RIP Thread for Notable People

Cervelo said:
Sorry Duke, was half asleep when I posted that this morning, have corrected my post with the correct horse
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Yes I have heard of Delta Work and had heard of its demise from PaddyPower. I presume it was the sports coverage. With Cheltenham 2 weeks away and DW due to run, I suppose it was worth a mention in that context.
 
Persia said:
Eleanor Maguire obituary: Irish neuroscientist who changed our understanding of memory
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But that obit was culled from the New York Times, for Chrissakes.

What's down on the plonkers of d'Olier Street ? Can't they even do the donkey-work of interviewing a few professors and Dublin friends of a dead notable and then synthesise it for themselves ? Failing that couldn't they even find a friend or colleague in Dublin or London and ask for an obit from them ?
 
IT and NYT have a deal these days on things like subsxriptions, more and more articles are now being shared across newspapers globally, you'll find articles from the Guardian in the IT and Examiner these days.

All about cost savings
 
Peanuts20 said:
IT and NYT have a deal these days on things like subsxriptions, more and more articles are now being shared across newspapers globally, you'll find articles from the Guardian in the IT and Examiner these days.
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They are all members of the international personhood of smoked salmon socialists.
 
Peanuts20 said:
IT and NYT have a deal these days on things like subscriptions, more and more articles are now being shared across newspapers globally, you'll find articles from the Guardian in the IT and Examiner these days.

All about cost savings.
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Yet it cannot have been cheaper for the NYT or Guardian to research the career and personal life of a dead Irish-raised scientist. If the research were done by the overseas newspaper then shame on IT. If the research were done by IT and paid for by NYT or Guardian then was the overseas paper allowed to scoop the IT, with the IT allowed to republish the piece it had researched under contract after a month elapsed ? This is equally daft by the IT.
 
Lets say for the sake of maths, it cost the NYT $1000 to research and write that piece. All things being equal, it would have cost the IT and the Guardian the same. However if the NYT sell the article to 2 overseas newspapers for $800, then the NYT makes a profit of $600 and the 2 overseas paper make a saving of $200

Thats what is happening in the newspaper industry these days
 

I managed to get around the NYT paywall somehow and found an obituary that seems clearly researched and written by a different person than that who wrote the Guardian obituary.

Yet in both cases, there is a focus on the opinions of Prof Maguire's colleagues in either UK or USA.

The IT obit is a sharply edited version of the NYT's. It doesn't seem to have absorbed the Guardian's obit's facts. It omits the Guardian's touching final paragraph about her star ex-student visiting her 2 days before her death with his Nobel medal.

The most important thing to a true academic is seeing their own ex-students succeed and extend the fields of the research they trained them in. Having one of them achieve the supreme accolade is a sure vindication of a lifetime of dedicated work. What could be more proper than to have that Nobel winner acknowledge his debt to his professor at the very close of their life. Thank God that the dons at UCL saw what was needed to be done. And thank God that The Guardian closed their piece with mention of her finale - even if the clowns at the IT set no store on it.

The NYT obit is attached below.


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NEW YORK TIMES

Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54​

By watching the brain process information, she discovered that a specific region plays a key role in spatial navigation — and that it can be strengthened like a muscle.





Eleanor Maguire in an undated photo. “She changed our understanding of memory,” said Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London.Credit...UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Feb. 14, 2025
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, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.
Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia.
Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. 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 (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. 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,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “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 Dr. Frith’s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.
Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “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?’”
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London

​

Dr. Maguire’s study on the human hippocampus, published in March of 2000, turned the spotlight on London taxi drivers. “I never noticed part of my brain growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, told the BBC at the time.Credit...John Lamb/Photodisc, via Getty Images
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.

But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.

“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.
Dr. Maguire’s study, published in March 2000, generated headlines around the world and turned London taxi drivers into unlikely scientific stars.
“I never noticed part of my brain growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, told the BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”

Dr. Maguire wondered, too: Why (and how) did their hippocampi grow?
She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/science/vishvaa-rajakumar-memory-techniques.html
But recalling information was only half the story.
In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.
“The whole point of the brain is future planning,” Dr. Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan’s book “Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future” (2020). “You need to survive and think about what happened when I was last here, is there a scary monster that will come out and eat me? We create models of the future by recruiting our memories of the past.”
Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.

