From a co-worker
Steve was the first person I met when I joined the Intelligence Community supporting NGA 10 years ago. My whole first day, he gave his time to show me the ropes, helping me get computer accounts, and explaining how things worked. … Well, it wasn’t quite the whole day. As I walked to the parking lot, I looked at my watch again and realized I’d only been there 7 hours. But my brain was full.
Steve had a big brain. His memory was phenomenal. He had half a dozen file cabinets full of Landsat imagery on CD’s. The CD’s came with labels that were an impenetrable string of numbers and letters, sometimes with the coarse 30-m resolution picture. Nobody else would have a clue how to find the right one, but Steve could do it every time, whether we wanted an image of western China, the South Pacific or the Sudan.
His favorite project at the time was GENIE, a state-of-the art algorithm devised by guys at Los Alamos National Labs, and Steve had the foresight that this could help in our mission. As developmental code, there were lots of intermediate diagnostic plots, one of which Steve dubbed the spaghetti plot. He delighted in baffling managers with these plots, which probably gave him insight, but baffled them. I don’t know about Steve’s religious beliefs, but this interest led me to suspect he was an adherent of Pastafarianism, whose deity is the well-known Giant Spaghetti Monster.
Steve had a big brain. In a big head. When we traveled out to Los Alamos to meet the GENIE team, Steve had a special side mission. Not fine art or dining, but a custom-made cowboy hat. I think it was a 20-gallon version.
Besides his scientific prowess, Steve had a special gift for acronyms. He could decode even the most obscure ones, correctly if he wanted, or cleverly, which was way more fun. During one office reorganization, our branch head asked us to come up with a new branch name and acronym. We got stuck with PRIQ; we liked the James Bond connotations in the “Q”, but not the pronunciation. Steve had had a far better idea. He proposed a name that described our mission exactly: “Advanced Exploitation of Information Operations and Undergrounds”, whose acronym is permanently memorable: AEIOU.
Steve had a big brain. And a big spirit of helping. I hadn’t seen him much in the last few years, but a while ago I asked him to help me find some obscure web site, which he did. A few months later, when I had of course forgotten how to get to it, I asked him for help again. That was when I had some hint that all may not be well. Because he tried to help me. He always was willing to help. And in my experience he had always been willing to help. But this time he just couldn’t seem to remember.
But I’ll always remember that better idea for a branch name, and I’ll always remember Steve as a very fine scientist, colleague, and friend. I will certainly miss him.