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Showing posts with label north carolina state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label north carolina state. Show all posts
It instantly became one of the most classic moments in sports history.
Coach Jim Valvano's North Carolina State - a scrappy team that had fought tooth and claw in defiance of all the odds - against University of Houston for the 1983 NCAA Basketball Championship. Houston: the team of "Phi Slamma Jamma". Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. No wonder one sports writer said that "Trees will tap dance, elephants will race in the Indianapolis 500 and Orson Welles will skip dinner" before Jimmy V's Wolfpack would beat the Cougars.
But we all know what happened. With seconds left in the game and the scored tied at 52, State's Dereck Whittenburg made a desperate launch of the ball. Lorenzo Charles was right at the basket, caught the ball and dunked it hard!
North Carolina State had done it! And in those wild seconds after the buzzer, Coach Valvano - overwhelmed with elation and disbelief - ran onto the floor looking for somebody, for anybody, to give a hug to.
It's moments like these that are the stuff of legends.
Jimmy V passed away ten years later in 1993, nearly a year after being diagnosed with bone cancer.
And yesterday afternoon, as '83 team member Thurl Bailey put it, the coach "finally found somebody to hug."
Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University.
Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”
Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch.” That’s pages in terms of books, by the way, so how much is this in terms of bits and bytes?
Speaking to Thinq, Dr Narayan explained that "one terabit can store 250 million pages." According to Dr Narayan, "at 10nm per bit, 1cm square stores one terabit." As such, the billion pages would be made up of four square centimetres of silicon, providing four terabits of storage. That's basically 512GB in just one small chip, and you could squeeze in much more data than that if the dots had a diameter of just 6nm.
If this new method overcomes the problems with limited reading/writing that current solid state storage has, in addition to that gads of space... well, that would pretty much be the last hard drive or iPod or whatever that you would ever need (and maybe even want :-)
In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.
The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.
Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.
Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes they've discovered can also be applied to fuel economy, reduction of heat in semiconductors and engine design.
I'm already giddy about the thought of one of those chips in an iPod...
"Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Wells will skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner before State finds a way to beat Houston."
-- Dave Kindred writer for The Washington Post April 4th, 1983
It became, and remains to this day, the defining sports moment of the modern era.
It was twenty-five years ago tonight, on April 4th, 1983, that North Carolina State won the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship, in what has become regarded by many as the single greatest basketball game ever played and one of the biggest upsets in the history of athletics.
It also produced some of the most memorable sports images to be ever televised or photographed.
What can be said about that game that hasn't already over a quarter-century? Nobody was expecting the Wolfpack of NC State to take down Houston. Guy Lewis's Cougars - dubbed "Phi Slamma Jamma" - boasted Hakeem Olajuwon and Clive Drexler. The entire team was already playing like NBA pros. They were ranked #1 in the nation. And after crushing Louisville in the semifinals of the 1983 NCAA Tournament, the Houston team was practically being laureled by most sports reporters as national champions even before tipoff. Writers like Kindred of The Washington Post were stepping all over themselves trying to describe the inevitability of Houston taking it all.
But nobody cared to tell any of this to a scrappy team from Raleigh, North Carolina that had been nicknamed the "Cardiac Pack". Nor did it seem that anybody thought to pass the word along to a cetain Italian kid from Queens.
Long before the start of the 1982-83 basketball season, North Carolina State's head coach Jim Valvano was telling his players that they possessed a lot of talent, and that they had the potential to bring home a national championship. Valvano believed it. The team believed it too. In spite of a rough regular season, the Wolfpack persisted and won the 1983 Atlantic Coast Conference championship.
And then NC State went to the Big Dance. The Wolfpack kept winning. Against Pepperdine, UNLV and Virginia the 'Pack achieved victory only within the last minute of each game after trailing for most of the time. And it wasn't long before everyone started to stand up and take notice of NC State and its sensational coach...
So it was that events converged on a showdown in Albuquerque, New Mexico - appropriately enough at The Pit, legendary for its hostile design - on the night of April 4th. Jim Valvano's North Carolina State versus Guy Lewis's Houston. Cardiac Pack against Phi Slamma Jamma. Irresistible Force meets Immovable Object.
