RIP

[babalu1997]

kendog

dedicated bbo hornets td

will be missed

[jonottawa]

My 30's. Haven't died yet but they're terminally ill. Doctors give them 6 months. I will miss them terribly.

[PassedOut]

Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85

[Cyberyeti]

Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85

Bizarre twist of timing.

 

On Thursday, the day he died I took a chaos theory exam involving some fractal stuff.

[PassedOut]

Larry Evans, 5-time US chess champion.

[y66]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/18/us/18evans_337-span/EVANS-obit-articleLarge.jpg

Bobby Fischer, left, training for the world championship with the help of Larry Evans in a hotel pool in the Catskills in 1971.

 

from the NYT obituary written by Dylan Loeb McClain.

 

I am slowly working my way through My 60 Memorable Games which McClain says Evans "cajoled and exhorted" Fischer to write and which he also edited and wrote introductions for all the games. "Typical of Mr. Evans’s style was the introduction to Game 9 against Edgar Walther, in which Mr. Fischer escaped with a draw: “What makes this game memorable is the demonstration it affords of the way in which a grandmaster redeems himself after having started like a duffer; and how a weaker opponent, after masterfully building a winning."

[y66]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/29/nyregion/29nielson3/sub-nielson-2-articleInline.jpg

Leslie Nielsen, center, with Julie Haggerty, Peter Graves and, on the floor, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in “Airplane!” (1980).

Rumack: Well, I don't have anything to say, you've done the best you could. You really have, the best you could. You can't expect to win em all. But, I want to tell you something I've kept to myself through these years. I was in the war myself, medical corps. I was on late duty one night when they brought in a badly wounded pilot from one of the raids. He could barely talk. He looked at me and said, "The odds were against us up there, but we went in anyway, I'm glad the Captain made the right decision." The pilot's name was George Zip.

 

Ted Striker: George Zip said that?

 

Rumack: The last thing he said to me, "Doc," he said, "some time when the crew is up against it, and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to get out there and give it all they got and win just one for the Zipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Doc," he said, "but I won't smell too good, that's for sure."

 

Ted Striker: Excuse me doc, I got a plane to land.

[Winstonm]

Yes, Leslie Nielsen, free now to live a life of religious fulfillment...

 

One for the road.

 

Rumack: Captain, how soon can you land?

Captain Oveur: I can't tell.

Rumack: You can tell me. I'm a doctor.

Captain Oveur: No. I mean I'm just not sure.

Rumack: Well, can't you take a guess?

Captain Oveur: Well, not for another two hours.

Rumack: You can't take a guess for another two hours?

[paulg]

Maurice Wilkes, who designed the EDSAC computer in 1949, has passed away aged 96. He was head of the computer lab (or equivalent) at Cambridge University from 1945 until 1980 (the year after I arrived there).

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/30/maurice_wilkes_rip/

[luke warm]

RIP dandy don meredith... many enjoyable monday nights, thx to you, frank, and howard

[PassedOut]

Captain Beefheart Dead At Age 69

 

Don Van Vliet, who became a rock legend as Captain Beefheart, died today from complications from multiple sclerosis in California.

:(

[barmar]

No mention of Blake Edwards?

[Fluffy]

No mention of Blake Edwards?

The comedian in Watchmen?

[blackshoe]

The comedian in Watchmen?

 

That was Edward Blake. Blake Edwards was an actor, producer and director, and husband of Julie Andrews. May he rest in peace.

[hrothgar]

Steve Landesberg

 

Always loved his droll style...

[Cyberyeti]

Gerry Rafferty

[PassedOut]

Pete Postlethwaite

[y66]

Daniel Bell, Ardent Appraiser of Politics, Economics and Culture, Dies at 91

 

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

 

Daniel Bell, the writer, editor, sociologist and teacher who over seven decades came to epitomize the engaged intellectual as he struggled to reveal the past, comprehend the present and anticipate the future, died on Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 91.

 

...

