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Chet Baker ‘You make me feel so young’

Chet Baker was a great  jazz trumpeter but he also had a great voice. It was soft and delicate, and if you listen to ‘Let’s Get Lost’ or ‘Autumn Leaves’, you will understand what I mean.

He also sang ‘You make me feel so young’ (the 1946 popular song covered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Anka, Rosemary Clooney…) and needless to say his fragile voice brings something unmistakably unique to this cover.

Baker died on May 13, 1988, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2007 Mayor of the City of Tulsa Kathy Taylor proclaimed December 23 as “Chet Baker Day”. But Chet Baker is also often celebrated during many jazz events around the world.

I couldn’t find an audio link of Chet Baker singing ‘You make me feel so young’ but I could find a video (although it’s not really a video). Click and listen, just open your ears and relax…

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RER cars decorated as beautiful rooms at Versailles

Have you ever visited Versailles? The Gallery of Mirrors and the Queen’s bedroom?

Since last month and until 2014, RER C travelers may have a chance to sit in one of the RER cars decorated as beautiful rooms at Versailles.

I think it’s a great idea and for once, travelers using RER C will enjoy the time they will spend inside the cars.

I like this ‘anachronistic’ decoration, and you will see more of it in the video (in French but you don’t need subtitles to look at the decorations).

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Brazil: retro-futurism, Steampunk and much more

Brazil is a 1985 science fiction, black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam and it is a variation of George Orwell’s 1984.

When I selected the movies I wanted to bring with me during this trip, Brazil came out in evidence I had to take it. I love the “retro-futurism” a la Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with a hint of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Here is what Roger Ebert wrote about the movie:

The movie is very hard to follow. I have seen it twice, and am still not sure exactly who all the characters are, or how they fit.

Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie’s air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling, De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie’s obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls.

The best scene in the movie is one of the simplest, as Sam moves into half an office and finds himself engaged in a tug-of-war over his desk with the man through the wall. I was reminded of a Chaplin film, “Modern Times,” and reminded, too, that in Chaplin economy and simplicity were virtues, not the enemy.

If you still wonder what is this movie about, then you have to watch it. And let me know what you think of it!

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Neutrinos can’t beat speed of light

It is now official: neutrino researchers admit Albert Einstein was right.

Mark Brown, Wired UK, writes:

Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they traveled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process. The results seem to run counter to a century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings.

[…] At the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto on June 8, CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, on behalf of four experiments — Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera. All four experiments measured a neutrino time of flight that was below the speed of light, confirming that neutrinos respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. The previous anomaly was “attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibreoptic timing system.”

If you don’t get why it would have been a big deal to prove Einstein’s theory wrong, a news on The Guardian explains it all:

Travelling faster than the speed of light goes against Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. If it were possible, it would open up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

 Now we know where we stand.

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‘Fahrenheit 451’ author Ray Bradbury dead

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer and he died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.

Bradbury’s bio on his official site introduces him very well:

Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works — short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse — exemplify the American imagination at its most creative.

Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, FAHRENHEIT 451 and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, are masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime. His timeless, constant appeal to audiences young and old has proven him to be one of the truly classic authors of the 20th Century — and the 21st.

 On Mashable, Chris Taylor wrote a great piece about Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451:

The most important thing to know about Fahrenheit 451 is that it is explicitly not about government censorship. (Bradbury was so firm on this point he once walked out of a UCLA class when his students tried to insist it was so.)

The firemen aren’t burning books on the orders of some shadowy Big Brother. They’re doing it, protagonist Guy Montag is told, because society as a whole turned away from the scary cacophony of knowledge, from the terror of differing opinions and the burden of having to choose between them, from deep and troubling thoughts.

We turned away from literature and towards vapid reality television and radio shows, the book says. We spurned any kind of poetry (Montag’s wife Millie slams Matthew Arnold’s classic Dover Beach as depressing and “disgusting”) and preferred to listen to the noise of our cars as they speed across the landscape at 100 mph.

Even when Guy wants to read his stolen books, he can’t, because the ubiquitous ads drown out his thoughts.

Any of this starting to sound familiar?

Yes, indeed!

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The 2012 Transit of Venus

I was in orbit around Earth when I witnessed the 2012 transit of Venus. The planet appeared as a small, dark disk gliding across the face of the Sun—a rare event that won’t happen again until the year 2117.

The story of the transit of Venus goes back centuries, as detailed on NASA website:

There is some evidence that the ancient Babylonians saw and recorded on a tablet something about Venus and the Sun in the 16th Century B.C., but the record is not clear. It is fair to say though that Galileo Galilei with his telescope, in 1610, was the first human to actually see Venus as more than just a bright point of light in the sky.

Johannes Kepler, meanwhile, was shaking up the world with his meticulous use of astronomical data assembled by Tycho Brahe. He predicted that Venus would pass in front of the Sun on December 6, 1631, but unfortunately the transit was not visible from Europe at all.