The whole world was watching. Including a certain young boy in north-central North Carolina, who had been cheering for State since he could remember and was tuned-in to the game on WFMY along with his family. And truth be known, as much as we have always been faithful NC State fans, we were wondering how they could pull this off, too.
Most of y'all know how this went, and if you don't or if you need a refresher tonight ESPN Classic is running a half-hour special about the 1983 NCAA Championship game. In the final minute Derek Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe brought State within sight of victory by bringing the score to a 52-52 tie (after gaining a comfortable lead at halftime only to watch Houston sap away at the margin). State's Thurl Bailey passed the ball to Whittenburg, who with seconds left in the game threw what became the most televised air ball in history.
The ball was short, and that would have been the end of it for State. Except that sophomore Lorenzo Charles swooped down from seemingly out of nowhere and slammed a dunk with two seconds left before the buzzer.
The final score: North Carolina State 54, Houston 52.
The Pit went wild with pandemonium! To say nothing of what was going on in countless homes and restaurants across the country. Millions of people had watched the impossible: Phi Slamma Jamma had been defeated at its own game.
And Jim Valvano could not control himself: he leaped from his seat and began a frantic rush up and down the court, looking for somebody, anybody, to give a hug to. It has became the most iconic moment in the history of college basketball, and one of the most famous ever in sports.
Here it is, courtesy of YouTube: the final glorious moments of the 1983 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship game... and the first wild moments in the birth of a tradition that would come to be known as "March Madness":
It's hard to believe that it was twenty-five years ago today that all of this happened...
And it's even harder to believe that this month marks fifteen years since Jim Valvano was taken from us at the all-too-young age of 47, after a year-long battle with bone cancer.
Jim Valvano was one of my all-time personal heroes, for more reasons than I can possibly relate in this space. And it's one of the greater regrets of my life that I never got to meet him. Valvano was always larger-than-life and after the Wolfpack won the championship in 1983 he became an inescapable presence. He went on David Letterman's show and even appeared along with friend Dick Vitale in one of the final episodes of The Cosby Show (Valvano was one of the "V and V Movers" in the episode where Cliff is trying to move a grandfather clock). After his time at NC State, Valvano also became a well-respected commentator for ABC Sports and ESPN.
But in spite of all of his new-found fame and the thrill of victory, Valvano never lost sight of the things that mattered most. And his animated personality never diminished, even after receiving the prognosis in 1992: "Hey doc, you forgot to use the flash", Valvano joked the moment he saw the cancerous dark tissue on his x-ray.
It was a humor that Valvano maintained during the length of his battle. During his speech at the 1993 ESPY Awards, he dismissed a teleprompter's notifying him that he had 30 seconds left to wrap things up. "They got that screen up there flashing 30 seconds, like I care about that screen," Valvano said on live televison. "I got tumors all over my body and I'm worried about some guy in the back going 30 seconds?"
The day he passed away, a lot of people cried. Including me. And I've always wanted to go pay my respects to the man and all the good things that he stood for.
So since this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest moment of his career, yesterday afternoon I set out for Raleigh...
On a good day, it's about an hour and a half's driving time between Reidsville and Raleigh. I like going there, but given how gas prices have been soaring lately it's become harder to justify going out that far. But this is something that I'd made the choice many months ago to do, and as it happened I had some free time yesterday to make a short day trip for this.
I left Reidsville at 12:30 yesterday afternoon. For early spring it has been unusually cool this past week, and I had to wear a long-sleeve shirt and jacket. My route had me getting onto Interstate 40 in Burlington, then heading east toward Raleigh. I stopped at the new Lowes Foods in Burlington (the one near the new shopping center with the Target and Best Buy) and found just what the occasion required: a single red rose, adored with lilies. The girl at the register said that my wife was "going to love this!" I had to tell her that "actually it's going on a gravesite", and I shared with her what I was doing.
"You're driving all the way from Reidsville, as high as gas is? That's sweet!" she told me.
