The only time I wandered around Cal Tech, I noticed a corpse lying on the floor of an office.
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I’m sorry sir. An older boy told me to do it.
Is there a moral to your sentence? (I almost said “story” but it lacks a few details to fall into that category.)
This story has no moral.
Okie dokie.
So, what does Google say? The main cause of the suicide is personal life troubles or professional failures or something else yet?
Are you sure that it wasn’t one of those famous Caltech pranks?
Cyanide is pretty extreme.
Hmm, how much ground did you cover in your wanderings and how long did they take?
Maybe we could estimate the campus mortality rate that way.
Please don’t start estimating from anecdotal evidence …
On second thought, this was probably once of the two times I visited Cal Tech, because I seem to remember once being in the Cal Tech library and convincing a young lady to read Procopius’s Secret History.
Oh I get it. The place is dead.
I guess he died due to climate change, huh.
I went to Caltech. Never saw a corpse lying on the floor of an office.
I’m not surprised. I don’t think it’s all that common.
No, pretty sure it’s not …
Nobody else seems to be asking, so I’ll give it a shot: why was the corpse lying on the floor of an office?
Because that’s where the guy was when he took cyanide. I was walking around, rubbernecking: I must have been one of the first people to see him there that morning. I assumed that he had pulled an all-nighter and was asleep on the floor – but he was dead. Right after I walked past, someone went in and closed the door.
I later heard most of the story, but I only found out his name a couple of hours ago, when I googled the case.
I sometimes saw corpses near my office, but that was in a medical school. How did you know it was a corpse? Had it been decapitated? Did you pause to check vital signs? Had the previously alive person been very irritating to you? Was he yet another academic unwilling to understand the breeder’s equation?
I only realized that he was dead sometime later – might have been a week or so, when the friend I had explored Cal Tech with told me what had happened.
This is the second suspicious death Greg has admitted being “close to”. If he turns into that woman from “Murder She Wrote” (all of whose contacts die mysteriously) I think a pre-emtive arrest may be called for before we are all doomed.
You should try to have a tour of medical examiner office. The dead bodies there are much more fun (gunshot, car accident, shotgun ampputated body parts, rutten delicious smelled body with bones ect).
Is a rutten body a person that was killed by Bas Rutten?
Had he a mask like Castlereagh?
How would a considerate person commit suicide. If the prospective dead person went to a hospital where most people give up the ghost one would greatly reduce the chance of success. If you went to a funeral home and just lied down on a table and expired it would prove extremely confusing to the proprietors. Disappearing isn’t easy. Letting yourself be discovered in your own home by loved ones after you have been dead a while is probably the rudest way to go. Perhaps it is best if we remain stumped.
Was it Ditch Day?
Ditch Day is tomorrow …
You can read the story in:
http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/180/1/Goldreich_OHO.pdf
I hope he’s not saying we should avoid eating steak.
No, that’s not the moral of the story …
This is what I found: Doug Winbigler.
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~blacker/history/bte/intro.html
I only did a search for “Caltech suicide cyanide,” though, so I’ll take your find over my own. Greg Cochran will have to settle this, although if he hasn’t already told the name, then I doubt that he’ll do it now.
Peter Young
Perhaps this is your way of admitting culpability
On the topic of Caltech, but not of suicide …
Caltech, which doesn’t give athletic scholarships, and rarely wins sporting events, managed to end up sanctioned by the NCAA a couple of years ago. Even though all Caltech students can not only read, they can all do physics problems. But those abilities, even coupled with being a student in good standing at Caltech, are not enough for the NCAA to consider you a legitimate college student. It turned out that a feature of the Caltech enrollment system left some students technically academically ineligible for the the first couple of weeks of each term.
This happened about the same time a study was released showing that many athletic powerhouse schools were enrolling athletes who couldn’t read. But those schools understood the system well enough to make sure their “students” were enrolled in plenty of units of remedial alphabet and basket weaving. (And had people lined up to do their work for them and professors lined up to pass them even if they were never seen in class.)
But Caltech was letting its students take a couple of weeks to decide if they wanted to sign up for, say, tensor calculus or advanced quantum mechanics. As far as the NCAA is concerned, real students take remedial alphabet. They don’t spend two weeks deciding which geek class to take. How dare Caltech pretend its athletes are really students!
One of the most considerate suicides in history was Sylvia Plath. She stuffed a blanket in the crack under the kitchen door to make sure the kiddies wouldn’t get gassed before putting her head in the oven.
It only delayed the inevitable though – when her son grew up, he committed suicide too.
There may be some heritability to personality disorders as well as affective disorders.