Sarah Lois Vaughan - Don’t Blame Me

Billie Holiday - Lady sings the blues

Ella Jane Fitzgerald - Summertime

… and another one by Ella, Cry me a river:

… and one more to stop this series, another classic, Georgia on my mind:

Nancy Wilson - Drinkin’ Again

Carmen Mercedes McRae - Miss Otis Regrets

Dinah Washington - Our Love Is Here To Stay

Nina Simone - I Put A Spell On You

Shirley Valerie Horn - Here’s to Life

Ernestine Anderson - I Want a Little Boy

Diane Schuur - Danny Boy

Abbey Lincoln - First song

Peggy Lee - Why Don’t You Do Right

June Christy - Something cool

Betty Carter - How high the moon

Lena Horn - Stormy weather

Dee Dee Bridgewater - Midnight Sun

Cassandra Wilson - Death Letter

Mildred Bailey - Squeeze me

For the next 7 days I will post an overview of the best female jazz singers, 21 in total. Some voices will not make this list, so feel free to agree or not.

Etta James - At Last

Chris Connor - Lullaby of Birdland

Anita O’Day - Sweet Georgia Brown

…Mojito ! No internet anymore tonight. Yes … you there … you too … turn your pc off and go party !

How did space and time come about? How did they form the smooth four-dimensional emptiness that serves as a backdrop for our physical world? What do they look like at the very tiniest distances? Questions such as these lie at the outer boundary of modern science and are driving the search for a theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought unification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Relativity theory describes how spacetime on large scales can take on countless different shapes, producing what we perceive as the force of gravity. In contrast, quantum theory describes the laws of physics at atomic and subatomic scales, ignoring gravitational effects altogether. A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents.

Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime, an article at SCIAM.

A bit more on this quantum grafity question (from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics):

Quantum gravity is one of the greatest puzzles of all time: to combine into one unified picture the two most important achievements of 20th century physics—the quantum theory, and Albert Einstein’s theory of space, time and gravity. Each of these two remarkably powerful theories dramatically pushed back the boundaries of our understanding and forced us to think in completely new ways about the universe in which we live. Successfully combining them together promises to yield the deepest insights physicists have every achieved into how our universe works.

What did Einstein discover that made us think in new ways? That space and time are not separate entities as Galileo and Newton had conceived, but are intimately related aspects of a single, four-dimensional reality called spacetime. And that this spacetime is not merely a static backdrop on which everything else happens, but is in fact a dynamical player in the universe’s great dance: matter causes spacetime to warp, and this warping, in turn, affects the way matter moves, the net result being a beautiful, geometrical explanation of the phenomenon we call gravity. It superseded Newton’s theory of gravity and predicted a host of new phenomena: black holes, gravity waves, gravitational lensing; and is now the very framework within which we understand our expanding universe.

What did the quantum theory reveal? That in the ultra-microscopic world of atoms and subatomic particles, nature operates in very bizarre ways: a single particle can behave as if it is in two places at once; a pair of particles, even a great distance apart, can behave in some ways as a single entity. This led to discoveries such as: antimatter (which when combined with matter will annihilate both, releasing pure energy) and vacuum polarization (whereby “empty” space is never really empty, but rather is seething with “virtual” particles continuously being created out of nothing and returning back to nothing), as well as a host of practical devices like the transistor and the laser, the basis of much of today’s computing and communications technologies.

Why the desire to combine relativity theory (i.e. gravity) with quantum theory? First, such a unified theory will be needed to answer many profound questions, including: How did the Big Bang begin? Or: What is happening deep inside a black hole? But more importantly, the history of physics has taught us again and again that successful unifications of seemingly disparate theories are a natural direction of progress in physics, invariably leading to deeper insights into—and more profound questions about—the workings of our mysterious universe. The search for a quantum theory of gravity, which strongly challenges the entire foundation of our understanding of the universe, promises to be the greatest unification of all.

If you want another non-technical explanation, read this.

Fingernails scraping down a blackboard… the scream of a baby… your neighbour’s dog barking: what is the worst sound in the world? This is what this website has been trying to find out. According to over a million votes cast worldwide in this mass online science experiment, vomiting is officially the most horrible sound ever. For whatever it’s worth knowing this. (via)

Your pretty empire took so long to build.

Now, with a snap of history’s fingers down it goes.

– V for Vendetta, page 208.

A web version of the Usenet Physics FAQ

“Parlami d’amore Mariu” performed by Giuseppe Di Stefano:

The Englishman Tim Berners-Lee in collaboration with the Belgian Robert Cailliau is usually credited with the invention of the Wold Wide Web.