Growing up, Eleanor was obsessed with “Star Trek.”
“My first scientific hero was fictional — Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she told the journal Current Biology in 2012. “He embodied so much of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, honest, meticulous, calm, fearless in facing the unknown, innovative and unafraid of taking risks.”
She graduated from University College Dublin in 1990 with a degree in psychology, and returned to earn her doctorate there after receiving a master’s degree from the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University).
Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995 and never left.
She is survived by her parents. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, also of cancer.
At Dr. Maguire’s memorial service, Dr. Price spoke about the energy and excitement her friend and longtime colleague generated at the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mother had called nightly to remind her daughter to go home.
“It wasn’t just a job,” Dr. Price said. “It consumed us, day and night.”
There was a sense that they were onto something big.
“We were among the first to use cutting-edge technology to peer inside the healthy, living human brain and witness its functions in action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity were instrumental to numerous discoveries.”
 
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Peanuts20 said:
To bring it back to the original topic of this thread, RIP Willie Walsh.
MSN
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I was in Rome over the weekend. We spend a day and a bit in the Vatican, with all its opulence and imperial pomp and sickening grandeur. It's 30 years since I was there and it's just as vulgar and soulless and reflective of an utterly human institution as I remember.

To me Willie Walsh was a thousand times closer to what a Christian should be than everything in the Vatican combined.
 
Brilliant musician, multi-talented, an enormous gap now in the world of music. I am at a loss for words for once. RIP Roberta Flack, I sinned to you more than a few dozen times.
 
Been to the Vatican myself in the past and it is just a gigantic and gaudy museum, although I did enjoy wandering around some of the smaller streets in the area. I'm reminded of the old joke that it's time to sell your share in a company when they build a fountain at head office (RBS being another example of that)

I much preferred the Irish College in Rome, lovely building with orange trees in the garden.
 
Purple said:
We spent a day and a bit in the Vatican, with all its opulence and imperial pomp and sickening grandeur. It's 30 years since I was there and it's just as vulgar and soulless and reflective of an utterly inhuman institution as I remember.
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Excuse edits but the last one needed doing for it to make sense.

Yes, the Vatican seems to be one of those things that non-catholics accept - even at times allow themselves to be allured by - more than catholics. I think it's fair to say that the media have a lot to do with the image of the Vatican in the mind of the general public. The pussyfooting of Joe Little of RTE around Vatican niceties in his correspondent's coverage is nothing to that displayed by UK news reporters at times.

The essence of the faith is easily losable by many when they are in human space immersed in talk and trappings more suited to galleries, museums or old university libraries.

Oh for a draught of vintage Fergal O'Connor on the Late Late again.

Peanuts20 said:
I much preferred the Irish College in Rome, lovely building with orange trees in the garden.
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I trust your stay was comfortable, Signor Peanut.
 
trajan said:
Oh for a draught of vintage Fergal O'Connor on the Late Late again.
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A great man. Somewhat before my time, but a free thinker with the intellectual ability and strength of character to remain so in an organisation which expressly condemns such things.

I regard the Catholic Church as I do all religions; human institutions primarily concerned with their own sustainment.
 
Two deaths announced today.

Broadcaster Henry Kelly (78)

Broadcaster Henry Kelly dies aged 78

The broadcaster and journalist Henry Kelly, who presented TV shows such as Going for Gold and Game for a Laugh, has died aged 78, a statement from his family has said.
www.rte.ie

Novelist and playwright Jennifer Johnston (95)

Novelist and playwright Jennifer Johnston dies aged 95

Award-winning writer Jennifer Johnston, known for novels and plays including 'How Many Miles to Babylon?', has died aged 95.
www.rte.ie

RIP.
 
@odyssey06

Not sure if Kelly ("Sorry for getting worked up about this but I feel very strongly about it.") is much of a loss to Ireland.

But Jennifer Johnston's passing is a loss to our literary set and her readers.
 
To be brutally honest, I'd never heard of Jennifer Johnston until today, and I'd consider myself reasonably well read.

Where as Going for Gold was one of the best pieces of kitch TV from the 80s and 90s you could get. So bad it was mildly entertaining.
 
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