Obituaries
Martin Gardner quoted a physicist named Robert Coveyou to the effect that "the generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance". I was sorry to find by searching Google that Coveyou had died in 1996 (not many years after I first read his quotation). Robert Coveyou was right: random numbers are serious business, and they have only become more so with time.
On a trip to Massachusetts, I discovered that my childhood barber Ernest Paul had also died last year, at the age of 84. Mr. Paul cut my hair from when I was about 5 until I was about 15, and I think I went back for a last haircut with him at the age of 18. Mr. Paul, as his obituary says, cut hair for 66 years, and he had already been doing it for nearly half an century when I first began to visit his shop. Everyone was astonished that he hadn't retired as he kept on working through his seventies. The local newspapers would just keep on interviewing him and profiling him and he would just keep on doing his job.
I hadn't planned to write a lament stanza, but here it happened:
