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How much would spend on a nice chess board? Maybe $50, maybe $100, maybe $200. The world’s most expensive chess set is valued at over 9.8 Million Dollars. This is the Jewel Royale Chess Set which was created in Great Britain and commisioned by the Royale Jewel Company. What makes this the most expensive chess set in the world? Well… its made of gold and platinum, it has diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls and sapphires. The king piece weighs 165.2 grams of 18 carat yellow gold and has a spiraling mid-section graced by 73 rubies and 146 diamonds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buq-p8vSCLQ&feature=related

I have recently become more intrigued by the greatest masters ever cantatas and found examples of irresistible beauty such as the follows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccgUrK59gCs&feature=youtube_gdata_player Please enjoy and share your most astonishing moments of awe in music.

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, the NPL said. The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time. The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess. The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia. The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years. "Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL. In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.

More often than not, we tend to demonstrate our best games. Still, our losses can be amusing and they are always educational. In the game that follows, there are no spectacular tactics, no obvious mistakes or blunders committed. Nonetheless, White’s fine, subtle, positional play soon dominates the board. One of my best “worst” games, not only because I could not spot my errors at the time – but, also, because I had a first-hand experience of how a world-class player can quietly walk over you, without you ever realizing what went wrong…

Sarabande In music, the sarabande (It., sarabanda) is a dance in triple meter. The second and third beats of each measure are often tied, giving the dance a distinctive rhythm of quarter notes and eighth notes in alternation. The quarters are said to correspond with dragging steps in the dance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T1Hlsujdvc The sarabande is first mentioned in Central America: in 1539, a dance called a zarabanda is mentioned in a poem written in Panama by Fernando Guzmán Mexía. Apparently the dance became popular in the Spanish colonies before moving back across the Atlantic to Spain. While it was banned in Spain in 1583 for its obscenity, it was frequently cited in literature of the period (for instance in works by Cervantes and Lope de Vega). The sarabande form was revived in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by composers such as Debussy and Satie and, in different styles, Vaughan Williams (in Job) and Benjamin Britten (in the Simple Symphony). One of the best-known constant-harmony variation types is the anonymous La Folia whose harmonic sequence appears in pieces of various types (mainly dances) by dozens of composers from the time of Mudarra (1546) and Corelli through the present day.The Theme of the fourth-movement Sarabande of Handel's Keyboard suite in D minor (HWV 437) for harpsichord is a variation of this piece. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esldkznHovU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3ZWKFWGh4

An older song and video but the guitar is fantastic, or so I think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2kAgLvhQM

Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as the weather. Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps.

Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians that ever lived. He was born in England on December 25, 1643. He was born the same year that Galileo died. He lived for 85 years. Isaac Newton was raised by his grandmother. He attended Free Grammar School and then went on to Trinity College Cambridge. Newton worked his way through college. While at college he became interested in math, physics, and astronomy. Newton received both a bachelors and masters degree. While Newton was in college he was writing his ideas in a journal. Newton had new ideas about motion, which he called his three laws of motion. He also had ideas about gravity, the diffraction of light, and forces. Newton's ideas were so good that Queen Anne knighted him in 1705. His accomplishments laid the foundations for modern science and revolutionized the world. Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727. 5: The Three Laws of Motion There are three laws of motion: An object will remain at rest or moving in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. When force is applied to an object, it will accelerate (Force = mass x acceleration). For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. First published when Newton was 43, the three laws remain the cornerstone of modern physics. Some die-hard physicists have even had the laws tattooed on their skin. For centuries, scholars have wrestled with the fundamental concepts of motion. The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought smoke moved upwards because smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding to go into the sky to hang out with the rest of its air buddies. French philosopher René Descartes devised laws of motion that were very similar to parts of Newton's first and third laws, but he still held that "God is the primary cause of motion and always conserves the same quantity of motion in the universe" The genius of Newton's laws is that they're so poetically simple. Using only these three basic laws, scientists now had a road map for all planetary motion, from the movement of electrons to the movement of the planets. Whether you're designing F-1 cars or figuring out why apples plummet to the earth after breaking free from a tree branch, Newton's three laws have you covered. 4: Calculus By Newton's time, scientists were becoming frustrated with the limitations of existing math systems like algebra and geometry. Mathematicians could calculate the speed of a ship, but they couldn't figure out the rate at which the ship was speeding up. They could measure the angle at which a cannonball was being fired, but they had no way of calculating which angle would send the cannonball the farthest. They could calculate the relative birth and death rate of a population, but they couldn't combine the two to figure out how rapidly a population was growing. The question was: How could they understand a way to calculate problems that involved changing variables? This was the problem facing Newton when an outbreak of bubonic plague hit England in the spring of 1665. As plague-stricken citizens dropped dead in the streets, Cambridge University was shut down, forcing Newton to move to Woolsthorpe, an estate in the north of England. He spent 18 months there formulating the origins of what he then called "the science of fluxions." As scientists have built upon Newton's original ideas over the years, the results have been far-reaching. In the 1960s, for example, Apollo engineers used calculus to figure out how to send a spacecraft between the moving targets of the Earth and the moon. Calculus has become a critical tool in almost any situation, from economics to physics to probability science. 3: The Reflecting Telescope Scientists knew that rainbows were formed by light refracting within raindrops, but they didn't know why rainbows were so colorful. When Newton first began his studies at Cambridge, the common theory was that the sun's rays were somehow being dyed different colors by the water. Using a lamp and a prism, Newton experimented by running white light through a prism to separate it into a rainbow of colors. The prism trick was nothing new, but just as with the raindrops, scientists assumed it was the prism that was coloring the light. But by reflecting the scattered beams into another prism, Newton reformed them back into white light, proving that the colors were a characteristic of the light itself. At the time, telescopes used a set of glass lenses to magnify an image. Through his experiments with colors, Newton knew that the lenses would refract different colors at different angles, creating a fuzzy image for the viewer. To get around this, Newton proposed using mirrors instead of lenses. The image would be captured in a large mirror and then bounced off a smaller mirror into the viewer's eye. The result would be both a clearer image and a smaller telescope. Granted, a Scottish mathematician had earlier proposed the idea of a reflecting telescope, but Newton was the first to actually build one. Grinding the mirrors himself, Newton put together a prototype and presented it to the Royal Society in 1670. To this day, nearly all astronomical observatories use a variant of Newton's original design. 2: The Modern Coin By the late 1600s, England's financial system was in the midst of a crisis. The country's currency was made up entirely of silver coins; often, the silver the coin was made out of was worth more than the value stamped on it. The system was a magnet for criminals who melted down the coins or "clipped" silver from the edges to sell to France. The practice was so widespread that by Newton's time the average bag of English coins was a hodgepodge of damaged and unrecognizable hunks of silver. Forgers were also rampant. Since English coins varied so widely in size and quality, it was easy to pass off even the most sloppy knockoffs as legal tender. Riots began to break out as faith in English currency eroded. In 1696, the British government appointed Newton warden of the Royal Mint. The position was supposed to be largely ceremonial, but a restless Newton jumped into the job with full force. He declared that all the coins in England needed to be recalled, melted down, and remade into a higher-quality, harder-to-counterfeit design. It was a bold move, considering that the entire country had to make do without a currency for the year. Working as many as 18 hours a day, Newton reorganized the Royal Mints into high-quality, high-efficiency factories pumping out currency that was highly resistant to forgers. You know those ridges on the edge of a U.S. quarter? Those are milled edges, a feature introduced by Newton on English coins to prevent clipping. 1: Cat Doors Newton never married and had few friends, but he did keep a dog and cat for companionship. The story goes that at Cambridge University, Newton's experiments were constantly being interrupted by his cat scratching at the door to his office. Newton summoned the Cambridge carpenter and had him saw two holes in his office door. A large hole was for the mother cat, and a smaller hole was for her kittens. Of course, since the kittens simply followed their mother through the larger hole, the smaller hole went unused. "Whether this account be true or false, indisputably true is that there are in the door to this day two plugged holes of proper dimensions for the respective egresses of cat and kitten," wrote a Newton contemporary some years after the scientist's death. The jury is still out on this story. Newton could have invented one of the world's most popular cat accessories -- or somebody at Cambridge simply was very skilled at making up stories for mysterious door holes.

