On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Dr Mark Whittle, University of Virginia astronomy professor, has recreated sound of cosmos after Big Bang using computer models to generate cosmic chords and tweaking of data to human audible range; findings and soundtrack, which condenses first million years into five seconds, were presented at American Astronomical Society meeting; photo (M)
Microsoft Corp discloses it held talks to acquire German software maker SAP before it is presented in trial of antitrust case brought by Justice Department to contest Oracle Corp's hostile $7.7 billion bid for PeopleSoft; Microsoft is not litigant in antitrust case; its presence looms large in courtroom, especially its strategy in business software--$25-billion-a-year market for back-office programs that companies use to manage their finances, human resources, procurement, sales and customer relations; graph; chart (M)
Article on Azar Nafisi, Iranian author who has gained literary celebrity status in wake of startling commercial success of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, about life and literature under Iran's Islamic government; Nafisi, in interview, comments on pitfalls of playing fame game in US and her decision to appear in Audi ad; photos (M)
Bush administration gives South Korea detailed plan for withdrawing one-third of 37,000 US troops on Korean peninsula by end of 2005, as part of wider effort to reposition US forces around globe; removal of 12,500 troops would be first reduction since 1992 and would include previously announced transfer of brigade of about 3,600 soldiers to Iraq this summer; South Korean conservatives accuse Pres Roh Moo Hyun of allowing anti-American views to flourish, provoking US; photo; conservatives also say shift would surrender bargaining chip useful in nuclear arms talks with North Korea; Sec Donald Rumsfeld is reassessing strategies and new technologies worldwide
New York Giants new quarterbacks--veteran Kurt Warner and rookie Eli Manning--train at first minicamp together; photo (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of June 2, 2004, covering June 8, 2004.
Usher
Method Man
New Found Glory
Gretchen Wilson
Alanis Morissette
2004Francesca Capaldi, American actress[†]
Francesca Angelucci Capaldi is an American actress. She is best known for her roles as Chloe James in the Disney Channel sitcom Dog with a Blog (2012–15) and Nellie Chambers in the Brat web series Crown Lake (2019–20).
2004Charles Hyder, American astrophysicist and academic (born 1930)[†]
Charles Latif Hyder was an American astrophysicist and dissident from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who campaigned against arms race, nuclear weapons and nuclear waste, and ran for the U.S. presidency. Media coverage of his hunger strike by the Communist press and television was seen as a Cold War retaliation to Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet scientist whose protest in turn was rallied by the Western media but received little or no coverage in the Soviet Bloc. By the end of his strike Hyder achieved superstar status in the USSR and the allied socialist countries, his name became nearly symbolic behind the Iron Curtain, though he remained little known in the United States, and apart from his wartime tour of duty never traveled outside the U.S.
2004Mack Jones, American baseball player (born 1938)[†]
Mack Fletcher Jones, nicknamed "Mack The Knife", was an American Major League Baseball left fielder who played for the Milwaukee / Atlanta Braves (1961–1967), Cincinnati Reds (1968), and Montreal Expos (1969–1971). He batted left-handed, threw right-handed and was listed as 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m) tall and 180 pounds (82 kg).
2004The first Venus Transit in well over a century takes place, the previous one being in 1882.[†]
A transit of Venus was observed from Earth on 8 June 2004. The event received significant attention, since it was the first Venus transit after the invention of broadcast media. No human alive at the time had witnessed a previous Venus transit since that transit occurred on 6 December 1882 in the 19th century.
In 2004, the world population was approximately 6,503,377,772 people[†]