11/25/2011

Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos


November 18, 2011

Scientists Report Second Sighting of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos




Few scientists are betting against Einstein yet, but the phantom neutrinos of Opera are still eluding explanation.
Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists, known as Opera, said on Friday that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated one possible explanation for how the experiment could have gone wrong.
But the group admitted that many questions remain. “This is not the end of the story,” said Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland, the spokesman for the collaboration, explaining that physicists would not accept the result that neutrinos could go faster than light until other experiments had come up with the same conclusion. “We are convinced, but that is not enough in science,” he said.
Other physicists said they remained skeptical that the universe was about to be overturned.
The speed of light was established as the cosmic speed limit, at least for ordinary matter in ordinary space, in 1905 by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (now known as special relativity), foreclosing the possibility of time travel into the past or of timely travel to other stars.
Neutrinos, though ghostly in many regards — they are able to traverse planets and walls of lead like light through a window, and to shape-shift from one of three varieties of the particle to another along the way — are part of the universe, and so there was no reason to expect that Einstein’s stricture should not apply to them as well.
But over the course of the last three years, in experiments designed to investigate this shape shifting, neutrinos produced at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and beamed underground to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, an underground facility about 450 miles away, arrived about 58 billionths of a second sooner than would a light beam, according to Opera. The group is based at Gran Sasso, which is near L’Aquila; CERN is in Geneva.
When these results were presented to a meeting at CERN in September, after a prairie fire of blog rumors, they were greeted by fierce skepticism. Among the problems with the original experiment, scientists said, was that the neutrinos were produced in bursts 10,000 billionths of a second long — much bigger than the discrepancy in arrival time.
Last month CERN retooled so that the neutrinos could be produced in shorter bursts, only 3 billionths of a second long, making it easier to match neutrinos at Gran Sasso with neutrinos at CERN, and the experiment was briefly repeated. The neutrinos still arrived early, about 62 billionths of a second early, in good agreement with the original result and negating the possibility, the Opera team said, that the duration of the neutrino pulse had anything to do with the results.
The details of both the first and second round of experiments are contained in a paper posted on the Internet at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics. In response to reports that some members of the Opera group had refused to sign a preliminary version of the paper in September, Dr. Ereditato said of the new paper, “They all signed.”
Physicists said the new paper had answered some of the questions about the experiment, but many remain: for example, about how the clocks were synchronized between Geneva and Gran Sasso, and how the distance between them was ascertained. “It does appear that they have done a good job,” said John Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was not involved in the experiment. But, he added, “If there is a deep systematic error in the calculation of expected time difference, this remains.”
Alvaro de Rujula, a CERN theorist, said there were two interpretations of the experiment. “One is that they have stumbled upon a revolutionary discovery; the other, on which I would place my bet, is that they are still making and not finding the very same error.”
In the meantime, Einstein sleeps peacefully.
Asked if he had seen any interesting theoretical explanations of how neutrinos could violate the speed of light among the papers that have been flooding the internet these past two months, Dr. Ereditato demurred. “That’s not our business,” he said. “A good experimentalist tries to be as cool as possible.”
Dr. Learned and Dr. de Rujula both said there were no convincing theories out there yet. “The theory papers are amusing in that it more and more points out how very much trouble this result will cause, if verified,” Dr. Learned said in an e-mail.
He added, “Fun!”


Source: NYT Space & Cosmos

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" is a song written by Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter, which was first heard in the movie New Orleans in 1947, where it was performed by Louis Armstrong and sung by Billie Holiday.






11/24/2011

Spam report: October 2011


Spam report: October 2011

Transatlantic - My New World Live pt 2

Transatlantic is a progressive rock supergroup consisting of Roine Stolt of The Flower Kings, Pete Trewavas of Marillion, Mike Portnoy formerly of Dream Theater and Neal Morse formerly of Spock's Beard. They formed in 1999 as a side project to their full time bands until 2002. They have reunited in 2009.

Transatlantic Official Site


Transatlantic - My New World Live pt 1

Transatlantic is a progressive rock supergroup consisting of Roine Stolt of The Flower Kings, Pete Trewavas of Marillion, Mike Portnoy formerly of Dream Theater and Neal Morse formerly of Spock's Beard. They formed in 1999 as a side project to their full time bands until 2002. They have reunited in 2009.