A Brief History of the Guitar A bit of reading here but you may find it interesting. The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain. The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre". It would also be passing strange if a square-framed seven-string lap harp had given its name to the early Spanish 4-string "quitarra". Dr. Kasha turns the question around and asks where the Greeks got the name "kithara", and points out that the earliest Greek kitharas had only 4 strings when they were introduced from abroad. He surmises that the Greeks hellenified the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument, "chartar". The Ancestors The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear. "Queen Shub-Ad's harp" (from the Royal Cemetery in Ur) A tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago. Egyptian wall painting, Thebes, 1420 BCE Archaeologists have also found many similar relics in the ruins of the ancient Persian and Mesopotamian cultures. Many of these instruments have survived into modern times in almost unchanged form, as witness the folk instruments of the region like the Turkish saz, Balkan tamburitsa, Iranian setar, Afghan panchtar and Greek bouzouki. The oldest preserved guitar-like instrument Har-Moses instrument had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. The soundbox was made of beautifully polished cedarwood and had a rawhide "soundboard". It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo. Queen Hatshepsut What is a guitar, anyway? To distinguish guitars from other members of the tanbur family, we need to define what a guitar is. Dr. Kasha defines a guitar as having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides" .The oldest known iconographical representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar is a stone carving at Alaca Huyuk in Turkey, of a 3300 year old Hittite "guitar" with "a long fretted neck, flat top, probably flat back, and with strikingly incurved sides". The Lute (Al'ud, Oud) The Moors brought the oud to Spain. The tanbur had taken another line of development in the Arabian countries, changing in its proportions and remaining fretless. The Europeans added frets to the oud and called it a "lute" - this derives from the Arabic "Al'ud" (literally "the wood"), via the Spanish name "laud".A lute or oud is defined as a "short-necked instrument with many strings, a large pear-shaped body with highly vaulted back, and an elaborate, sharply angled peghead". Renaissance lute by Arthur RobbIt is hard to see how the guitar - with "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides" - could possibly have evolved from the lute, with its "short neck with many strings, large pear-shaped body with highly vaulted back, and elaborate, sharply angled peghead". The Guitar The name "guitar" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word for "string" - "tar". (This is the language from which the languages of central Asia and northern India developed.) Many stringed folk instruments exist in Central Asia to this day which have been used in almost unchanged form for several thousand years, as shown by archeological finds in the area. Many have names that end in "tar", with a prefix indicating the number of strings: Dotar two = Sanskrit "dvi" - modern Persian "do" -dotar, two-string instrument found in Turkestan three = Sanskrit "tri" - modern Persian "se" -setar, 3-string instrument, found in Persia (Iran),(cf. sitar, India, elaborately developed, many-stringed) four = Sanskrit "chatur" - modern Persian "char" -chartar, 4-string instrument, Persia (most commonly known as "tar" in modern usage)(cf. quitarra, early Spanish 4-string guitar,modern Arabic qithara, Italian chitarra, etc) five = Sanskrit "pancha" - modern Persian "panj" -panchtar, 5 strings, Afghanistan Indian Sitar The Indian sitar almost certainly took its name from the Persian setar, but over the centuries the Indians developed it into a completely new instrument, following their own aesthetic and cultural ideals. Persian Setar Chartar ("Tar") Tanburs and harps spread around the ancient world with travellers, merchants and seamen. The four-stringed Persian chartar (note the narrow waist!) arrived in Spain, where it changed somewhat in form and construction, acquired pairs of unison-tuned strings instead of single strings and became known as the quitarra or chitarra. From four-, to five-, to six-string guitar As we have seen, the guitar's ancestors came to Europe from Egypt and Mesopotamia. These early instruments had, most often, four strings - as we have seen above, the word "guitar" is derived from the Old Persian "chartar", which, in direct translation, means "four strings". Many such instruments, and variations with from three to five strings, can be seen in mediaeval illustrated manuscripts, and carved in stone in churches and cathedrals, from Roman times through till the Middle Ages. Right: Roman "guitar", c:a 200 CE. Mediaeval psalter, c:a 900 CE. Angel with guitar, St. Stephen's church, 1591. By the beginning of the Renaissance, the four-course (4 unison-tuned pairs of strings) guitar had become dominant, at least in most of Europe. (Sometimes a single first string was used.) The earliest known music for the four-course "chitarra" was written in 16th century Spain. The five-course guitarra battente (left) first appeared in Italy at around the same time, and gradually replaced the four-course instrument. The standard tuning had already settled at A, D, G, B, E, like the top five strings of the modern guitar. In common with lutes, early guitars seldom had necks with more than 8 frets free of the body, but as the guitar evolved, this increased first to 10 and then to 12 frets to the body. 5-course guitar by Antonio Stradivarius, 1680 A sixth course of strings was added to the Italian "guitarra battente" in the 17th century, and guitar makers all over Europe followed the trend. The six-course arrangement gradually gave way to six single strings, and again it seems that the Italians were the driving force. (The six-string guitar can thus be said to be a development of the twelve-string, rather than vice versa, as is usually assumed.) In the transition from five courses to six single strings, it seems that at least some existing five-course instruments were modified to the new stringing pattern. This was a fairly simple task, as it only entailed replacing (or re-working) the nut and bridge, and plugging four of the tuning peg holes. An incredibly ornate guitar by the German master from Hamburg, Joakim Thielke (1641 - 1719), was altered in this way. (Note that this instrument has only 8 frets free of the body.) At the beginning of the 19th century one can see the modern guitar beginning to take shape. Bodies were still fairly small and narrow-waisted 6-string guitar by George Louis Panormo, 1832 The modern "classical" guitar took its present form when the Spanish maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered its proportions, and introduced the revolutionary "fan" top bracing pattern, in around 1850. His design radically improved the volume, tone and projection of the instrument, and very soon became the accepted construction standard. It has remained essentially unchanged, and unchallenged, to this day. Guitar by Antonio Torres Jurado, 1859 Steel-string and electric guitars At around the same time that Torres started making his breakthrough fan-braced guitars in Spain, German immigrants to the USA - among them Christian Fredrich Martin - had begun making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings first became widely available in around 1900. Steel strings offered the promise of much louder guitars, but the increased tension was too much for the Torres-style fan-braced top. A beefed-up X-brace proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard for the flat-top steel string guitar. At the end of the 19th century Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars with oval sound holes. He married the steel-string guitar with a body constructed more like a cello, where the bridge exerts no torque on the top, only pressure straight down. This allows the top to vibrate more freely, and thus produce more volume. In the early 1920's designer Lloyd Loar joined Gibson, and refined the archtop "jazz" guitar into its now familiar form with f-holes, floating bridge and cello-type tailpiece. The electric guitar was born when pickups were added to Hawaiian and "jazz" guitars in the late 1920's, but met with little success before 1936, when Gibson introduced the ES150 model, which Charlie Christian made famous. With the advent of amplification it became possible to do away with the soundbox altogether. In the late 1930's and early 1940's several actors were experimenting along these lines, and controversy still exists as to whether Les Paul, Leo Fender, Paul Bigsby or O.W. Appleton constructed the very first solid-body guitar. Be that as it may, the solid-body electric guitar was here to stay.