 

Mr. Bell’s output was prodigious and his range enormous. His major lines of inquiry included the failures of socialism in America, the exhaustion of modern culture and the transformation of capitalism from an industrial-based system to one built on consumerism.

But there was room in his mind for plenty of digressions. He wrote about the changing structure of organized crime and even the growing popularity of gangsta rap among white, middle-class, suburban youth.

 

Two of Mr. Bell’s books, “The End of Ideology” (1960) and the “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978), were ranked among the 100 most influential books since World War II by The Times Literary Supplement in London. In titling “The End of Ideology” and another work, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (1973), Mr. Bell coined terms that have entered common usage.

 

In “The End of Ideology” he contended — nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism — that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.

 

...

 

Daniel Bolotsky was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 10, 1919, to Benjamin and Anna Bolotsky, garment workers and immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father died when Daniel was eight months old, and Daniel, his mother and his older brother, Leo, moved in with relatives. The family changed the name to Bell when Daniel was 13.

 

Mr. Bell liked to tell of his political beginnings with an anecdote about his bar mitzvah, in 1932. “I said to the Rabbi: ‘I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’ ”

 

Mr. Bell did join the League and as an adolescent delivered sidewalk speeches for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for president. By the time he had graduated fromStuyvesant High School in Manhattan and entered City College in the late 1930s, he was well grounded in the Socialist and Marxist canon and well aware of the leftist landscape, with its bitter rivalries and schisms.

 

At City College, he had no trouble finding his way to Alcove No. 1 in the cafeteria, where, among the anti-Stalinist socialists who dominated that nook, he found a remarkable cohort that challenged and sustained him for much of his life as it helped to define America’s political spectrum over the last half of the 20th century.

 

Its principal members, in addition to Mr. Bell, included Mr. Kristol, whose eventual move to the right as a founding neoconservative led Mr. Bell to leave The Public Interest in 1972 while steadfastly affirming his friendship for his old school chum.

 

There was Irving Howe, the late critic, professor and editor of the leftist journal Dissent, who remained a Social Democrat. And there was Nathan Glazer, who would become Mr. Bell’s colleague in the Harvard sociology department, the author, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of “Beyond the Melting Pot,” and the architect of strategies for school integration. In 1998 the four men were the subjects of a documentary film by Joseph Dorman titled “Arguing the World.”

 

The atmosphere of City College in the ’30s was supercharged with leftist ideology. There were Communists and Socialists, Stalinists and Trotskyites, all giving vent to their views in the years of the Spanish Civil War just before Hitler’s pact with Stalin paved the way to world war.

 

In the film, Mr. Bell described the atmosphere in the cafeteria as “kind of a heder,” referring to the Jewish religious schools where arguing a variety of views and redefining positions was the basis of learning. He graduated in 1939.

 

Mr. Bell never hesitated to expand and revise his thinking through the years. New editions of his older books often include new prefaces and afterwords that look at his old arguments in the light of new developments in politics and society. And he was always quick to point out what he regarded as misconceptions about his work and his life.

 

In 2003, for example, an article by James Atlas in The Times described him and Mr. Kristol as neoconservatives who had felt that the Vietnam War had a “persuasive rationale.” He answered with a letter that declared, “I was not and never have been a ‘neoconservative.’ Nor did I support the war.”

 

Indeed, for all the ideological wars he had witnessed, Mr. Bell disdained labels, particularly as they were applied to him. Over the years he would offer his own political profile, declaring what he called his “triune” view of himself: “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture.”

[PassedOut]

Tura Satana

[Cyberyeti]

Gary Moore

[paulg]

Ken Olsen, the founder of minicomputer and client/server company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died on Sunday. He was 84 years-old (The Register).

 

For my generation DEC was the company that changed computing. No longer sending batches of punch cards away to the mainframe and getting your results back, normally a space in the wrong place in the input, a day or two later. Especially for scientists and engineers, the ability to actually see the computer let alone debug programs through the front panel was amazing.