Transatlantic Official Site

11/22/2011

Boost in IPv6 use is only one step to solution



Boost in IPv6 use is only one step to solution
Fueled by GoDaddy, IPv6 support soared 1,900 percent in 12 months by one measure
Stephen Lawson



November 21, 2011 (IDG News Service)

Support for IPv6 has grown by almost 20 times in the past year by one measure, but most websites still can't be reached without IPv4, the current Internet Protocol, which is near running out of unclaimed addresses.

The number of subdomains under .com, .net and .org that support Internet Protocol version 6 increased by about 1,900 percent in the year leading up to October 2011, according to an automated sampling of subdomains by Measurement Factory. The study, which was sponsored by IPv6 software specialist InfoBlox, used a script to automatically sample 1 percent of the subdomains under the three well-known top-level domains.

IPv4 only allows for about 4 billion addresses, whereas IPv6 has a nearly unlimited supply. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the global governing body for the Internet, assigned the last of the unclaimed IPv4 addresses to regional registry bodies earlier this year. Some enterprises and service providers are making a gradual transition to IPv6 using dual software stacks, but experts expect users eventually to come to the Internet without IPv4 addresses. They will need pure IPv6 communication, which most operators of websites can't offer today.

Last month, 25.4 percent of subdomains under .com, .net and .org supported IPv6, up from just 1.27 percent a year earlier. However, the long-awaited IPv6 future may not be as close as it sounds from that statistic.

All the figure means is that a DNS (Domain Name System) server can point to those subdomains using IPv6. If a user with an IPv6-only device tries to go to a website, for example, the site's registrar can match up its URL with an IPv6 address and kick back an answer to the Web surfer, said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at InfoBlox.

Most of the dramatic boost in the past year came when GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars, made its DNS work with IPv6. GoDaddy claims its DNS service has more than 30 million customers. Had it not been for GoDaddy, the number of subdomains supported would have grown by a bit more than double, to about 3 percent, according to Measurement Factory.

But for now, most of those DNS requests wouldn't take an IPv6-only user to an actual Web page, because less than 1 percent of all subdomains surveyed had IPv6-enabled Web servers, according to the Measurement Factory study. Likewise, there were very few IPv6 email servers. Just over 2 percent of zones were served by IPv6-compatible mail servers.

The good news is that many more operators of websites, such as GoDaddy's customers, now can serve IPv6 visitors once they have an IPv6-compliant Web server, Liu said. Along with GoDaddy, Measurement Factory cited three other major registrars, Gandi and OVH in France and Active24 in the Czech Republic, that adopted IPv6 during the period.

GoDaddy has said it plans to extend its IPv6 strategy soon by supporting the new protocol on its website hosting service. Then, companies that rely on GoDaddy instead of operating their own Web servers will be able to run an IPv6 site.

The study found France leading in IPv6 adoption, with 57 percent of subdomains in France reachable by IPv6, followed by the U.S. with 42 percent and Czech Republic with 36 percent. But its scope was limited by examining only .com, .net and .org. For one thing, that left out subdomains that are under country-level domains in Asia, where a more severe shortage of IPv4 addresses has led to strong government efforts behind IPv6 in some countries.

The sample also overlooked other top-level domains where IPv6 has been more widely adopted, such as the .gov domain of the U.S. government and the .edu domain used by universities, said Nav Chander, an Internet infrastructure analyst at IDC. However, the move to pure IPv6 networking remains slow, Chander said. "There's still very little IPv6 usage," he said.

Source: Computerworld

11/16/2011

Fool's Overture (Roger Hodgson - Supertramp) Live


"Fool's Overture" is the closing track from Supertramp's 1977 album Even in the Quietest Moments. Written and sung by guitarist, keyboard player, singer and songwriter Roger Hodgson, the song tells about World War II Britain and the lessons learned from it. The song, which is over 10 minutes long, is a collage of progressive instrumentation and sound samples. First there are excerpts of Winston Churchill's famous June 4, 1940 House of Commons speech regarding Britain's involvement in World War II ("Never Surrender"), and later sounds of police cars and church bells are heard. The flageolet-sounding instrument plays an excerpt from Gustav Holst's "Venus", from his orchestral suite The Planets. There is also a reading of the first verse of William Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time" (more commonly known as "Jerusalem"), ended by a very short sample of the band's song "Dreamer".
Its writing credits are given to Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, although it is a Hodgson composition.[1] Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles, Hodgson and Davies joined writer's credits from 1974 until 1983, when Hodgson left Supertramp to pursue a solo career.


Summertime Blues

"Summertime Blues" is the title of a song co-written and recorded by American rockabilly artist Eddie Cochran. It was written in the late 1950s by Cochran and his manager Jerry Capehart. Originally a single B-side, it was released in August 1958[1] and peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 29, 1958 and number 18 on the UK Singles Chart.




With a Little Help from My Friends

"With a Little Help from My Friends" (originally titled "A Little Help from My Friends") is a song written by Paul McCartney, with input from John Lennon, released on The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. The song was written for and sung by The Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr as the character "Billy Shears"; it is ranked #304 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.



11/12/2011

My Baby Left Me

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (August 24, 1905 – March 28, 1974) was a Delta blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He wrote songs such as "That's All Right" (1946), "My Baby Left Me" and "So Glad You're Mine", later covered by Elvis Presley and dozens of other artists. here we can see the original version by Arthur, Elvis version as well as Raul´s version. After Elvis Presley recorded three Crudup songs in the 1950s, Crudup became known as “The Father of Rock 'n' Roll.” Despite the commercial success of his songs, Crudup was never fairly paid for the music he composed and recorded, and had to work as a laborer or bus driver to support his family.









11/11/2011

Roy Buchanan - Down By The River (LIVE) ALBUM VERSION

Let's celebrate our 400th post in Fiel do Rock with the genious Roy Buchanan. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound.
Roy Buchanan (September 23, 1939 - August 14, 1988) was an American guitarist and blues musician. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan was a sideman and solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career, and two later solo albums charting on the Billboard chart. Despite never having achieved stardom, he is still considered a highly influential guitar player.Ranked #57 on the Rolling Stone list "100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time," Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of all Time."

Roy Buchanan - Sweet Dreams

Roy Buchanan (September 23, 1939 - August 14, 1988) was an American guitarist and blues musician. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan was a sideman and solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career, and two later solo albums charting on the Billboard chart. Despite never having achieved stardom, he is still considered a highly influential guitar player.Ranked #57 on the Rolling Stone list "100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time," Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of all Time."

Roy Buchanan - The Messiah Will Come Again

Roy Buchanan (September 23, 1939 - August 14, 1988) was an American guitarist and blues musician. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan was a sideman and solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career, and two later solo albums charting on the Billboard chart. Despite never having achieved stardom, he is still considered a highly influential guitar player.Ranked #57 on the Rolling Stone list "100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time," Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of all Time."

Roy Buchanan - Hey Joe

Roy Buchanan (September 23, 1939 - August 14, 1988) was an American guitarist and blues musician. A pioneer of the Telecaster sound, Buchanan was a sideman and solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career, and two later solo albums charting on the Billboard chart. Despite never having achieved stardom, he is still considered a highly influential guitar player.Ranked #57 on the Rolling Stone list "100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time," Guitar Player praised him as having one of the "50 Greatest Tones of all Time."

Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Buchanan-Great Balls of Fire (Live)

Have fun with Jerry and Roy together! Wow...That's simply awesome!

Jerry Lee Lewis,Roy Buchanan-Whole Lotta Shakin Going On (Live)

Have fun with Jerry and Roy together! Wow...That's simply awesome!

Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Buchanan-Shake,Rattle and Roll (Live)

Have fun with Jerry and Roy together! Wow...That's simply awesome!

11/10/2011

World's Fastest Computer Gets an Upgrade, Breaks Its Own Record

By James MulroyPCWorld    Nov 7, 2011 11:05 PM


The world's fastest computer, the "K" supercomputer by Fujitsu and RIKEN, will keep its title as by breaking its own speed record. How much number-crunching power are we talking about? It completely smashes the processing power of the world's second- through eight-fastest supercomputers combined, coming in at an astounding 10.51 petaflops. That thoroughly crushes the old record of 8.162 petaflops.
Fujitsu--an information technology company--and RIKEN--a large research institute in Japan--upgraded their K supercomputer with an additional 19,584 CPUs, allowing it to break its own world speed record in the number of calculations the computer can perform per second. The new record is an astounding 10.51 quadrillion calculations per second.
According to Fujitsu the letter "K," the name of the computer, "comes from the Japanese Kanji letter 'Kei' which means ten peta or 10 to the 16th power", or quadrillions of calculations per second. A "FLOP" is the number of floating-point operations per second; in layman's terms, it's the number of instructions the computer can process in a single second. Now that K reached10 petaflops, it holds true to its name.
The supercomputer became the world's fastest back in June 2011, replacing the Tianhe-1A at theNational Supercomputing Center in Tianjin which comes in at a mere 2.51 petaflops. The K supercomputer uses 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs across 864 computing racks. In June, it only (relatviely speaking) had 68,544 CPUs across 672 computing racks.




11/07/2011

Cloud Computing - A Business View


So, at the end of the day: What’s Cloud Computing? If we “google" Cloud Computing, we will find several flavors and standpoints about same thing. But I have been noticed all of them are too technical. And I tightly believe the late for a mass adoption of Cloud in the companies is exactly the lack of a Cloud´s Business definition that would help companies’ owners, managers and CFOs to fund and manage migration. Hereafter we present you three definitions (a government standards institute, a big cloud player and an IT research and advisory company) that shall to help us rather than understand clouds, make it more business-friendly and further take advantage of it in our business.
According NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of:
·         Five essential characteristics: On-demand self-service, Broad network access, Resource  pooling, Rapid elasticity and Measured service;
·         Three service models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS);
·         Four deployment models: Private cloud, Community cloud, Public cloud and Hybrid cloud.
Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.
For IBM cloud computing is a new model of consuming and delivering IT and business services. It enables users to get what they need, as they need it—from advanced analytics and business applications to IT infrastructure and platform services, including virtual servers and storage.
That means money. Everything exposed above means save money. And nowadays saving money and cutting costs is the top priority for any business on any market sector. And that’s not only for large or global enterprises. The cloud computing benefits will be more perceived and most quickly by SMB companies. I tightly believe the more small a company is the more benefits it can take from Cloud Computing.
You’re an entrepreneur and want to start a new business. You probably have to create a website to show and sell your products or services. Or even have to develop new software to support your business demand. You’re just getting start and maybe do not have much money to invest. So, what can you do? How Cloud Computing could help you?
Imagine a world where you can host your website and have all infra structure necessary to run it in a place where you simply don’t know and for sure don’t mind for you. Because, what you need to know is your website infrastructure will be there to be used and consumed as you need. Your concerns can be narrowed and your efforts can be focused in your core business and does not matter what the cloud is doing to support your sells. You no longer need a room or IT team engaged to support your services.
As well as if you need new software or maybe escalate capacity to receive incoming requests from clients or even make your site available to receive tens of millions of simultaneous access and be able to close deals during a seasonable period.
You can get and order all these services when you can and when you want by using Cloud Computing services.

Office tools, project management tracking tools, servers, storage, software applications for any sort of business and whatever you need from IT to support your business you can find in the Cloud.
And the worth here is you will have a SLA to guarantee services and you are paying for a service tailored for your business needs.

