I learned that Horace (Barlow) passed away. He was a visionary, a neurotheory pioneer. I feel terrible since I had promised him a draft based on our discussion and only managed to rewrite and put it in the bin 5 times. Here is the last pic I have of him w his (then) new puppy

There is a fantastic interview with Horace in "mechanical minds in history", as well as a chapter on "Ratio club" where pioneers met and discussed ideas around cybernetics, brain and information processing (you can find it online). ppl like Turing, McCulloch, MacKay, Ashby etc

One of the cool things from the interview is that Horace wanted to get into physics, but his classmate was Freeman Dyson. Seeing Dyson's prowess with math pushed Horace to go to biology since. (I think most ppl if had a classmate like Dyson would feel the same)

Another cool thing is that when he discussed his plan to test the retina inhibiton story (his visionary 1953 paper) with his PhD advisor Lord Adrian (yeah "the" Adrian), since he was questioning Hartline's idea, Adrian told him not to bother. But,

Barlow didn't give up even though both Adrian and Hartline were Nobel laurates...and out came his ground breaking paper. That is good lesson for everyone, specially younger scientists, to know that even the most accomplished can be wrong. Don't give up and follow your curiosity

If you have not, check the @SfNtweets interview with him as part of their history of neuro collection. There is much to learn from history of science as told by the greats..
RIP Horace, you have been a role model for many and have pushed us to think deeply

A generous deep thinker, driven by curiosity, a visionary skeptic, a great physiologist and a pioneer theorist...there are not more like him. Sad loss for the field. https://twitter.com/wbialek/status/1279882935575994368