something, need at least three for that.' And then I get to the end, and that's exactly what happened. I wonder if people still attempt Himalayan mountains in twos like that.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#75

Post by felideon »

ColinWright wrote: post #69
sajid wrote: post #32

Death date removed from Wikipedia. Latest edit shows: "(Protected John McCarthy (computer scientist): Violations of the biographies of living persons policy: Rumors of his death added to page. May be true, but better to wait than edit war."

Death date now reinstated. (22:09 BST, 21:09 Zulu)

It [edit: the Brazilian article] cites Steven Levy, senior writer of Wired, as the source. It does not say where the source is found, but I assume it's this tweet:

http://twitter.com/#!/stevenjayl/status/128568370055491584

He may be a writer for Wired, but he doesn't seem to have a solid source either.

EDIT: There seems to be someone that claims Stanford has confirmed it by phone, as you can see in the Discussion page of Wikipedia, though:

"I spoke to the Associate Director of Communications at Stanford School of Engineering, and Dan Stober of Stanford News Service. Both have confirmed that Professor McCarthy passed away this weekend. They both said there were not a lot of details available at this time. An obituary will be issued by Stanford soon. http://chime.in/user/toybuilder/chime/65979187159736320 -- I apologize for bad formatting. I'm not a regular Wiki editor. Joseph Chiu 24 October 2011, 2:11 PDT. I have not edited the article page."

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