IT Professional


11/06/2011

Robert Johnson- Crossroad


Source: Robert Johnson Blues Foundation

One hundred years ago, a boy-child was born in Mississippi – a dirt-poor, African-American who would grow up, learn to sing and play the blues, and eventually achieve worldwide renown. In the decades after his death, he has become known as the King of the Delta Blues Singers, his music expanding in influence to the point that rock stars of the greatest magnitude – the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers – all sing his praise and have recorded his songs.
That boy-child was Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist who lived from 1911 to 1938. He recorded 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37 for the American Record Corporation, which released eleven 78rpm records on their Vocalion label during Johnson¹s lifetime, and one after his death.
Most of these tunes have attained canonical status, and are now considered enduring anthems of the genre: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “Hellhound On My Trail,” “I Believe I¹ll Dust My Broom,” “Walking Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Like many bluesmen of his day, Johnson plied his craft on street corners and in jook joints, ever rambling and ever lonely – and writing songs that romanticized that existence. But Johnson accomplished this with such an unprecedented intensity, marrying his starkly expressive vocals with a guitar mastery, that his music has endured long after the heyday of country blues and his own short life.
Never had the hardships of the world been transformed into such a poetic height; never had the blues plumbed such an emotional depth. Johnson took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression, and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once asked, answering his own question: “Well, this is it.” Eric Clapton put it more plainly: “I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson.”
The power of Johnson’s music has been amplified over the years by the fact that so little about him is known and what little biographical information we now have only revealed itself at an almost glacial pace. Myths surrounding his life took over: that he was a country boy turned ladies’ man; that he only achieved his uncanny musical mastery after selling his soul to the devil. Even the tragedy of his death seemed to grow to mythic proportion: being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend then taking three days to expire, even as the legendary talent scout John Hammond was searching him out to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In 1990, Sony Legacy produced and released the 2-CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings to widespread critical acclaim and, for a country blues reissue, unprecedented sales. The Complete Recordings proved the existence of a potential market for music from the deepest reaches of Sony¹s catalog, especially if buoyed by a strong story with mainstream appeal. Johnson¹s legend continues to attract an ever-widening audience, with no sign of abating. If, in today¹s world of hip-hop and heavy metal, a person knows of only one country blues artist, odds are it is Robert Johnson.



Robert Johnson - Sweet Home Chicago (1936)

Source: Robert Johnson Blues Foundation

One hundred years ago, a boy-child was born in Mississippi – a dirt-poor, African-American who would grow up, learn to sing and play the blues, and eventually achieve worldwide renown. In the decades after his death, he has become known as the King of the Delta Blues Singers, his music expanding in influence to the point that rock stars of the greatest magnitude – the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers – all sing his praise and have recorded his songs.
That boy-child was Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist who lived from 1911 to 1938. He recorded 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37 for the American Record Corporation, which released eleven 78rpm records on their Vocalion label during Johnson¹s lifetime, and one after his death.
Most of these tunes have attained canonical status, and are now considered enduring anthems of the genre: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “Hellhound On My Trail,” “I Believe I¹ll Dust My Broom,” “Walking Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Like many bluesmen of his day, Johnson plied his craft on street corners and in jook joints, ever rambling and ever lonely – and writing songs that romanticized that existence. But Johnson accomplished this with such an unprecedented intensity, marrying his starkly expressive vocals with a guitar mastery, that his music has endured long after the heyday of country blues and his own short life.
Never had the hardships of the world been transformed into such a poetic height; never had the blues plumbed such an emotional depth. Johnson took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression, and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once asked, answering his own question: “Well, this is it.” Eric Clapton put it more plainly: “I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson.”
The power of Johnson’s music has been amplified over the years by the fact that so little about him is known and what little biographical information we now have only revealed itself at an almost glacial pace. Myths surrounding his life took over: that he was a country boy turned ladies’ man; that he only achieved his uncanny musical mastery after selling his soul to the devil. Even the tragedy of his death seemed to grow to mythic proportion: being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend then taking three days to expire, even as the legendary talent scout John Hammond was searching him out to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In 1990, Sony Legacy produced and released the 2-CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings to widespread critical acclaim and, for a country blues reissue, unprecedented sales. The Complete Recordings proved the existence of a potential market for music from the deepest reaches of Sony¹s catalog, especially if buoyed by a strong story with mainstream appeal. Johnson¹s legend continues to attract an ever-widening audience, with no sign of abating. If, in today¹s world of hip-hop and heavy metal, a person knows of only one country blues artist, odds are it is Robert Johnson.