[y66]

James Elliot Is Dead at 67; Discovered Rings of Uranus

 

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/03/11/us/ELLIOT2-obit/ELLIOT2-obit-articleInline.jpg

Photo by Calvin Hamilton/JPL, via NASA

 

James Elliot used the light from distant stars to help discover the very faint rings of the planet.

 

In 1977, using a telescope in an airplane, Dr. Elliot led a team of Cornell University scientists to observe the planet Uranus when it passed between Earth and a star. Flying at night over a patch of the Indian Ocean where Uranus’s shadow was to be cast, he had the foresight to turn on his equipment more than a half-hour early. This allowed him to record a series of slight dimmings that provided the first evidence of Uranus’s rings.

 

“This is science deeply rooted in preparation and planning, with only minutes of execution,” said Michael Person, an astronomer at M.I.T. who worked with Dr. Elliot. “You have to be there, prepared and ready, observing at the right time, or you don’t get it.”

 

The Uranus researchers — Dr. Elliot, Edward Dunham and Douglas Mink — were aboard the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration jet that flew above the clouds to gather unobstructed images of the stellar eclipse through a mounted three-foot telescope.

 

“He spent the whole flight pacing in a circle, so his headset wire would get twisted up, and he had to unplug and uncurl it,” said Dr. Dunham, who is now at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. “We worked until the sun came up, and the pilot was running out of gas, and we had to go home.”

 

...

 

Dr. Elliot’s penchant for preparation was apparent at home. A few years ago he drew up a list called “Jobs for Grandchildren.” When reminded that he did not yet have any grandchildren, he replied, “They aren’t things I need to have done soon.”

[y66]

Bernard Clayton Jr., Cookbook Author, Is Dead at 94

By WILLIAM GRIMES

 

Bernard Clayton Jr., a newspaper reporter whose love for fresh bread inspired him to master the art of baking and write several classic cookbooks on bread and pastry, died on March 28 in Bloomington, Ind. He was 94.

 

His death was confirmed by his wife, Marjorie.

 

Mr. Clayton experienced a bread-baking epiphany while bicycling across Europe with his wife in 1965. The quality of the breads, gratifying to appetites sharpened by a hard day’s ride, impressed him deeply. Although he had never baked so much as a muffin in his life, he embarked on a quest to explore the intricacies of bread and pastry making.

 

His hobby developed into an obsession, which became a career. Over the next decade, he traveled around the world and logged countless hours in his home kitchen, newly outfitted with a professional oven, mastering the techniques and the recipes that he presented in “The Complete Book of Breads.”

 

First published in 1973, it became a twin to James Beard’s “Beard on Bread” on the shelves of American home cooks. It was periodically updated, most recently in 2003, under the title “Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads.”

 

A 7,000-mile research trip that took him to bakeries all over France led to “The Breads of France” (1978), a comprehensive cookbook that guided the reader through French bread in all forms, from the leaf-shaped fougasse of Provence to the bagels served at Goldenberg’s deli in the Marais neighborhood of Paris.

 

Bernard Clayton Jr. was born on Dec. 25, 1916, in Rochester, Ind. His father owned and edited The Zionsville Times, a weekly newspaper, and his son, after attending Indiana University for two years, signed on as a reporter for The Indianapolis News.

 

He was soon hired by Life magazine as a photo editor and later ran the Time-Life bureaus in Chicago and San Francisco. During World War II, he was a military correspondent for Time and Life. After the war, he ran Pacific News, a magazine-distribution company, in Honolulu, before embarking on a career in public relations.

 

In 1964, Mr. Clayton dropped out of the corporate world and began traveling by car, bicycle, canal boat and horse-drawn Gypsy wagon in the United States and Europe with his wife. Two years later, he was recruited by Indiana University’s news bureau to oversee a special project for six months. He stayed for 14 years as a writer and editor before retiring in 1980.

