[hrothgar]

Cyberyeti, on 2019-March-27, 05:54, said:

Roger Charlery AKA Ranking Roger, co-frontman of The Beat (The English Beat in the US). A voice of my teenage years, along with bands like the Specials and the Selecter on the 2 tone label, they brought a big ska revival 1978-85 ish.

https://www.youtube....h?v=BR4HiPHRbrs

*****...

I saw them live a couple times. First time was in London in 83 or so...

Great band

[Winstonm]

Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco

First member of his generation of Italian cosa nostra to flip and go into witness protection.

[y66]

Agnès Varda, beloved French New Wave director

[PassedOut]

Kitty Tucker

My classmate in both high school and university, and a wonderful friend, Kitty made her mark in the world. This has been a sad week for me.

[y66]

Richard Lugar

Quote

Mr. Lugar, who had two stints as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had an impact on a wide range of foreign issues, but his most notable accomplishment was indisputably as the co-creator of a program to help destroy surplus stocks of nuclear weapons around the world.

The project was emblematic of his approach to legislating: It represented an ability to take a long view about complex issues, ran counter to the inclinations of many of his fellow Republicans and was built on a foundation of bipartisan cooperation. It was presented jointly with Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was based on the novel concept of providing American funds to destroy obsolete nuclear missiles and materials elsewhere in the world. At the time, the countries of the former Soviet Union said they could not afford the costs of the destruction and were not even providing sufficient resources to properly guard the weapons’ storage areas.

The idea was first proposed during the term of President George H. W. Bush, who opposed it, along with many others. It took almost a decade, but Mr. Lugar succeeded in persuading Congress, and especially skeptical fellow Republicans, of the need for such a program.

He was also Congress’s leading voice on treaties to ban or limit nuclear weapons, and his judgment on any such proposals was often crucial to whether one could be enacted.

[barmar]

I'm surprised Trump hasn't tried to repeal it -- it sounds like the kind of program he really hates, since it's not "America First".

Maybe he just didn't know about it, but now Lugar's death might raise his awareness of it.

[kenberg]

I have to note the passing of Doris Day
https://www.washingt...m=.3b9e12386556
The article notes that Sentimental Journey was recorded in 1945. It's a song I remember from early childhood along with Sioux City Sue (Gene Autry, 1945) and Cow Cow Boogie (Ella Mae Morse, 1942!) . Becky and I disagree over Ms. Day, Becky really can't stand five minutes of her on film, I think you have to sit back, take it for what it is and enjoy it. The article also repeats the much quoted quip of uncertain origin "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin". Pillow Talk was a very dumb movie. I enjoyed it. There, I have confessed.

[barmar]

I'm not as old as Ken, I mainly remember her from her TV Show in the late 60's, which used her hit "Que Sera, Sera" as the theme song.

This is one of those "I had no idea she was still alive" death reports.

[barmar]

Tim Conway

Arguably the funniest member of the ensemble on The Carol Burnett Show, which is saying quite a bit.

[Lovera]

Niki Lauda:https://en.m.wikiped...wiki/Niki_Lauda

[y66]

Murray Gell-Mann

Quote

There is nothing physicists love more than a mess of puzzling, apparently contradictory experimental results. Physicists are convinced that nature is fundamentally simple, and that they can discover hidden principles which bring order to the chaos — if they just think about it hard enough. Nobody was better at finding order amid apparent chaos than Murray Gell-Mann, who died on Friday.

The 1950s and 60s were a Golden Age of particle physics, as accelerators produced a plethora of new particles with unpredictable properties. This presented a problem: There were too many of these new particles, which appeared in collisions without any evident rhyme or reason. They didn’t look anything like the kind of simple, elegant structure scientists expect from the laws of nature.

With a series of brilliant strokes, Dr. Gell-Mann revealed the secret pattern that made everything snap into place. His Eightfold Way, mischievously named after a Buddhist doctrine of liberation, made sense of the new particles that had been discovered and predicted ones that hadn’t been. The Eightfold Way is to elementary particles what the Periodic Table is to chemical elements. Ultimately, he proposed “quarks,” unobserved particles that are bound together in groups of two or three, to account for almost all of the new discoveries.

But that wasn’t all.

Dr. Gell-Mann was at the center of a whirlwind of theoretical activity. He showed how quantum mechanics allowed a particle to transform into a different particle and then back again. He demonstrated that the strength of particle interactions would depend on the energy with which they were colliding. With his colleague Richard Feynman, he explicated the symmetry structure of the weak nuclear force, one of the four forces of nature. He proposed a physical quantity — “strangeness” — that would explain why some particles lasted longer than others. He, along with Harald Fritzsch, hypothesized that there were force-carrying particles, which they called “gluons,” that hold quarks together. Each of these ideas has subsequently been triumphantly confirmed by experiment.

Any one of these achievements would have served as the high point in the career of any physicist. And there were many others he could have received credit for, as he often waited too long to publish and was occasionally scooped; the Eightfold Way was proposed independently by Yuval Ne’eman, and quarks were theorized by George Zweig. Dr. Gell-Mann’s perfectionism could get the best of him.

Where Dr. Gell-Mann almost always came out ahead was in giving names to his ideas. Dr. Ne’eman simply referred to his proposal by its mathematical label, “SU(3).” That was never going to compete with the romance of “the Eightfold Way,” even if Dr. Gell-Mann did later regret providing an opening to those who would connect quantum physics with Eastern mysticism. Dr. Zweig, on the other hand, called his hypothetical particles “aces,” which lacked the enigmatic heft of “quarks.” Dr. Gell-Mann actually had the sound “kwork” first, and then later noticed the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake.” There was no connection to particle physics, but Dr. Gell-Mann didn’t let that get in the way of a colorful coinage.