Robert Johnson - Love In Vain Blues (Takes 1&2) (1937)

Source: Robert Johnson Blues Foundation

One hundred years ago, a boy-child was born in Mississippi – a dirt-poor, African-American who would grow up, learn to sing and play the blues, and eventually achieve worldwide renown. In the decades after his death, he has become known as the King of the Delta Blues Singers, his music expanding in influence to the point that rock stars of the greatest magnitude – the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers – all sing his praise and have recorded his songs.
That boy-child was Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist who lived from 1911 to 1938. He recorded 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37 for the American Record Corporation, which released eleven 78rpm records on their Vocalion label during Johnson¹s lifetime, and one after his death.
Most of these tunes have attained canonical status, and are now considered enduring anthems of the genre: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “Hellhound On My Trail,” “I Believe I¹ll Dust My Broom,” “Walking Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Like many bluesmen of his day, Johnson plied his craft on street corners and in jook joints, ever rambling and ever lonely – and writing songs that romanticized that existence. But Johnson accomplished this with such an unprecedented intensity, marrying his starkly expressive vocals with a guitar mastery, that his music has endured long after the heyday of country blues and his own short life.
Never had the hardships of the world been transformed into such a poetic height; never had the blues plumbed such an emotional depth. Johnson took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression, and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once asked, answering his own question: “Well, this is it.” Eric Clapton put it more plainly: “I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson.”
The power of Johnson’s music has been amplified over the years by the fact that so little about him is known and what little biographical information we now have only revealed itself at an almost glacial pace. Myths surrounding his life took over: that he was a country boy turned ladies’ man; that he only achieved his uncanny musical mastery after selling his soul to the devil. Even the tragedy of his death seemed to grow to mythic proportion: being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend then taking three days to expire, even as the legendary talent scout John Hammond was searching him out to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In 1990, Sony Legacy produced and released the 2-CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings to widespread critical acclaim and, for a country blues reissue, unprecedented sales. The Complete Recordings proved the existence of a potential market for music from the deepest reaches of Sony¹s catalog, especially if buoyed by a strong story with mainstream appeal. Johnson¹s legend continues to attract an ever-widening audience, with no sign of abating. If, in today¹s world of hip-hop and heavy metal, a person knows of only one country blues artist, odds are it is Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson - When You Got a Good Friend


Robert Johnson - Me and the Devil Blues


Source: Robert Johnson Blues Foundation


One hundred years ago, a boy-child was born in Mississippi – a dirt-poor, African-American who would grow up, learn to sing and play the blues, and eventually achieve worldwide renown. In the decades after his death, he has become known as the King of the Delta Blues Singers, his music expanding in influence to the point that rock stars of the greatest magnitude – the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers – all sing his praise and have recorded his songs.
That boy-child was Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist who lived from 1911 to 1938. He recorded 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37 for the American Record Corporation, which released eleven 78rpm records on their Vocalion label during Johnson¹s lifetime, and one after his death.
Most of these tunes have attained canonical status, and are now considered enduring anthems of the genre: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “Hellhound On My Trail,” “I Believe I¹ll Dust My Broom,” “Walking Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago.”
Like many bluesmen of his day, Johnson plied his craft on street corners and in jook joints, ever rambling and ever lonely – and writing songs that romanticized that existence. But Johnson accomplished this with such an unprecedented intensity, marrying his starkly expressive vocals with a guitar mastery, that his music has endured long after the heyday of country blues and his own short life.
Never had the hardships of the world been transformed into such a poetic height; never had the blues plumbed such an emotional depth. Johnson took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression, and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once asked, answering his own question: “Well, this is it.” Eric Clapton put it more plainly: “I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson.”
The power of Johnson’s music has been amplified over the years by the fact that so little about him is known and what little biographical information we now have only revealed itself at an almost glacial pace. Myths surrounding his life took over: that he was a country boy turned ladies’ man; that he only achieved his uncanny musical mastery after selling his soul to the devil. Even the tragedy of his death seemed to grow to mythic proportion: being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend then taking three days to expire, even as the legendary talent scout John Hammond was searching him out to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In 1990, Sony Legacy produced and released the 2-CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings to widespread critical acclaim and, for a country blues reissue, unprecedented sales. The Complete Recordings proved the existence of a potential market for music from the deepest reaches of Sony¹s catalog, especially if buoyed by a strong story with mainstream appeal. Johnson¹s legend continues to attract an ever-widening audience, with no sign of abating. If, in today¹s world of hip-hop and heavy metal, a person knows of only one country blues artist, odds are it is Robert Johnson.


