OBITUARY
Henry David Whitman, who was conceived via in vitro fertilization, born via c-section, fed safe and readily-available food via the marvels of modern food science and large-scale shipping and railway infrastructure, monitored at nighttime via radio wave technology, preserved through countless ailments via a system of modern medicine based on growing bodies of research built on the cumulative exertions and experimentations of countless learned men and women, protected from yet more ailments by immunization and the hard-won eradication of previous generations of diseases, educated via man-made institutions of free learning funded (however insufficiently) by local and state levels of an also man-made system of government, entertained via a global system of interconnected computer networks consisting of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies, transported hither and thither by motorized carriages that had gone from barely functional to so sophisticated they could nearly drive themselves in little more than a century, aided in traveling farther afield by the advent of aeronautics, allowed to behold places he had never been and would never be via the art and science of recording light or other electromagnetic radiation as durable images, connected with friends continuously and cheaply via enormous online networks funded by digital global advertising infrastructure operating at an unthinkable scale, and continually enlightened by books full of words that could only have resulted from the elaborate, millennia-long process by which symbolic communication systems became systems of writing which became more easily dispersed through such crowning achievements of human innovation as the manufacture of paper, the development of ink, the creation of movable type, and Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, marvels of human resourcefulness now so commonplace and taken-for-granted as to be seldom even remarked upon, died of natural causes on Thursday when felled by a tree.