The first recorded sighting of this transit was by British cleric, Jeremiah Horrocks, and his friend William Crabtree, on December 4, 1639—only because Horrocks had mathematically predicted it, using better data than Kepler did.

I told you, it all began long ago…

And now, the best view of the transit of Venus—seen from Hong Kong, China.

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Dishonored, a Neo-Victorian, Steampunk video game

I love playing video games and the least I can say is that Steampunk is not a common genre. But it will change soon with Dishonored, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks.

Dishonored is a Neo-Victorian/steampunk stealth, action game that will be launched on October 9th 2012 for the PC, PS3, and XBox 360.

Shaun McInnis, Editor at Gamespot had the opportunity to try the game at the E3 and he posted his hands-on impressions:

Playing Dishonored for the first time, you can’t help but feel sorry for Sam Fisher. The hero of the Splinter Cell franchise has probably spent half his life lurking in the shadows, going from one stealth operation to the next desperately trying to avoid being seen. Poor Sam. He probably could have gotten out into the sunlight once in a while if only he had supernatural powers.

Then again, not everyone can be like Corvo, the stealthy assassin you navigate through Dishonored’s dystopian world of eerie technologies and royal corruption. Corvo is an assassin with access to exotic weaponry and even more exotic supernatural abilities. Using these tools, you realize that actively deceiving your enemies is every bit as important as hiding from them. In other words, creeping through the shadows isn’t always the most effective tactic.

Promising, isn’t it? Watch the video below to learn more about this exciting game!

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Dark matter finds new home in old gold mine

Lead is a town of about 3,100 residents, about a half-hour from the Wyoming border. Nestled nearly 5,000 feet beneath the earth, is a laboratory that could help scientists answer some pretty heavy questions about life, its origins and the universe.

Yes, we’re talking about dark matter. Regular matter — people and planets, for example — make up about 4 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe, he said. Dark matter makes up about 25 percent.

Dark matter is too sensitive to detect in normal laboratories, but one so far underground would help shield it from pesky cosmic radiation. Also, the LUX detector (Large Underground Xenon, the world’s most sensitive dark-matter detector) is submerged in water, further insulating it.

The article published on the Herald Tribune provides more details about this experience which could lead to unexpected results!

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The Steampunk Bible by J.VanderMeer, S.J.Chambers

On my first day, I posted about The Chap Mag. Among the many books I took with me, there is The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer and S. J. Chambers. If you ever wondered what is Steampunk about, this is the book you need to buy. For everyone else, this book lives up to its name.

The photography and art are great, and the book is an excellent overview of Steampunk filled with interesting information introducing different aspects of the Steampunk culture like music, movies and books.

The presentation on Amazon:

Steampunk—a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction culture—is a phenomenon that has come to influence film, literature, art, music, fashion, and more. The Steampunk Bible is the first compendium about the movement, tracing its roots in the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells through its most recent expression in movies such as Sherlock Holmes. Its adherents celebrate the inventor as an artist and hero, re-envisioning and crafting retro technologies including antiquated airships and robots. A burgeoning DIY community has brought a distinctive Victorian-fantasy style to their crafts and art. Steampunk evokes a sense of adventure and discovery, and embraces extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future. This ultimate manual will appeal to aficionados and novices alike as author Jeff VanderMeer takes the reader on a wild ride through the clockwork corridors of Steampunk history.

Note that the complete title is: The Steampunk Bible : An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature. You’d better write it down.

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One day, we will use a neutrinophone, like in Star Trek

This is the kind of news I like. If you thought your new mobile phone was the best ever made, you’re wrong. What about a phone using neutrinos? What about a neutrinophone?

Jeff Nelson is the Cornelia B. Talbot Term Distinguished Associate Professor of Physics at William & Mary and in this article, he explains that the neutrinophone demonstration was a side project stemming from neutrino research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

About the neutrinos:

Neutrinos are mysterious subatomic particles emitted in unimaginable numbers by nuclear reactions. Despite their high numbers, scientists are just now learning about the characteristics of neutrinos. William & Mary’s physicists are involved in several large multinational collaborations aimed at learning about the properties of neutrinos. In addition to MINERvA and the other Fermilab experiments, William & Mary researchers are involved in other neutrino investigations, most notably the Daya Bay initiative in China.

How it works:

The beam of neutrinos  travels through hundreds of meters of rock on the way to the MINERvA detector, which Nelson explains is designed to study neutrino interactions in detail. For communication over the neutrinophone, the physicists used a simple 1-0 binary code. “If you saw neutrinos, it was a zero; if there weren’t any neutrinos, it was a one,” he explained. “There are standard encoding patterns, ASCII is one of the ones that is used on the computer that tell you what letter corresponds to a series of so many digits of binary bits.”

And the pbest part for the end:

As a practical communications tool, the neutrinophone sits on the border of science and science fiction. Nelson notes that Star Trek characters use neutrino communications, but there are a number of scientific and engineering challenges to creating an interplanetary neutrinophone.

My geek friends and dear Star Trek fans, our dream will, one day, become a reality!