« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
It's the PhD thesis that boldly goes where no thesis has gone
before. Djoymi Baker watched 700 episodes - 624 hours without ads -
of Star Trek and its spin-offs, dating from 1966 to 2005,
in the name of research.
She analysed the series armed with an exhaustive knowledge of the characters and storylines of ancient mythology - from Homer's Odyssey down.
Famed Jazz Trumpeter Maynard Ferguson Dies at 78
Friday , August 25, 2006
VENTURA, Calif. — Jazz trumpeter , known for his soaring high notes and for his hit recording of "Gonna Fly Now," which lent the musical muscle to the "Rocky" movie franchise, has died. ... "Someone just said, 'Gabriel, move over to second trumpet,"' Schankman said from his St. Louis office. "He was the last of the greats. That era is closed. There is no Kenton, no Basie, no Ellington, and now, no Ferguson."
Born into a musical family in Montreal, Ferguson began playing the piano and violin at age 4, took up the trumpet at 9 and soloed with the Canadian Broadcasting Company Orchestra at 11, then quit school at 15 to pursue a career in music. The next year he was leading his own dance band, the first of a number of big bands and smaller ensembles he eventually fronted in a career that produced more than 60 albums and three Grammy nominations.
Ferguson, also a much admired teacher, became identified with ear-piercing power and dizzying high notes that he was still able to play with precision. He was named Down Beat magazine's "trumpeter of the year" three times. "My instrument is a thing of pleasure, and I play it only because I enjoy it," he once said. "The most important thing is doing what feels right for me."
The trumpeter — who stood just 5 feet 9 — credited yoga with enabling him to harness the full capacity of his lungs and routinely hit a double-high-C. "He will be remembered for his soaring high notes, he'll be remembered as Stan Kenton's lead trumpet player and he'll be remembered for movie soundtracks like `The Ten Commandments,"' Schankman said. "But what they should remember him for is his work as an educator. "He played for students, visiting high schools, to raise money for instruments and music programs. And he left them with an inspiring remark."
As with many esteemed jazz players, mainstream success largely eluded Ferguson. But he scored a Top-10 hit with his version of "Gonna Fly Now," and the single spawned a gold album and a Grammy nomination in 1978. "I knew it was going to be a hit," he once said of the Bill Conti composition. "Sylvester Stallone was in the studio when we recorded it," punching a speed bag to the rhythm of the song. "If you listen very close to the original recording, you can hear in the mix the sound of him hitting the small bag," Ferguson said.
Ferguson moved to the U.S. at age 20, playing in big bands — including Jimmy Dorsey's — and performing solo in New York City cafes. He then joined Stan Kenton's orchestra, where his shrieking, upper-register trumpet formed the backbone of the group's extensive brass section. In 1956 he formed the first of several 13-piece orchestras known for the crisp vigor of their horns. They helped launch the careers of such jazz notables as Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, Bob James, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul. As the popularity of jazz declined in the 1960s, Ferguson was forced to scale down his big band, touring less frequently and favoring a smaller sextet instead. He moved his family to India, where he absorbed Eastern music and philosophy, then to England. He later moved back to the U.S., settling in California.
But he returned almost yearly to India. "I go to teach, but I always end up learning more," he said. In the late `60s and `70s, he created a musical niche by rearranging pop and rock songs — "MacArthur Park" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," for example — for big bands. Meanwhile, "Conquistador," the album that included "Gonna Fly Now," reached No. 22 on Billboard's charts and helped rekindle the public's interest in big bands.
Born in Montreal on May 4, 1928, Ferguson said his most important musical influences were Louis Armstrong and his mother, a violinist with the Ottawa Symphony and later a school administrator. He remembered being about 9 when he fell in love with the horn. "I went to a church in Montreal, sort of like a Sunday school get-together," and had a chance to put a cornet to his lips, he told the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times in 2003. "It was my first time playing the instrument," Ferguson said. "My parents were really surprised when I said, `I have got to get me one of these.' "I remember having the feeling after I played it that the trumpet was the instrument for me." Schankman said a memorial service will be held later in St. Louis.
Grigory Perelman, the Russian who seems to have solved one of the hardest problems in mathematics, has declined one of the top prizes in maths. The Fields Medals are among the most important prizes for mathematics, and Perelman was to have picked up the award at a ceremony in Madrid. However, the organisers told the BBC that Perelman had declined the prize.
My first programmable calculator was the TI-58. It had neither constant memory (like the TI-58C) nor a card reader (like the TI-59), and so user programs had to be reentered each the time the device was turned off and on. The following description of the TI-59 is from the site :
"The TI-59 was the first "real" programmable calculator in the world - you could actually use it to perform some useful work, like solving the system of linear equation, finding the zero of a function or even playing a Hi-Lo game... or the game of chess. Fantastic 960 program steps (nearly 1 kilobyte of RAM), 100 data registers, a variety of built-in functions... it was a dream machine, a personal computer you could afford during the late 1970s. The TI-59 even had peripherals - magnetic cards to save programs, a variety of solid-state ROM modules containing up to 5000 program steps of (mostly engineering) software and a PC100C printer.
In the old days, amateur programming was "the way to do things", so hundreds of TI-59 owners spent countless hours uncovering TI-59 secrets and writing miraculously optimized programs - saving a single program step (one byte) sometimes took an hour of work. TI-59 programs were distributed via numerous user clubs, and there was a number of TI-59 related publications.
Although hardly anybody actually uses the TI-59 nowadays, accomplishments of TI-59 programmers deserve to be remembered. is dedicated to the good old days when people thought that each byte of program memory was important and when computers were truly personal."