ELPIS was the spirit (daimona) of hope. She along with the other daimones were trapped in a jar by Zeus and entrusted to the care of the first woman Pandora. When she opened the vessel all of the spirits escaped except for Elpis (Hope) who alone remained to comfort mankind. Elpis was depicted as a young woman carrying flowers in her arms. Her opposite number was Moros, spirit of hopelessness and doom. PARENTS Perhaps a child of NYX, though nowhere stated OFFSPRING PHEME (Sophocles Oedipus the King 151) Hesiod, Works & Days 54 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :"[Zeus] hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetus stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk . . . But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger: ‘. . . I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’So said the father of men and gods, and laughed aloud. And he bade famous Hephaistos make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape . . .When he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare, the Father sent glorious Argus-Slayer [Hermes], the swift messenger of the gods, to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never take a gift of Olympian Zeus, but to send it back for fear it might prove to be something harmful to men. But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood. For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills (kakoi) and hard toil (ponoi) and heavy sickness (nosoi) which bring the Keres (Fates) upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar (pithos) with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Elpis (Hope) remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aigis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues (lugra), wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Of themselves diseases (nosoi) come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus." Pindar, Fragment 214 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :"With him liveth sweet Elpis (Hope), the nurse of eld, the fosterer of his heart--Elpis (Hope), who chiefly ruleth the changeful mind of man." Theognis, Fragment 1. 1135 (trans. Gerber, Vol. Greek Elegiac) (Greek elegy C6th B.C.) : "Elpis (Hope) is the only good god remaining among mankind; the others have left and gone to Olympos. Pistis (Trust), a mighty god has gone, Sophrosyne (Restraint) has gone from men, and the Kharites, my friend, have abandoned the earth. Men's judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety. But as long as man lives and sees the light of the sun, let him show piety to the gods and count on Elpis (Hope). Let him pray to the gods and burn splendid thigh bones, sacrificing to Elpis (Hope) first and last."[N.B. Theognis' account is the inverse of Hesiod's : the good spirits escaped from Pandora's jar, abandoning mankind in their flight to heaven.] Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 250 ff (trans. Weir Smyth) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :"Prometheus: Yes, I caused mortals to cease foreseeing their doom (moros).Chorus: Of what sort was the cure that you found for this affliction? Prometheus: I caused blind hopes (elpides) to dwell within their breasts.Chorus: A great benefit was this you gave to mortals."[N.B. This is presumably a reference to Pandora's jar, a curse concocted by Zeus to punish mankind for the theft of fire. Prometheus seems to be saying that he was the one who stayed Hope inside the jar, when the other evils escaped.] Sophocles, Oedipus the King 151 ff (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) : "Chorus: O sweetly-speaking message of Zeus, in what spirit have you come to glorious Thebes from golden Pytho? I am on the rack, terror shakes my soul, O Delian healer [oracular Apollon] to whom wild cries rise, in holy fear of you, wondering what debt you will extract from me, perhaps unknown before, perhaps renewed with the revolving years. Tell me, immortal Phama (Report), child of golden Elpis (Hope)." Aesop, Fables 526 (from Babrius 58) (trans. Gibbs) (Greek fable C6th B.C.) : "Zeus gathered all the useful things together in a jar and put a lid on it. He then left the jar in human hands. But man had no self-control and he wanted to know what was in that jar, so he pushed the lid aside, letting those things go back to the abode of the gods. So all the good things flew away, soaring high above the earth, and Spes/Elpis (Hope) was the only thing left. When the lid was put back on the jar, Elpis (Hope) was kept inside. That is why Elpis (Hope) alone is still found among the people, promising that she will bestow on each of us the good things that have gone away."[N.B. In the extant Latin version of this fable Eplis is translated as Spes.] Ovid, Heroides 2. 9 ff (trans. Showerman) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :"Spes (Hope), too, has been slow to leave me; we are tardy in believing, when belief brings hurt."[N.B. The Roman counterpart of Elpis, Spes, had a temple in Rome.] Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7. 7 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :"[Aion or Father Time, addresses Zeus:] ‘But, some may say, a medicine [Elpis, Hope] has been planted to make long-suffering mortals forget their troubles, to save their lives. Would that Pandora had never opened the heavenly cover of that jar--she the sweet bane of mankind!’"