11/03/2011

Quantum Computers, Part 2: Zeros and Ones, Both and Neither


By David Vranicar
TechNewsWorld
11/03/11 5:00 AM PT


Traditional computers rely on information stored as zeros and ones. Together, the 0s and 1s form bits. Machines that use quantum technology, however, have a different type of bit. Unlike a conventional bit, a quantum bit, or "qubit," has the physical properties of an atom. And because of atoms' ability to be in dual states, a qubit can simultaneously be 0 and 1.


Comparing an atom to a coin is like comparing a human heart to a repeatedly clinching fist. The analogy is woefully simplistic in relation to what is actually going on.

But someone with a layman's understanding of the human body is unlikely to grasp the nuances of the human heart. Similarly, someone whose understanding of physics is derived from high school science class is unlikely to grasp the quantum world. So despite its shortcomings, a coin may be an apt description. Or at least the most apt description this side of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

So: When someone flips a coin, it will land on either heads or tails. These are the two, and only two, possible outcomes while the coin is in the air.

In that sense, a coin is akin to classical computing. Information is stored in a string of 0s and 1s (a string, that is, of heads and tails). Together, the 0s and 1s form bits, and these bits, when aligned in certain sequences, dictate the functions that a machine is to perform, be it sending a text message or opening up Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Word.

A Huge Little Difference

Machines that use quantum technology, however, have a different type of bit. Unlike a conventional bit, a quantum bit, or "qubit," has the physical properties of an atom. And because of atoms' ability to be in dual states, a qubit can simultaneously be 0 and 1. So while conventional computers are governed by a rigid series of mutually exclusive 0s and 1s, a quantum computer is built with qubits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

A qubit, in this sense, is a coin resting on its edge, capable of going either way and, as a result, performing at a higher level than conventional bits.

"A coin on its side gives you the option of going either way," said John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, speaking in colloquial terms about a colossal concept.

"It provides a range of possibilities that usually aren't possible," he told TechNewsWorld.
And this versatility is one of the reasons quantum technology is going open previously unopened doors -- or, more accurately, build doors where doors previously didn't exist.


Dueling With Dual Nature

Increased possibilities or no, a coin on its edge is nonetheless fragile, constantly in a state of wanting to topple over. Thus, while the dual possibilities of qubits unleash fantastic computational capabilities, this fragility poses a daunting challenge.

"You want to extract that richness, but you don't want to lose the stability," Martinis said. "We need to be able to control something, to control the quantum state, but at the same time we don't want to have other things that cause the state to change."

This quandary has mandated its own area of study, some of which is taking place some 5,500 miles away from Santa Barbara, in Denmark. That's where Jacob Sherson, a professor and researcher at Aarhus University, is trying to perfect a type of laser, or "tweezer," that can manipulate the movement of these otherwise fragile atoms.

"The tweezer," Sherson told TechNewsWorld, "is a tool to make atoms interact with one another. We are able to point the tweezer at a single atom and control it, make it do what we what. Now we want to do that with more and more atoms."


Ordering Magnitude

Owing to the fact that qubits have the physical properties of an atom -- that they can simultaneously be 0 and 1 -- each additional atom doubles the number of possible operations. This results in an exponential increase of the power of a quantum device.

As Sherson writes, "30 quantum bits can allow a billion 10^9 operations at once, whereas a gate with 30 classical bits still does only one operation."

Current computing devices compensate for this limitation by cramming billions of transistors into a single chip, allowing for myriad functions by virtue of volume. Quantum technology wouldn't need this volume, however, because each individual qubit is so powerful. And this, according to Mark Ketchen, the manager of physics of information at the IBM's (NYSE: IBM) TJ Watson Research Center, will bring about seismic shifts in computing power.

"You don't need several billion qubits to perform functions on a quantum computer" Ketchen said. "You would only need a small number. Maybe it'd be in the hundreds or thousands, but certainly not billions. So we are creating something that is orders of magnitude less and orders of magnitude faster."

Source: Tech News World


Quantum Computers, Part 1: A Simple Understanding

By David Vranicar TechNewsWorld 11/02/11 5:00 AM PT

Quantum computers aren't limited to the pages of sci-fi. They're part of the here and now. But understanding even the most basic elements of quantum physics can be extraordinarily difficult. "Quantum physics would be absolutely obvious to us if we traveled the speed of light or moved like electrons," said Bristol University's Jeremy O'Brian.

