Death of a RAW fan

Len Sassaman was a bright, accomplished computer geek. He apparently suffered from depression and took his own life on July 3. He was 31.

I had a slight connection to him. His wife, noted computer scientist Meredith L. Patterson, is a member of the Libertarian Futurist Society and we both served on a committee last year that nominates works for the Hall of Fame award. When I nominated Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson for the award, she seconded the nomination, and then nominated Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. I'm not sure that it's quite correct to even claim her as an acquaintance, but she seemed interesting so I follow her on Twitter. You can learn a lot on Twitter by following smart people. And so I learned the sad news about her husband soon after she did.

I would not have mentioned Mr. Sassaman here, except that I ran across this obituary by Andrew Orlowski, who wrote, "He introduced me to the cypherpunks at one of their regular meetups at Stanford. I introduced him to Robert Anton Wilson, the author of the Illuminatus trilogy, and his favourite author."

I don't know if Mr. Sassaman ever looked at this blog, or read the postings at alt.fan.rawilson, or hung out with the Maybe Logic folks. But in some sense, he was a member of our community.