However this is to some extent due to the work of Paul Otlet. His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks—although these notions were described by different names. The NYT published recently an article about the work of Paul Otlet to acknowledge his early vision of the web.

Update: I just discovered why the initial logo of the World Wide Web was green. It so happens that Robert Cailliau is a synaesthetic (when the perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors) and he sees all “W”s as green… So the logo was green not because WWW is a “green” technology.

10 ideas that changed the course of history according to The Observer : Plato’s Philosophy, Sun-centred (Copernican) Theory of the Universe, Cartesian Cogito, Theory of Universal Gravitation, Adam Smith’s Laissez-Faire Economics, Women’s Liberation, Marxist Analysis of Capitalism, Theory of the Unconscious, Theory of Relativity, World Wide Web.

Eurozine’s series Literary perspectives provides an overview of diverse literary landscapes, describing the current literary climate in specific European countries, regions, or languages. The articles in this series are published bi-monthly. Written by renowned literary critics and authors based in the respective countries and regions, they will also represent different critical traditions and practices. Have already been published: Hungary, Northern Ireland, Slovenia, Ukraine, The Netherlands, Estonia and Austria. A very interesting series !

Questioning authority. Nietzsche’s gift to Derrida. “Be it the moral-theological tradition, God, or his own status as author, Nietzsche’s refusal to legitimate authority remains constant. As Alan D. Schrift writes, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Jacques Derrida’s post-modern critique of the subject as a privileged centre of discourse.”

Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope. Reviewed by Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh.

Volume 12, one of the few Dutch blogs I read, posted Der Erlkönig, a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Although Goethe is probably one of the most important writers and thinkers in Western history, I must confess I’m not all that familiar with his work. When I have (make) time…

Volume 12 posted the original German text, but here is an English translation by Edgar Alfred Bowring (1853). Enjoy.

THE ERL-KING.

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasp’d in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

“My son, wherefore seek’st thou thy face thus to hide?”
“Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”
“My son, ’tis the mist rising over the plain.”

“Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
Full many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.”

“My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?”
“Be calm, dearest child, ’tis thy fancy deceives;
‘Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.”

“Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They’ll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep.”

“My father, my father, and dost thou not see,
How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?”
“My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
‘Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight.”

“I love thee, I’m charm’d by thy beauty, dear boy!
And if thou’rt unwilling, then force I’ll employ.”
“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,–
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

Like so many others I installed Firefox 3 on Download Day. Next I customized it by installing several add-ons:

• The Delicious Bookmarks extension “integrates your browser with del.icio.us by augmenting the bookmarking functionality in Firefox”.
• Firebug integrates with Firefox “to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page”.
• FireShot is “a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages.Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.It’s possible to choose whether entire web page or only visible part of this page should be captured.Screenshots can be uploaded to server, saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing”.
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. Keeps your bookmarks synchronized across your computers and provides online access to them as well.
• Sage-Too (NOT sage !) “a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension. It’s got more of what you need and not much of what you don’t”. Feeddemon is my default aggregator, but I use this extension as well.
• ScribeFire is “a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog”. It doesn’t beat blogjet or live writer, but still.
• The Web Developer extension “adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools”.

If you do not like the default theme of Firefox, than you might like the NASA Night Launch theme which gives you a nice dark look.

Update: I’ll write a post about how I keep my bookmarks and RSS feeds organized across different computers I use. Later. Later.

Cyd Charisse passed away yesterday, Jun 18th, aged 86 (just heard this on the news - yes, not all information comes to me via the internet…). Cyd was born to be a dancer. She spent her early childhood taking ballet lessons and joined the Ballet Russe at 13. In 1939 she married Nico Charise, her ex-dance teacher. In 1943 she appeared in her first film, Something to Shout About (1943), billed as Lily Norwood. The same year she played the Russian dancer Galina Ulanova in Mission to Moscow (1943), directed by Michael Curtiz (indeed, the director from the famous movie Casablanca !). In 1945 she was hired to dance with Fred Astaire in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and that uncredited appearance got her a seven-year contract with MGM. She appeared in a number of musicals over the next few years, but it was Singin’ in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly that made her a star. That was quickly followed by her great performance in The Band Wagon (1953). As the 1960s dawned, musicals faded from the screen, as did her career.

Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain:

And with Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon:

Obituary at the BBC, more about Cyd at Legs - A tribute to Cyd Charisse