I got onto I-40 just after leaving Lowes Foods. And according to the directions I pulled off the Internet, it would be another fifty miles before I left the interstate. But it turned out that the directions were off a bit, and I ended up bewildered somewhere in Cary (I think it was Cary...). I stopped at a gas station and asked for directions toward Glenwood Avenue, and the guy told me to take a right and keep going and "it's only two miles away."
I never found Glenwood Avenue. But I can't help but think now that maybe it was providential, because I wound up driving through the campus of North Carolina State University. After going through downtown Raleigh on New Bern Street, I stopped at a pharmacy and asked if anyone knew where Oakwood Avenue was.
"Go back down New Bern, take a right onto Raleigh Boulevard, and then a left right there at Oakwood. You can't miss it," a woman told me. She also asked "Are you looking for anything in particular?"
"A cemetery," I told her.
"Okay well you'll definitely see that," she replied.
Finally, at around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, I arrived at Oakwood Cemetery...
Founded in 1869, with a large amount of acreage devoted to thousands of Confederate veterans who are buried there, Oakwood is easily one of the most magnificent and beautiful cemeteries that I have seen in this part of the country. It is also wonderfully maintained, and the staff there was glad to help me find the spot I was looking for. "Jim Valvano is buried up there. Take a left and look for a large black marble marker," one of the groundskeepers told me.
It had already started to rain by the time I approached Raleigh. It had begun to fall even harder. The rain was washing the pollen out of the air and from the surfaces, leaving a sickly yellow residue to drain away. By this time the thermometer in my car was registering an outside temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And finally, in the Cedar Hill Section of the cemetery, there it was...
The groundskeeper wasn't kidding: Jim Valvano's grave is positively big. But it's not necessarily ostentatious. One of the things that I thought when I saw it for the first time was that even his grave marker, in its own way, spoke volumes about the man that it served to honor.
I took those photos from one of the little roads that criss-cross the cemetery. By the way, if you ever visit Oakwood please be very careful and alert, because the driveways within the cemetery barely accommodate one vehicle, much less two at a time. And the only entrance to the place is large enough for one car at a time, period. So as you approach the entrance on Oakwood Avenue, be aware of any cars trying to leave the cemetery too.
Along with the rose that I'd bought on the way, I had something else that I wanted to leave at Valvano's grave...
It's, I guess it's called a "graveside note": something that I created in Photoshop yesterday morning. At the top of it is a color photo of Valvano surrounded by his players, taken moments after North Carolina State won the national championship in 1983. And then there was something that I wrote that was inspired by Valvano's words at the ESPY Awards, and which are also engraved on his tombstone:
Dear Coach V, You made us laugh. You made us think. You made us cry.
And you made us proud.
On the 25th anniversary of your greatest victory, from all of us who will remember that night for the rest of our lives ...
Thank you.
I then placed the note and the rose on Valvano's grave...
The rain was falling harder by then. I finished up with my personal honoring of Valvano's memory, and then started to leave. Here's one last picture I took...
And then I said my goodbye to "Coach V" and left. I felt immensely satisfied that I was finally able to do this, and honor the memory of the man who inspired so many with both his witty humor and profound wisdom.
I know of no better way to wrap this up, than to post the video of Jim Valvano's speech at the 1993 ESPY Awards, along with perhaps the most famous words he gave from the podium that night...
"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."
Tomorrow night ABC will premiere Masters of Science Fiction, an anthology show featuring film adaptations of... well, science fiction stories! The show is being narrated by Stephen Hawking, which alone should say something about how classy this project is. And then there is the acting talent the producers have brought onboard: Malcolm McDowell, Terry O'Quinn (who also plays Locke on ABC's show Lost), and Brian Dennehy are just some of the faces that we'll be seeing during the show's initial four-episode run.
The first installment has a lot of local interest because it originated with a professor at North Carolina State University. John Kessel's short story "A Clean Escape" will star Sam Waterston and Judy Davis in a post-Apocalyptic tale of the near future about a psychiatrist who's trying to help a man with curious lapses in memory.