Checkmates with Names Some mating patterns are seen so frequently that they have names. Some checkmates are so notorious or so common that they have been given names. Here are some of the best known mating patterns. Fool's Mate The Fool's Mate is the shortest possible checkmate starting from the initial position. White cooperates by opening a narrow road to the White King. The position in the diagram occurs after 1.g4 e5 2.f3 Qh4 mate. The game is also known as a Fool's Mate when Black is mated the same way. Scholar's Mate The Scholar's Mate has different variations which all follow the same pattern. First, the e-Pawn moves to make way for the White Queen and Bishop. Then the Queen and Bishop move to attack the natural weakness at f7. The initial moves 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Nc6 3.Bc4 are typical. Finally, Black ignores the attack and is mated by, for example, 3...d6 4.Qxf7 mate. The move 3...Nf6 is no better. White's move Qd1-h5 violates the opening principle that the Queen should not be developed too early. If Black defends properly, White's opening advantage will disappear quickly and the initiative will pass to Black when the Queen is attacked by a timely ...Nf6. Back-rank Mate Our first examples were checkmates in the opening. Back-rank mates usually happen later in the game after many of the pieces have been developed. Here's a typical example. White wins with 1.Rxd7 Rxd7 2.Rc8+ Rd8 3.Rxd8 mate. Back-rank mates are undoubtedly the most common type of checkmate to occur in practice. Here's another, more complicated example from a real game (Alekhine - Freeman 1924). White wins with 1.Nh6+ Qxh6 2.Rxf8+ Kxf8 3.Qd8 mate. Smothered Mate The Smothered Mate is a checkmate by a Knight on a King surrounded by its own pieces. Here is a well known example from the Caro-Kann opening. After 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nd7 5.Qe2, Black must be careful. If 5...Ngf6, then 6.Nd6 is checkmate. Most smothered mates happen in a corner, where the King is already restricted by the sides of the board. Here's a simple example. White wins with 1.Qxh7+ Qxh7 2.Nf7 mate. A smothered mate pattern which arises frequently is illustrated in the following diagram. White forces checkmate with 1.Qe6+ Kh8 2.Nf7+ Kg8 3.Nh6+ Kh8 4.Qg8+ Rxg8 5.Nf7 mate. The sequence of White's 3rd, 4th, and 5th moves is in every good player's arsenal of tactical tricks. Arabian Mate Another corner mate is known as the Arabian Mate. Black is helpless to prevent 1.Rc7 g5 2.Rh7 mate. Legal's Mate Named after the Frenchman Legall De Kermeur (1702-1792), Legall's Mate (accent on the second syllable of Legall) is more commonly known as Legal's Mate, where Legal rhymes with beagle. Legall tutored Philidor and is sometimes considered to have been an unofficial world champion before his protégé assumed the title. The mate can follow different variations. Legall's name is taken from his only recorded game, which started 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 d6 3.Nf3 Bg4 4.Nc3 g6... ...and continued 5.Nxe5 Bxd1 6.Bxf7+ Ke7 7.Nd5 mate. White's 5th, 6th, and 7th moves are typical of the many similar variations. Epaulet Mate The Epaulet Mate (also known as the Epaulette Mate) is a mating pattern where the King is hemmed in by its own Rooks. Here's an example. White wins with 1.Rf8+ Qxf8 2.Rxf8+ Rxf8 3.Qxg6 mate. The unfortunate Rooks reminded someone of military epaulets and the name stuck. Pedestal Mate Similar to the Epaulet Mate is the Mat du Guéridon (guéridon mate), another mating pattern with French origins. Since guéridon means pedestal table, let's just call it the Pedestal Mate. Some writers prefer the colorful term Swallow's Tail Mate. White wins with 1.Rxf6+ gxf6 2.Qg8+ Ke7 3.Qf7 mate. The Black King's escape squares are again blocked by its own pieces. Boden's Mate Our last mating pattern, named after Samuel Boden (1826-1882), is a disaster befalling a King castled on the Queenside. Our example is a position which could have happened in a game (Nimzovich - Alekhine 1912) from an early Russian championship. White won with 1.Qc6+ bxc6 2.Ba6 mate. The White Bishops cooperate to cover all of the Black King's escape squares.

