Monday, October 16, 2017

Apples Rainbows and Waves

Isaac Newton and the Apple
    It is one of the most famous anecdotes in the history of science. The young Isaac Newton is sitting in his garden, when an apple falls on his head and in a stroke of brilliant insight, he suddenly comes up with his theory of gravity. It was 1666, and the plague had closed many public buildings and places. Newton was obsessed by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and eventually reasoned that the influence of gravity must extend over vast distances. After seeing how apples always fall straight to the ground, he spent several years working on the mathematics showing that the force of gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance.  His thoughts ?  There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth's centre, not in any side of the Earth". Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple. It also had a resonance with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, and Newton was known to have religious views.

 Apple Computer
      Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer on April 1 1976 and incorporated the company on January 3 1977 in Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had been friends for some time, having met in 1971, through their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez. The Apple Lisa was a personal computer designed at Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s. Officially, “Lisa” stood for “Local Integrated Software Architecture”, but it was also the name of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' daughter.Development of the Lisa began in 1978  and it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at the very high price of US$9,995 with a 5 MB hard drive. 

Their First Logo 1977

Newtons Circle of Colour
      This circular diagram became the model for many color systems of the 18th and 19th centuries. Claude Boutet’s painter’s circle of 1708 was probably the first to be based on Newton’s circle.  Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton 1642-1726 and a series of experiments that he publishes in 1672. He is the first to understand the rainbow when he refracts white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. In the late 1660s, Newton starts experimenting with his ’celebrated phenomenon of colors.’ At the time, people thought that color was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms colored light. Newton set up a prism near his window, and projected a beautiful spectrum 22 feet onto the far wall. Further, to prove that the prism was not coloring the light, he refracted the light back together. Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light alone was responsible for color. His most useful idea for artists was his conceptual arrangement of colors around the circumference of a circle , which allowed the painters’ primaries red, yellow, blue to be arranged opposite their complementary colors ,as a way of denoting that each complementary would enhance the other’s effect through optical contrast.

 Colours in White Light and Newtons Disc



Colours of the Rainbow -- All colours bounce off at 40 to 42 degrees. Unique frequencies, make up more colors in a rainbow than there are stars in the Universe or atoms in your body, but that goes far beyond what we can perceive. Your imperfect eye can probably only discern about a million distinct colors when you view a rainbow, or anything else, for that matter. It’s only light ranging from about 400 nanometers to a little over 700 nanometers that provides us with the light visible to our human eyes.

Rainbows 



Sound Waves -- White noise, for example, contains all the audible frequencies, just like white light contains all the frequencies in the visible range. In musical sound waves, the frequencies are spaced at intervals that we find pleasing to the ear, creating a harmonic structure that gives a sound its unique tone quality, or timbre. The noises we hear every day, boots stomping across the floor, a car honking outside, the jingling of keys are made up of sporadic wave forms, a random distribution of frequency and amplitude. The other colors are similar to white noise, but with more energy concentrated at either the high or low end of the sound spectrum, which subtly changes the nature of the signal. Pink noise, for example, is like white noise with the bass cranked up. In recent years, pink noise has become the darling of the noise spectrum, dethroning white as the in-vogue option on sound generators for sleep or concentration.The pink noise pattern has been found in most genres of music.  If white is all frequencies at once, black is the color of silence.

What Color is a Mirror

Trivia
 Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Aubrey Powell -- He was born on 23 September 1946, co-founded the album cover design company Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson in 1967.The company ran successfully for 15 years until 1982. He was nominated for five Grammy Awards.

The story of where the album design came from by Aubrey Powell -- "I was looking through an old French book of early color photography from the 50s, and in this book was a photo of a prism on a piece of sheet music and sunlight coming in through the glass window. It was creating this rainbow effect. Storm said, “This is interesting. It sums up Pink Floyd. I’ve got it. We’ll do a triangle with a prism shape coming through it as a graphic, not as a photograph."