There's a very disturbing piece in the News & Observer by Holly Brewer, associate professor of early American history at North Carolina State University. I had no idea this was happening in North Carolina schools, until I read her article. According to Dr. Brewer, North Carolina public schools are no longer giving high school students even a basic education in American history prior to the Revolution...
RALEIGH - While few of us have noticed, the state Department of Public Instruction has gutted history education in North Carolina. As a result of a decision taken largely without public input or comment, high school students no longer learn about Colonial and Revolutionary American history unless they take Advanced Placement classes. Required U.S. history in high school now begins with George Washington's presidency and ends with that of George W. Bush. It is crammed into one semester (on block scheduling) instead of two.
At a moment when the nature of basic American rights has once again become a crucial issue in politics, our students -- our citizens and future voters -- now learn nearly nothing about the principles over which the Revolution was fought, except during one day in their 10th grade civics and economics class. The Constitution, inasmuch as students consult it in that class, becomes an empty document, a list to be memorized without context or meaning. It, too, is hurried over, in a course that focuses on other material.
Four years ago, I taught a refresher course for history teachers, who warned me that these curricular changes were about to happen. But I didn't believe them. In this state that was an original colony, I couldn't believe that our schools would virtually cease to teach the first half of American history.
I now learn from those teachers that these changes have in fact reduced instruction in early American history -- including the Revolution -- to virtually nothing.
LEAVING OUT NEARLY TWO CENTURIES OF AMERICAN HISTORY, and especially the Revolution and Constitution, is simply unconscionable. History provides a grounding in the basics of citizenship through the tangible experiences and decisions of historical actors, whether John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley or the ladies who participated in the Edenton tea party. Only by understanding that Jefferson was raised in a Church of England that put the king at its head, for example, can we understand why he so vigorously advocated the separation of church and state.
Our students need to learn where the principles of democracy come from and why they matter. They need to learn about the struggles of early settlement, about cultural conflict on the frontier, about the religious intolerance and conflicts over basic rights that motivated people to support the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.
America's colonial and revolutionary past explains why we have developed rules against torture and arbitrary imprisonment. That history explains how slavery was allowed to develop in the first place and why people began to believe that slavery was wrong. It explains how we came up with principles of religious toleration. It explains how to avoid unnecessary wars, and how difficult it is for empires to win military conflicts against anti-colonial insurgencies. It shows how we have changed as a people and a nation.
As the 1988 report of the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools stated: History "provides the only avenue we have to reach an understanding of ourselves and of our society."
The problem with history instruction, moreover, goes deeper than the recent change in high school standards. The focus on basic reading, writing and math skills in elementary school -- partly a product of No Child Left Behind -- has minimized history instruction in earlier grades as well. Yet history is at the core of what students should be learning because it provides them with so much useful advice and perspective on their own lives. ...
Color me paranoid, but for a very long time now - since even before I studied for awhile at Elon to be a teacher, even - I haven't been able to escape the sense that there's been a deliberate "dumbing-down" of the American people, beginning with their time in school. This essay by Dr. Brewer doesn't just reinforce that belief, it downright confirms it.
How can we be a free people if we have no understanding about the process that gave us that freedom... or if we have no concept of what constitutes actual freedom, at all?
Click on the links above for a sobering must-read for anyone interested in public education in North Carolina.
I'm just now finding out about this! I can't believe that I missed this game! AAAARRGGGHHHH...
Speaking of N.C. State, tomorrow is March 10th. That's my Dad's birthday. March 10th is also the birthday of Jim Valvano. He would have been 61 tomorrow. Can't believe it's been almost fourteen years already since he was taken from us. I can't tell you how many people I saw crying the day he died.
Goodness gracious: has it really been almost a quarter-century since that night in Albuquerque?
Valvano was one of my heroes. And he still is. This excerpt from his speech at the ESPY Awards - just two short months before he died - shows some of why that is...
"When people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it's the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."
And because this seems to be as good a time as any, here's something I found just the other day...
But lest we forget:
"Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Welles will skip breakfast, lunch and dinner before State finds a way to beat Houston."
-- Dave Kindred in The Washington Post on Monday, April 3rd, 1983
