Yesterday's events were shocking, but this morning we're starting to learn the names of the victims. Some of them were names we heard last night -- rumors on Fark, Myspace, or Wikipedia -- some of the names were new.
I woke this morning to the confirmation that Liviu Librescu was among the ones whose gunshots were fatal. Dr. Librescu and I met a few years ago, as fellow participants in a summer faculty workshop. He was already in his early 70's even then, and still here because it was clear how much he enjoyed his job. He was quiet, but had a wickedly sly sense of humor, and little patience for the bureaucratic red tape we had to put up with at the workshop. Once the workshop was over, I had little contact with him, except that occasionally I'd see him in the hallway and say hi.
That's how it is with a lot of the people at this community -- the odd semester-based schedule that academia lives by (but nobody else) often means that people are thrown together to see each other regularly for a few months at a time, to find that the following semester, their schedules separate them completely. There are so many people here, that "I knew one semester" but are now just nodding acquaintances.
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