The Concerto for Two Violins The Concerto for 2 Violins, Strings and Continuo in D Minor, BWV 1043, also known as the Double Violin Concerto or "Bach Double", is perhaps one of the most famous works by J. S. Bach and considered among the best examples of the work of the late Baroque period. Bach wrote it between 1730 and 1731 when he was the cantor at Thomasschule, in Leipzig, Germany. Later in 1739, in Leipzig, he created an arrangement for two harpsichords, transposed into C minor, BWV 1062. In addition to the two soloists, the concerto is scored for strings and basso continuo. The concerto is characterized by the subtle yet expressive relationship between the violins throughout the work. The musical structure of this piece uses fugal imitation and much counterpoint. The concerto comprises three movements: 1.Vivace http://youtu.be/USxt5bRuTWQ 2.Largo ma non tanto http://youtu.be/ZXv5nF9dZzQ 3.Allegro http://youtu.be/RDjz2LuFcos In 1940, George Balanchine made a ballet of this music called Concerto Barocco.

The number of Shannon a simple proof how deep chess can be Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001) was a famous electrical engineer and mathematician, remembered as "the father of information theory". He was fascinated by chess and was the first one to calculate with precision the game tree complexity of chess i.e. the number of possible chess games. He based his calculation on a logical approximation that each game has an average of 40 moves and each move a player chooses between 30 possible moves. That makes a total of 10120 possible games. This number is known as the number of Shannon. To a similar conclusion came Peterson in 1996. An interesting comparison is the estimation of the total numbers of atoms in the universe 1081 . The number of legal positions in chess according to him, however, is about 1050 . All these calculations will suffer slight changes when we apply new rules to chess, such as the Sofia rule or further estimation of the effect of en-passant. However, the numbers are close enough to show you how deep chess can be. Other game tree complexities (log game tree): Tic tac toe 5 Connect Four 21 Othello 58 Chess 120 Backgammon 140 Connect six 140 Go 766