The goings-on of the quantum world elude our sight and, for a lot of us, our understanding. But you don't need an Einsteinian grasp of physics to see that the quantum world is playing a bigger and bigger role in modern technology. Be it the researcher in Denmark controlling atoms with lasers or the company in Canada already building quantum computers -- to say nothing of the investors funding these efforts -- the quantum world has begun its migration from theory to technology.

Good luck finding a nice, clean entry point to discuss quantum computers.

It should come as no surprise, of course, that something called "quantum computers" would be tricky to talk about. The inner workings of computers are plenty complex to begin with. When melded with a dizzying branch of physics -- quantum mechanics, which dissects the world of atomic and sub-atomic movement -- the result is bound to defy simplistic explanations.

For the laymen among us, quantum technology is so daunting that simply asking someone to explain it can be complicated. I learned, for instance, that sending an interview request to a quantum physicist is liable to come back thus: "Please try me anytime next week if you're happy with a non-unit probability of successfully getting through."

Gulp.

But even if quantum computers require an expanded vocabulary and understanding of mind-bending science, their impact moving forward figures to be incalculable. (Incalculable here is used literally.) Researchers, engineers and, importantly, investors have dived in headlong at companies like IBM and D Wave, and at universities from California to Denmark. What's more, companies like Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Lockheed Martin have begun to meld quantum technology into their operations, thus proving that the steady migration from labs to commercial industry is under way.
Indeed, quantum computers are not some sci-fi theory residing only in the future. They're part of the here and now, and they will be ever more so over the coming years -- even if many of those who stand to gain have a non-unit probability of understanding exactly how they work.

Analogy Roam

For someone who would have plenty of trouble calculating even a simple physics problem (like the author), analogies can help make sense of the perplexing quantum world. Alas, even analogies are profoundly imperfect, for anything that invokes the non-quantum world (the world we see) to explain the quantum world (the world we don't) is inherently flawed.

"Our heads have evolved over the millennia to deal with things we can understand," said quantum researcher Jeremy O'Brian, who is a professor of physics and electrical engineering at Bristol University.

"Quantum physics would be absolutely obvious to us if we traveled the speed of light or moved like electrons," he told TechNewsWorld. "All of this stuff would make sense and we could totally get our heads around this. But it's just not how we've evolved. We evolved to understand regular physics, so this stuff can seem bizarre."

As such, it may be best to start with something else that once seemed entirely bizarre: the laser.

In 2010, O'Brien coauthored a paper that appeared in the science journal Nature, a paper that used lasers as a springboard to quantum technology. (The section about lasers was one of the few not written in quantumese, which tends to read something like: "Faster nanostructred NbN superconducting nanowire detectors have achieved high efficiency and photon number resolution ...")

Before lasers, there had already been myriad technological advancements with light. The candle evolved into a lantern, the lantern into a light bulb, the light bulb into a flashlight and so on.

But none of these technologies, the paper explains, were "coherent." Light was generated and then dispersed from the source. End of story.

The laser, however, is different because it is "coherent light," not emitted and then forgotten but instead manipulated to perform a function. This coherence means that lasers can perform surgeries and scan bar codes and do any number of things that its predecessors couldn't. It is like light that thinks.

Not Replacing, but Reinventing

Even so, lasers didn't replace light bulbs and candles. They were instead a supplement, not designed to supplant existing technology, but to aid in the situations when a lantern wouldn't cut it.

And this is what's happening, roughly, with quantum computers. People aren't attempting to reinvent classical computers, just as the people who built the laser weren't attempting to reinvent the flashlight. Instead, they're building an entirely different type of computer.

"We're not trying to compete with conventional computers that perform conventional functions," Geordie Rose, chief technology officer at the quantum computer manufacturer D Wave, told TechNewsWorld. "The things they're good at, they're really good for. But there are many things computers aren't good at."

These shortcomings are where quantum technology comes into play. And people around the world have embarked on a quest to fill the voids.

"There's a lot of optimism that we can build more and more complexity in the computers," said John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"The problem with quantum computing is that you have to compete with something" -- modern-day computers -- "that is so utterly fantastic," he told TechNewsWorld.

But as the march down the path of quantum computing continues, the definition of "utterly fantastic" figures to be rewritten. To some extent, it already has been.

Source: Tech News World