[kristopolous]

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark.

When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one.

There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw

That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakfast showing up early to an event when it was just me and woz in the room and I talked to him for an hour not realizing who he was.

Actually my bullshit flags went up thinking "this guy sure likes to tell fantastic exaggerated stories!"

Kinda like talking to, say Harrison Schmitt, not knowing him, and saying "you? Landed on the moon? Sure old man. Stepped foot on the moon... then you were a senator? alright."

[dreamcompiler]

Schmitt's one of our local heroes here in New Mexico. He's the only moonwalker who was not a military aviator. (He's a geologist.)

I'm not a big fan of his climate change denialism but yeah, he did walk on the moon.

[sehansen]

Reminds of this Neil Gaiman anecdote about imposter syndrome:

"""Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. """

from: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-a...

[kristopolous]

Correction, 2023...