[blackshoe]

I knew that name was familiar — I have his Complete Book of Breads, the '73 edition.

[y66]

Bill Cook, Medical Device Maker

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

 

Bill Cook’s first business venture — selling shot glasses with pictures of nude women on the bottom — flopped. But that did not stop him from developing a sprawling company that has made thousands of medical devices, including heart stents, urological equipment and living-tissue transplants.

 

Along the way he amassed a $3.1 billion fortune, making him the 101st richest American in 2011, according to Forbes magazine. And yet he lived a modest life. He and his wife, Gayle, continued to live in the three-bedroom home they bought in 1967, having moved there from an apartment where they had used a spare bedroom to make a new sort of catheter.

 

... Mr. Cook was not widely known outside Indiana, where he sprinkled many millions in gifts. Certainly his products — used to treat conditions from heart attacks to incontinence — were not household names. But he built a 42-company empire with annual sales of $1.7 billion that spanned four continents and employed 10,000 people.

 

He started work every day at 5 a.m.; liked chatting with old friends in barbershops and luncheonettes and, four years ago, finally built a garage. Until then he had been scraping the snow and ice off his windshield himself. Though he was a billionaire, he had no driver.

 

Mr. Cook fit no obvious category. He sometimes drove the bus that took his friend, the singer John Mellencamp, on tour.

 

He and his wife led in the restoration of many Indiana buildings, including 40 on the National Register of Historic Places. He built a casino in French Lick, Ind., in the shape of a boat to comply with a law allowing only riverboat gambling. A moat encircles it.

 

His was certainly the only medical supply company ever to produce a Broadway show, “Blast!” in 2001. The show grew out of his long sponsorship of a champion local drum and bugle corps. (He drove the bus.) “Blast!,” an exuberant tribute to brass and percussion by Hoosier musicians, won Tony and Emmy awards (the Emmy for a televised production on PBS).

 

... William Alfred Cook was born on Jan. 27, 1931, in Mattoon, Ill., and grew up in Canton, Ill., where he played three sports, sang in the choir and played in piano competitions. After earning a biology degree from Northwestern University, failing at his shot-glass brainstorm and serving in the Army, he became the catalog editor for a hospital supply firm, where he liked imagining new products. One was disposable hypodermic needles.

 

In 1957 he married Gayle Karch, who survives him, along with their son, Carl, and a granddaughter. The next year, he started a company in Chicago, MPL Inc., to make hypodermic needles. It became the nation’s third-largest needle maker. He moved to Bloomington after being waylaid there in a blizzard and liking it.

 

In 1963, he and his wife started what became the Cook Group. They invested $1,500 in a blowtorch, soldering iron and plastic tubing to make catheters in their apartment. Mr. Cook wore a tie and coat as a means of self-discipline. Their first sale: two catheters at $7.50 each.

 

At a medical trade show in 1964, Mr. Cook was using a Bunsen burner to demonstrate making catheters from plastic tubing when a man wandered by to ask if he could borrow the equipment, as the exhibit was closing for the day.

 

He was Dr. Charles T. Dotter, who developed angioplasty, the technique of mechanically widening an obstructed blood vessel. He returned the next morning with 15 exquisitely made catheters, and Mr. Cook promptly sold them for $10 apiece. They went on to form a mutually beneficial association in many projects over the years.

 

Mr. Cook, like many billionaires, had luck. A local jeweler asked if he would hire his 17-year-old son, Thomas Osborne, who was not good in school but who was handy. Sure, Mr. Cook said. The young man soon made a prototype machine to wind wire used to guide a catheter.

 

“His name’s on almost every patent,” Mr. Cook said of Mr. Osborne, who went on to make a career at Cook. “The kid was just destined.”

 

... Not everything Mr. Cook touched turned golden. In 1991, he bought the money-losing Manchester United basketball team in Britain for almost nothing. He was offered United’s soccer team as part of the deal, for a price under $25 million, but he said no. It is now worth $1.86 billion.