His last name means "star" in Estonian. I was curious if his roots were from Estonia, but could not find any info. In any case, rest in peace Dave.
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> I had to deal with that analogy a lot in high school, and I got used to it. It is, indeed, a rather popular food in schools. My problem with people using TAYT is that they end up misspelling it as Tate. Actually my name in the USA is usually pronounced "Tot", or better, T"ah"T, but while doing i18n testing in the mid-90s, and I discovered that the correct spelling (in Estonia) was with the ä. I gleefully adopted that, so I could break all of our protocols and web tools prior to the worldwide acceptance of UTF-8, and also because I was a death metal fan. Using the umlaut also makes it impossible for an automated spellchecker to respell it as "That", however no alternative has really worked. For a while there, the IRS thought I was three different people....
> The word, in Estonian, means "Star or planet", and as the Estonians did not know what an asteroid was, I have taken it to mean "Star or planet?".
While not saying anything about roots directly, I'm guessing it has to have been the reason behind him adopting the Estonian spelling of it. Maybe from grandparents or great-grantparents. Or even further back, considering apparently Estonians didn't know what an asteroid was back then.
> Or even further back, considering apparently Estonians didn't know what an asteroid was back then.
Asteroids have been called "falling stars" in most languages for ages, nor would "asteroid" work well as a name. Nothing to do with anyone's knowledge of astronomy really.