Claudia “Sue” Powers, widow of the U-2 pilot and spy who was famously shot down over Russia, died of respiratory failure last week at 68, in Las Vegas, reports the LA Times. Her husband was the hottest news back in 1960, when he parachuted out of his plane and was captured, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to 10 years in a Russian prison. He was freed two years later in exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.

Sue Powers, a CIA psychometrist who tested agents coming back from abroad, met Powers in ’62 after his release from the Soviet Union. They married and moved to Los Angeles, where he became a Lockheed test pilot and flew helicopters for TV news. He died in 1977, when his KNBC-TV Channel 4 chopper crashed in Encino. With their son, Francis, the widow Powers obtained several posthumous distinguished medals for her husband and established the Cold War Museum, a traveling exhibit that honors him. The Los Vegas resident was a longtime volunteer at the Atomic Testing Museum.

[Ed. note: Psychometrics, since you were wondering, is the branch of psychology that deals with the design, administration, and interpretation of quantitative tests for the measurement of psychological variables such as intelligence, aptitude, and personality traits.]

The guy who added the escape key and the backslash to computer language died Thursday of cancer, at age 84, in Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas, miles and miles and miles from Dallas, reports reuters. In the ’50s and ’60s Bob Bemer worked for IBM Corp. and helped develop the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (you know, ASCII), a format code that allows most computers to read text as a binary number.

He won the Computer Pioneer Award in 2002 from the IEEE Computer Society for his work in making it easier for people to move text and images on a computer screen. “Computer power is work power, but it is also knowledge power, of the kind that has been used throughout history for aggrandizement as well as the good of the people,” Bemer wrote on his Web site.