Today, the situation in particle physics is the opposite of that in the postwar boom. All of the data being produced in high-energy accelerators is beautifully explained by a single theory with a highly unromantic name: the Standard Model. It was put together over years by numerous talented scientists, but nobody had a greater part in its construction than Dr. Gell-Mann.

There are many ways to become an influential theoretical physicist. Some produce creative new ideas, while others are masters of intricate calculations. Some are best at speculating about the unknown, while others bring clarity and insight to established lore. Part of what made Dr. Gell-Mann special was his mastery of all these modes. His work with Francis Low on the “renormalization group” taught physicists how phenomena at high energies and short distances could be elegantly related to what happens at low energies and long distances. This philosophy remains the central organizing principle of much of modern physics.

Once the Standard Model triumphed in the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Gell-Mann didn’t rest on his laurels. He became convinced of a pressing need for more interdisciplinary work on complex systems. He consequently helped found the Santa Fe Institute, which is today the world’s leading research center on complexity, and which was Dr. Gell-Mann’s research home for the last decades of his life.

It was an interesting move for someone who had garnered so much fame working as a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Elementary particles are the most fundamental building blocks of nature, and their study would seem to be an expression of simplification in its purest form. The essence of complexity research, by contrast, is the emergence of new kinds of order that are only manifest when systems are large and messy.

But this shift of perspective suited Dr. Gell-Mann, who was never comfortable with narrow disciplinary boundaries. He was a rare breed of wide-ranging polymath, well-versed in archaeology, history and ornithology. With his former student James Hartle, he proposed a way of understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has bothered physicists since the days of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. His final research program was an expansive project to study the evolution of human languages.

[Winstonm]

Leon Redbone Born ??? - Died May 30, 2019

https://www.youtube....sGOTAhnJ2l9UTpz

[PassedOut]

Mac Rebennack

Such a night

[Winstonm]

PassedOut, on 2019-June-06, 18:45, said:

Mac Rebennack

Such a night

Guess he finally got to the right place at the right time.

[y66]

Molly O'Neill

Quote

I tried to tease the extraordinary from the mundane, and to use the familiar — the sprig of basil, the bottle of olive oil — to usher readers into social, geographic and cultural worlds where they otherwise might not go.

In "Letter From Cambodia" (New Yorker, July 23, 2001), she describes a trip that she and Sottha Khunn, then head chef at Le Cirque, took to Siem Reap in Cambodia where he grew up to "give his mother some happiness before she dies, help her finish the house, maybe cook for her and her friends one perfect meal. Better than sending orchids to the funeral."

Quote

"They're not going to like the bass-too spicy, too bold. I got carried away."

The dish didn't look bold; it looked innocent. Sottha hadn't added the tomatoes. The butter sauce was light, and its lemony hue, combined with the pale minced chives and wild greens, was almost translucent against the white fish fillets, like refracted sunlight. Without the tomatoes, the sauce was tart and sour, the fish gentle and sweet. The scent of lemongrass erupted like a cheer over the distant, poignant memory of galan­gal and garlic. Sottha had done it: he had found a new balance between East and West.

The room became very quiet. The el­ders looked at each other as if one of their children had just won the Nobel Prize. Within three minutes, every plate on the table looked as if it had been licked clean. When Sottha saw the empty plates, he understood that he'd seriously misread the crowd. Cocsal lifted his Scotch glass and said,"Bravo!"

The three Mesdames raised champagne glasses in a babble of "Gincin!" "Cheers!" "Salut!" Sottha later told me, "It was at this precise moment that I realize exactly how stupid I am, a slave, all my life, to perfection, and for what? To be always alone? The perfect thing comes like a fortune or a war. You prepare but you never know exactly the day, and only a stupid man stands and waits."

The rest of the meal- by Sottha's standards, anyway- was anticlimactic ("Like the history of Cambodia since the ninth century," Cocsal cheerfully whispered to me). Nobody cared. Sottha brought it to the table, sat down, and ate with us. His fantasy of a formal evening became a family dinner. "What the hell," he said. "Everybody having a good time." Later, when I asked Sottha what had inspired him to leave the tomatoes out of the fish dish, he replied that it had simply been an over­sight. But his mother did not agree. "Sottha did not forget the tomatoes," she said as we cleared the table. "He remembered that he did not need them."

[PassedOut]

George Rosenkranz

I remember him as a courtly gentleman at the table, as well as being a good player. Good to see that he had a long life.

[Winstonm]

I didn't know that this had happened. I played often against Crane.

https://www.nytimes....ane-murder.html

Quote

May 10, 2019

A North Carolina man was arrested on Thursday in the murder of Barry Crane, a renowned Hollywood director and bridge player who was bludgeoned and strangled to death more than three decades ago in his Los Angeles home....

....On weekends, he traveled across the country to play bridge, and rose through the ranks to become one of the game’s greatest players. At the time of his death, he was the career leader in master points, which are awarded to bridge players to rank their performance. He was crowned national champion 13 times.

He remains a recognizable name among elite bridge competitors. The person who wins the most master points in a year wins the Barry Crane Trophy, and the list of top players is known as the Barry Crane Top 500.

“By a wide margin the 57-year-old Crane played more tournament bridge, won more titles and collected more master points than anyone else,” The New York Times wrote in 1985 after his killing

[Cyberyeti]

Not a RIP yet, but one to watch. Apparently Sir Everton Weekes has had a heart attack and is in intensive care.

West Indies cricket legemd, international bridge player and a gentleman. One of the biggest thrills of my life was being kibitzed by him at a tournament when I was 12.

[Winstonm]

Arte Johnson

Very interesting. Und you didn't screw it up.

[y66]

From "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton:

Quote

You see, you spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.