Read this thru slowly and try to comprehend the amount of force produced in just under 4 seconds! There are no rockets or airplanes built by any government in the world that can accelerate from a standing start as fast as a Top Fuel Dragster or Funny Car! DEFINITION OF ACCELERATION One top fuel dragster 500 cubic inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first 4 rows of stock cars at the Daytona 500. It takes just 15/100ths of a second for all 6,000+ horsepower of an NHRA Top Fuel dragster engine to reach the rear wheels. Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1-1/2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25% less energy being produced. A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster's supercharger. With 3,000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition. Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle. At the stoichiometric (stoichiometry: methodology and technology by which quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions are determined) 17:1 air/fuel mixture of nitro methane, the flame front temperature measures 7,050 deg F. Nitro methane burns yellow... The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases. Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder. Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After halfway, the engine is dieseling from compression, plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1,400 deg F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow. If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient force to blow cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half. In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate an average of over 4G's. In order to reach 200 mph (well before half-track), the launch acceleration approaches 8G's. Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence. Top fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light! Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load. The redline is actually quite high at 9,500 rpm. Assuming all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs an estimate $1,000.00 per second. The current top fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.428 seconds for the quarter mile (11/12/06, Tony Schumacher, at Pomona , CA ). The top speed record is 336.15 mph as measured over the last 66' of the run (05/25/05 Tony Schumacher, at Hebron , OH ). Putting all of this into perspective: You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter 'twin-turbo' powered Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a top fuel dragster is staged and ready to launch down a quarter mile strip as you pass. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the 'Vette hard up through the gears and blast across the starting line and pass the dragster at an honest 200 mph. The 'tree' goes green for both of you at that moment. The dragster launches and starts after you. You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums and within 3 seconds, the dragster catches and passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter mile away from where you just passed him. Think about it, from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 mph and not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1,320 foot long race course. ...... and that my friend, is ACCELERATION!

October 18, 2011 at 12:02 pm Meteors, comets and why we’re lucky to be alive New analysis of data collected over 100 years ago suggests that the human race may have narrowly escaped extinction. Image courtesy couleewinds ( flickr.com/12057715@N00 ) Scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico have shed new light on data collected by Mexican astronomer José Bonilla in 1883. Hector Manterola and his team at UNAM suggest that the event Bonilla witnessed over 100 years ago was evidence of a highly fragmented comet missing the Earth by mere hundreds of kilometres, the impact of which would probably have caused “an extinction event”. Over the course of two days in August of 1883, Bonilla observed and recorded 447 objects passing in front of the sun from an observatory in Zacatecas, Mexico. Bonilla’s findings were published in the French journal, L’Astronomie, in 1886. With no explanation as to why other larger observatories never witnessed the phenomenon the editor of L’Astronomie speculated that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing in front of Bonilla’s telescope. Subsequent interpretations of the event have suggested yet another explanation – that Bonilla’s observations may have been evidence of UFO’s. The team at UNAM now hypothesize that what Bonilla observed were actually fragments of an astounding, billion-ton comet and the reason this went unnoticed by other observatories is that the comet fragments passed so close to the Earth as to only be visible to a miniscule swath of the planet. “According to our calculations, the distance at which the objects passed over the Earth’s surface, was between 538 km and 8,062 km, the width of the objects was between 46 m and 795 m and its length between 68 m and 1,022 m” -Hector Javier Durand Manterola, Maria de la Paz Ramos Lara, Guadalupe Cordero Manterola and his team point out that Bonilla observed these fragments for about three and a half hours over two days thus implying an average of 131 per hour and a total of 3,275 fragments during the time between his observations. They estimate that each fragment was at least as large as one thought to have touched down in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 – an impact calculated to be 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. It doesn’t take an astronomer to envision what 3,275 impacts over the span of two days might do to the Earth and its ecosystems. Some have been quick to criticize the team’s interpretation of the historical observations, one astronomer, Phil Plait, stating that “When a comet breaks up, it spreads out. Even when intact, the material surrounding a comet can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers across!” We’ll most likely never know for certain what it was that Bonilla witnessed, but if it was a comet, I hope for our sake that it’s not careening around for a second pass.

Although this is not Bach you may like this musician? Fantastic guitar, classical guitar, also he has created music for many movies, I have no doubt many are familiar with his music and may not even be aware of this. Sunburst http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAPEu7HhSx4