Techie Time Capsule!

Let's travel to 1981, when (if (human) memory serves) Centipede and Pac-Man were start-of-the-art videogames and computer undergrads at the University of Virginia (UVA) learned to program using BASIC and FORTRAN and COBOL and PASCAL—on punchcards run through the school's computer.

Thanks to Dan Radosh for the lead.



Source (2:17)

Huffington v. Gasman

When I learned that The New Yorker had published a profile of Arianna Huffington, I immediately searched it for references to artist and Picasso expert Lydia Gasman, who was one of my favorite professors during my madcap college days.

Sure enough, there it was:

Lydia Gasman, now an emeritus art history professor at the University of Virginia, says that Huffington’s Picasso biography included themes similar to those in her unpublished four-volume Ph.D. thesis. “What she did was steal twenty years of my work,” Gasman told Maureen Orth in 1994. Gasman did not file suit. (Huffington denied both allegations.)

I first encountered Gasman when I accidentally walked into one of her modern art history lectures. Won over by her enthusiasm, I signed on to her class and went on to complete a total of three of her courses by the time of my graduation. I guess I was also a kind of "recruiter" for her classes, as I urged many of my friends to take them too.

Gasman, who has a kind of legendary status among Picasso cognoscenti, was such an engaging lecturer that I've long wondered when I'd be able to see her giving a presentation in New York City. But I've never seen her slotted for such a talk. It's our loss.