Michael Hawley, Programmer, Professor and Pianist, Dies at 58 (nytimes.com) 17
Michael Hawley, a computer programmer, professor, musician, speechwriter and impresario who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what is now called the Internet of Things, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 58. From a report: The cause was colon cancer, said his father, George Hawley. Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the "Star Wars" director George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the Entertainment Gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas. In between, he worked at NeXT, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines. He was known as a scholar whose ideas, skills and friendships spanned an unusually wide range of fields, from mountain climbing to watchmaking. Mr. Hawley lived with both Mr. Jobs and the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, published the world's largest book, won first prize in an international competition of amateur pianists, played alongside the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the wedding of the celebrity scientist Bill Nye, joined one of the first scientific expeditions to Mount Everest, and wrote commencement speeches for both Mr. Jobs and the Google co-founder Larry Page.
Two of Mr. Hawley's Media Lab projects -- Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow -- anticipated the Internet of Things movement, which aims to weave digital technology into everything from cars to televisions to home lighting systems. Led by companies like Amazon, Google, Intel and Microsoft, the movement is now a $248 billion market, according to the market research firm Statista. Mr. Hawley developed "a pattern of ideas that emerged long before the Internet of Things," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab, said in an email. "I would call that pattern not artificial intelligence, but intelligence in the artificial," he wrote. Mark Seiden, an independent computer security consultant who met Mr. Hawley in the early 1980s when they were both working at IRCAM, a music lab in Paris, and eventually hired him at Lucasfilm, compared Mr. Hawley's exploits to those of George Plimpton, the writer whose participatory kind of journalism had him masquerading as a boxer, a professional football player, a circus performer and a stand-up comedian.
Two of Mr. Hawley's Media Lab projects -- Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow -- anticipated the Internet of Things movement, which aims to weave digital technology into everything from cars to televisions to home lighting systems. Led by companies like Amazon, Google, Intel and Microsoft, the movement is now a $248 billion market, according to the market research firm Statista. Mr. Hawley developed "a pattern of ideas that emerged long before the Internet of Things," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab, said in an email. "I would call that pattern not artificial intelligence, but intelligence in the artificial," he wrote. Mark Seiden, an independent computer security consultant who met Mr. Hawley in the early 1980s when they were both working at IRCAM, a music lab in Paris, and eventually hired him at Lucasfilm, compared Mr. Hawley's exploits to those of George Plimpton, the writer whose participatory kind of journalism had him masquerading as a boxer, a professional football player, a circus performer and a stand-up comedian.
Hot damn... (Score:3)
Half a paragraph covers more than I'll ever do in my whole life.
What can one say, it looks like this man actually lived.
Re: (Score:2)
Get yourself checked! (Score:5, Informative)
Colon cancer is the most common form of cancer, and it is a "silent killer", often giving little to no symptoms before it is too late.
Thankfully, it starts out as a polyp in the colon several years before it starts to grow and become dangerous. And a polyp can be spotted and snipped off during a routine colonoscopy, removing it before growth can happen.
Everyone should get themselves checked every five-to-ten years once they have reached 50 /y of age.
Unless you have a dangerous condition to begin with, a colonoscopy has very low risk -- and for God's sake do please get over any notion about it being sexual in any way! (The doctor's job is to check your colon, not your butt!)
The worst part is the prep before the procedure, where you'll have to empty your bowels to provide good visibility.
The procedure is no big deal, and can make a big difference.
Trust me. Because I have a special condition (that you hopefully don't) I have had eight colonoscopies in the last ten years...
You can even choose to be sedated during it if you're worried, but I never do that (because I'm not a wuss and because the colon actually looks kind'a cool from the inside...).
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You can even choose to be sedated during it if you're worried, but I never do that (because I'm not a wuss and because the colon actually looks kind'a cool from the inside...).
For me, being sedated is the way to go. And the colon doesn't look so good when there's a tumor in there. Trust me on this one.
Get a colonoscopy, folks (men and women). Don't be an idiot. I am/was an idiot.
Gatorade! (Score:2)
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Not only is it not a big deal, but it's so close to 100% effective as to be indistinguishable from it.
If you get a colonoscopy and they find something early, they can snip it out. You will not get cancer. If they find nothing, you will not get cancer. There is no bad news at the end of a colonoscopy if you're doing it preventatively.
I did it with minimal sedation—half the dose, apparently—and I was fully lucid during the procedure. You feel very little; a bit of cramping is all. You get to see i
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Honestly, you may wish to have a screening at least once in your 30s, even if only via the newer stool sample methods for people at low risk. My brother, who was a contributor here for a long time (AlpineR), died of complications due to colon cancer nearly 9 years ago now. He was 38 and spent 7 years fighting it. I can only imagine that if he'd had the screenings early, they might have caught it before it became serious. I say this because due to him, I've been having screenings every 3-5 years since my
lucasfilm games? (Score:2)
my google-fu is failing me - what games did he work on?
Moving up (Score:2)
I hope he's enjoying all the new Things.
MIT Media Lab? Minsky? (Score:1)
literally worse than hitler. cancelled.
I am undecided where his contribution falls (Score:2, Insightful)
IoT is a massively negative thing, from the looks of it. We will spent a lot of effort and suffer a lot of damage before that problem is contained.
On the other hand, maybe he just anticipated the upcoming stupidity and chose not to call it that.
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I still can't figure out why all the negativity about IoT, except that most people really have no clue what it really is. No, it's not your connected refrigerator, it's the 20 BILLION things that will be communicating by the end of the year, such as streetlights, sewer flow sensors, field moisture sensors, etc.
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He may have laid the foundation for the IoT (Score:2)
But he still did not deserve to die that young.
Condolences and thanks (Score:2)
Winston (Score:3)
Prof. Patrick Winston, also at MIT but leading the Artificial Intelligence Lab, derisively predicted the IoT at least as early as 1982 when I took his course on AI and he said, "we don't need a microprocessor in every doorknob." Unfortunately, we lost Prof. Winston just last year. If you are involved in lecturing or presenting at all, you should take the hour to view his "How to Speak" lecture, readily available as part of MIT OpenCourseWare.