End of year obits

Slate's Tim Noah has a interesting piece about end-of-year obits -- he notes that most publications put their 'people who died this year' lists together early, so if people are unfortunately enough to die in the last two weeks of December, you go almost unnoticed.

Personally, I ususally read the obits because it is like reading a mini-biography of these people's lives. It would be nice if we could recognize some of these people while they are alive, but...

Anyway, these are interesting folks, but Noah's list does have some people with at least some connection to our community. [I will note that he includes John Diebold, and I did offer up a link to Diebold's obit back when I saw it. I've included him below again, however.]

Dec. 15: Samuel Cohn. A career official in the White House budget office from 1947, when it was called the Bureau of the Budget, to 1973, after it was renamed the Office of Management and Budget. By the time he left he was more or less running the place. He called himself "the SOB of the B.O.B."

Dec. 21: Albert Weimorts. Designed a big bomb built for the specific purpose of killing Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf war. It missed.

Dec. 26: John Diebold. Early computer tycoon. In a 1952 book he turned the (then-technical) term "automation" into a synonym for "computerized."