 When all the world is a hopeless jumble And the raindrops tumble all around Heaven opens a magic lane When all the clouds darken up the skyway There's a rainbow highway to be found Leading from your windowpane To a place behind the sun Just a step beyond the rain.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Ali and Boxing Inspirations


Bob Dylan and the The Hurricane
     Rubin Hurricane Carter's book, The 16th Round was published in 1974. Carter who had been in and out of jail all his life had in 1964 finally got a chance to fight for the middleweight title losing the fight to Joey Giardello. The book however was written about his fight for justice after being charged for a triple murder  in  1966. A murder he said he did not commit. At the time it made an impact on quite a few people of prominence with one of them being boxer Mohammad Ali and another, in musician Bob Dylan, who decided to visit Rubin in jail. Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the Hurricane in July 1975 . Dylan had to alter some lyrics as the retrial case was still being heard and was worried about mentioning names of the star witness's which could lead to court actions. Dylan used a considerable amount of poetic licence in the song but it had the desired effect and got peoples attention. Released on Dylan's 1976 album Desire. Carter was eventually tried and convicted twice for the murder in the Lafeyette Bar in 1966. Once in 1967 and again in the retrial in 1976 but in 1985 the second conviction was finally overturned and he was freed.


Hurricane Bob Dylan

 

                                               Rocky and Sylvestor Stallone

       Living in a one bedroom apartment in 1975, broke and needing some inspiration. Stallone decided to visit the library and spent most of the day  reading Edgar Allen Poe .  

      Then a couple of days later he viewed the Mohammad Ali V Chuck Wepner fight on TV . This became the inspiration for the script of Rocky and even though later denying this, after Wepner took out a lawsuit, over the script . Stallone settled out of court. Wepner was a huge underdog in the fight and knocked Ali down in the ninth round but with only nine seconds left of the fifteen round event, Wepnar himself was knocked to the canvas unable to get to his feet.
Ali vs Wepnar Final Round


      Stallone was so inspired by the fight that he sat down for three days straight and completed a movie script. Shortly after he was pulled in by his agency for a small part and he decide to offer the script to them and get their views on it. They offered him 25,000 for the script alone, but he would'nt take the deal unless he was able to play the role of Rocky. They eventually gave in to Stallone and gave him a million dollar budget to make it . It was basically filmed with a hand held camera for many of the scenes to keep the budget down. It ended up costing less than a million and earning over 200 million dollars.


Rocky Theme Songs
  •       Gonna Fly Now was Bill Conti's theme song for Rocky. He had written it and taken it to his friend, Carol Connors and asked her what she thought as he wanted to include some words with the music but could'nt come up with any suitable. The story goes like this, Carol was in the shower when Gonna Fly Now came into her head . That evening she called Bill who immediately  liked the words and that is history. The song had thirty words in total when finished. Trivia -- Carol Conners was the lead singer for the Teddy Bears who had the hit song To Know Him Is To Love Him.  
  •      Eye of the Tiger  was the theme song for the Rocky III movie which interestingly included a scene where Rocky got thrown out of the ring by a wrestler Hulk Hogan . After Wepner's fight with Ali his career headed downhill and in 1976 Wepner ended up in the ring with Andre the Giant where he was thrown out of the ring. I dont think this is coincidental . Wepner retired from boxing in 1978



      Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky,on January 17th 1942. His first boxing bout was in 1954 which he won in a split decision . He won three Louisville Golden Gloves titles before winning the National Golden Gloves in 1959. The following year he became an Olympic gold medalist. Then in 1964 he won the world heavyweight boxing title for the first time .It was after this fight that he converted to Islam and then in 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam conflict he was called up for military service. Ali refused to be enlisted so was stripped of his title and had a battle to keep himself out of jail. Finally in the seventies he got the opportunity to reclaim the title .Eventually becoming the first person to hold it three times. Recording wins in famed bouts against Frazier and Foreman. He was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1984 after which Ali devoted much of his time to philanthropy and in 2005 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on June 3rd 2016 in Phoenix Arizona.


Ali Quotes
  • I'm so fast that last night .I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark. 
  •  I've seen George Foreman shadow box and the shadow won. 
  • At home I'm a humble guy, but i dont want the world to know. Humble people ,I've found don't get very far. 
  • I said I was the greatest , I never said I was the smartest.
  • Don't wait for the world to recognize your greatness,live it and let the world catch up to you.
  • I am the greatest . I said that before I even knew I was.   
  • Inside the ring or out , aint nothing wrong with going down. Its staying down thats wrong. 
Mohammad Ali and Sam Cooke recording The Gangs All Here


    
said Ali "captured the imagination and support of the entire dark world". 
Lawrence Guyot Civil Rights Organiser
said"He was this beautifully arrogant young man. Who made us proud to be us and proud to fight for our rights".