RIP Thread for Notable People

Probably not well known to most of you - but I heard yesterday that a Dublin musician/drummer called Dave Moloney had died.

He played with an early version of The Boomtown Rats featuring Bob Geldof, and went on to join The Vipers who released a great punk-era single called 'I've Got You'.

In The 1980s he drummed with Rocky De Valera & The Rhythm Kings, and in the early 1990s he joined ex-Blade Paul Cleary in The Cajun Kings who had a long-running residency at The Purty Kitchen in Dun Leary. He played with many other bands over the years - he even did a stint as Johnny Logan's drummer.

He was a brother of RTE 2FM's Mike Moloney (of 'Moloney After Midnight' fame.)
 
Knew Dave well , lovely chap and a great raconteur.
Big Manchester United fan , many’s the night and indeed afternoon we spent in Larry Murphy’s pub in Baggot Street watching football,
Worked in the box office in the National Concert hall as well.
Gutted to hear of his death .
May the sod rest lightly on him .
 
Sorry to hijack this thread about dead footballers but Irish Neuroscientist and Nobel prize winner Eleanor Maguire died in January at the age of 54 after a long battle with spinal cancer.
Her work with London taxi drivers which proved the concept of brain elasticity made her famous within her field and earner her the Nobel prize but her later work on the same area of the brain was probably more interesting. She was a truly remarkable person as well as being a remarkable scientist.

Nothing about it in the Irish media and nothing from the President... if only she's also being a left wing dictator!
 
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Purple said:
Sorry to hijack this thread about dead footballers but Irish Neuroscientist and Nobel prize winner Eleanor Maguire died in January at the age of 54 after a long battle with spinal cancer.
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Yes. Great work indeed. (Unfortunately, she won an Ig Nobel Prize - not the Nobel. At least not yet.)

Purple said:
Nothing about it in the Irish media and nothing from the President... if only she's also being a left wing dictator!
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Agree.

Nothing in the Irish Times either. If only she'd been some corsety old fuddy nobody still remembered from the glory days of Trinity College (1923 - 1968) . . .

Now that would get her a full page obit on Saturday's issue.
 
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Purple said:
Sorry to hijack this thread about dead footballers but Irish Neuroscientist and Nobel prize winner Eleanor Maguire died in January at the age of 54 after a long battle with spinal cancer.
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How unfair is it that someone of such value to society can suffer such illness and be taken so early while parasites like jimmy saville and rolf Harris survive for decades longer?
 
Salvadore said:
How unfair is it that someone of such value to society can suffer such illness and be taken so early while parasites like jimmy saville and rolf Harris survive for decades longer?
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It is indeed unfair. But that's an unfairness of Nature and one beyond our control.

What's well within our control is the level of attention given to bagpipes like Saville and Harris, yet denied to serious scientists like Ms Maguire, by public broadcast media. I wait with great impatience a future backlash against media prioritising the off-beat and vulgar at the expense of the sane and productive - however banal.
 
trajan said:
I wait with great impatience a future backlash against media prioritising the off-beat and vulgar at the expense of the sane and productive - however banal.
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I wouldn’t anticipate a backlash unfortunately.

As Rupert Murdoch once said, no one ever lost money by underestimating public taste.
 
I have a contact within RTE and I've left a message on their mobile number. The Irish Times main number is off the air / asleep at the wheel. News Desk at either - Forget it. International Women's Day is to be celebrated in March. Has anyone any contacts that might include a profile of this brilliant scientist in one of their programmes. BTW are we all men getting the hump about the indifference to this incredible Irishwoman?
 
Salvadore said:
As Rupert Murdoch once said, no one ever lost money by underestimating public taste.
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It was Henry L. Mencken, American Journalist and essayist, who said that "No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

He also said, rather fortuitously, that "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

He'd some great quotes
 
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This kind of reminds me of those lunchtime Department meetings I was forced to attend while a postgrad in UK. At the end of some tricky but trivial item and what should be done about it, some old wag would haul out the old pseudo-resolution, a letter to The Times, and there the matter was rested.

Only one of my letters to the Irish Times got acted on (more to cover the incompetence of one of its scribes who referred to the Sinatra hit as "This Life (sic)" than as a matter of factuality) and the rest ignored. I doubt if attaching the names of 12 AAM apostles would improve our chances. Some years back I raged at them for not doing a obit on Prof Donal O'Donovan: the Irish Times blamed the Trinity fellows for not sending a request forward, the Trinity management said it was all an editorial matter for the Irish Times.

But of course we should do our utmost to effect this, even if we fail.
 
NYT obit is paywalled

From The Guardian, quoting Lynn Nadel, who is based at the University of Arizona, the co-author of a paper that inspired Prof. Maguire, “Her work, starting with the taxi drivers, really linked the human hippocampus to space as well as memory ... Just about everything she did broke new ground.”
 
peemac said:
Maybe the Irish Times will catch up soon
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Eleanor Maguire obituary: Irish neuroscientist who changed our understanding of memory

Eleanor Maguire obituary: Irish neuroscientist who changed our understanding of memory

Her work studying London cabbies transformed our conception of how brains adapt and grow
www.irishtimes.com

Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus – especially those belonging to London taxi drivers – transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, has died at the age of 54 in London.

Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus – a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain – like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case. An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on living subjects, Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.

“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” said Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Frith’s lab, Maguire was watching television one evening when she stumbled on The Knowledge, a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorising the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerised. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’”

(Continues- very lengthy obit)
 
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Purple said:
Nothing about it in the Irish media and nothing from the President... if only she's also being a left wing dictator!
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Or a racing horse!!
Was watching the Six One news the other day and the last bit of news was to announce the death of a 12 year old horse Delta Work
Strange to think that the death of a racing horse makes the national news before somebody like Eleanor Maguire
When even the racing post has the decency to report the passing of a jockey over a the death of a horse
 
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