Mid-morning. Welcome back, boy. – Amorella
1002
hours. Thank you, Amorella. We were up earlier, had breakfast, read the Sunday
paper and I did my exercises while Carol was drying her hair. Presently I am in
the shadow of the woods at the far north lot at Pine Hill Lakes Park while
Carol is on her walk.
First,
I am surprised that I like ancestry.com so well but I do and of course this new
software Family Tree Maker Mac 3, is made for it. I have loaded 250 family
members onto the ‘Orndorff-Hammond-Paik’ tree. I am delighted to be continuing
the work Great Aunt Floy Orndorff Gray began so many years ago. I think she
would be quite happy with the progress. After the last work I did, mainly from
2001-2003 there is a lot more online and other people have filled in and
documented many gaps and additional ancestors for me. For instance, John Wakeman
1523-1590 – Joan Beauchamps 1526-1587 in Worchestershire, England we now have
evidence that Joan is a direct descendant of John Beauchamp of Warwickshire. (1015)
1115
hours. We are up at Grandma’s Garden about a half mile north of SR 73 on SR 48.
Carol thought it was time for a ride and it helps if there is a destination.
Boy, the Beauchamps name doesn’t mean
anything any more, don’t you think. – Amorella
1121
hours. No, probably no more than most other names but historically in England
it was important and Aunt Floy would like that we were related. I love English
history so it means something to me too. Otherwise, it is just a name like
Eisenhower, lots of people with that name but few if any are probably ever
asked if they are related to the former President and Commander in Chief.
** **
John de Beauchamp, 1st Baron
Beauchamp of Kidderminster (1274-1336) was an
administrator and landowner. He came from Holt, Worcestershire, and belonged to
a cadet branch of the great family of Beauchamp, whose head was the Earl of
Warwick. He was the son of another John (born 1319), whom he succeeded in the
1360s. A favourite of the ailing King Edward III King, in the years 1370 to
1375 he received several grants of offices, including the constableship of
Bridgnorth Castle. He was elected for Worcestershire to Edward III's last
parliament (January 1377) and Richard II’s first (October 1377).
Richard II regarded him warmly,
and acted as godfather to his son. Retained in the household, Beauchamp soon
received substantial further patronage, and by 1384 he had been made Receiver
of the Chamber and Keeper of the King's Jewels. He took the order of knighthood
on Richard II's entry into Scotland in 1385. That December he was granted for
life the office of Justiciar of North Wales, to which was added in August 1386
a charter of liberties within his recently purchased estate at Kidderminster.
Even though the Commons demanded in October that a new Steward of the Household
be appointed only in parliament, Richard II refused to comply, and in January
1387 he promoted Beauchamp to the stewardship. Even more provocative was Sir
John's creation on 10 October following as ‘Lord of Beauchamp and Baron of
Kidderminster’, a new dignity to be maintained from the estates of Deerhurst
Priory. This was the first creation of a peerage by letters patent.
Beauchamp's rapid rise from
esquire to baron could not be borne by the Lords Appellant, who included his
kinsman, Thomas Beauchamp, 12th Earl of Warwick. The latter probably
saw the rise of his cousin as a threat to his dominance of the midlands.
Arrested and imprisoned along with three other household knights, Lord
Beauchamp was impeached in the Merciless Parliament in 1388 and condemned by
the lords for treason. He was beheaded on Tower Hill and buried in Worcester
Cathedral. Fortunately for his heir, John Beaucham, 2nd Baron
Beauchamp of Kidderminster, then aged eleven, he had entailed certain of his
manors, so these were exempt from forfeiture.
From Wikipedia
** **
1219 hours. We have stopped at Pinecrest Greenhouse on
Rt. 42 near Sharonville for two tomatoes plants. The above shows the fun in
genealogy – here we are a famous man in his time no doubt made more infamous as
he was beheaded for treason by the House of Lords. (1221)
Mid-afternoon. You had a late ‘Mother’s Day’
dinner at Outback; Carol had salmon and you the six-ounce special steak. The
split salad was on the house and you split the carrot cake dessert also. You
offered to pay from your own monies but Carol insisted. Now you are home and
you are both going to relax inside this June, summer hot afternoon. A comment I
prefer to make is about John de Beauchamp is the ‘surprise’ you noted upon
reading while at Grandma’s Garden. This is what caught your heart and soul, boy
– Beauchamp was a good friend of King Edward III who was a good friend of
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). A bit of your genes may have touched a bit of
Chaucer’s genes, second hand, of course, but it is a delight to me.’ That’s the
way you see it. And, secretly, ‘there is always a chance John Beauchamp had
meet old Geoffrey himself’. - Amorella
** **
In 1360, Chaucer was captured by the French while serving as a soldier;
the King paid a ransom of 16 pounds for his release. In 1367, Chaucer became a
squire in Edward's household, receiving an lifetime annuity of 20 pounds. At
the Feast of the Garter in 1374, Edward granted Chaucer a daily pitcher of wine
(a royal sign of special favor).
From - http://home-dot-gwu.edu/~jhsy/chaucer-ppp.html
** **
1551
hours. The above on Edward III and Chaucer is very cool in my heart and soul. What
a wonderful thought, here I taught Chaucer (and loved him for his writings and wit) for thirty-five years and one of my
ancestors may have seen and even spoke with him in the king’s presence. The very concept evokes ‘wonderful amazement’ on my part that this was even a possibility. –
rho
You both had a piecemeal supper while
watching NBC News and then 60 Minutes. Once online and on Facebook you
remembered the BBC science article you posted Friday. Here it is. - Amorella
** **
SCIENCE
& ENVIRONMENT
30 May 2014
Last updated at 07:18 ET
Quantum phenomenon shown in $15m D-Wave computer
Scientists
says they have obtained the best evidence yet for an important quantum physics
phenomenon inside a $15m computer built by a Canadian firm.
D-Wave
claims it has built the first practical quantum computer, a type of machine
that could solve complex problems faster than is possible today.
Scientists
say they have shown that an effect called "entanglement" is present
in eight units of quantum information.
Entanglement
is a key step towards building a practical platform.
The
results have just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review
X.
D-Wave,
based in Burnaby, outside Vancouver, has courted controversy with its claim to
have built a practical quantum computer, a feat that was thought to be decades
away.
In a
tangle
Quantum
computing exploits the strange physics of quantum mechanics, which takes hold
at tiny (atomic or sub-atomic) scales.
The
basic units of information in classical computers are called "bits"
and are stored as a string of 1s and 0s, but their equivalents in a quantum
system - qubits - can be both 1s and 0s at the same time.
But
the qubits need to be synchronised using a quantum effect known as
entanglement, which Albert Einstein dubbed "spooky action at a
distance".
"This
is the first peer-reviewed scientific paper that proves entanglement in D-Wave processors," Dr Colin
Williams, director of business development at D-Wave, told BBC News.
"What's
even more remarkable is that this is the largest demonstration of entanglement
in any quantum, superconducting computing scheme so far," he said.
"It's a big achievement for the field."
They
also showed that the entanglement was stable, persisting throughout a critical
operation of the processor. The vast majority of academic research into this
area of computing is based around the model of "quantum gates". These
are the quantum equivalents of the logic gates that form the building blocks of
circuits in classical computing. But D-Wave has taken a different approach
known as quantum annealing. On a particular type of mathematical challenge
known as an optimisation problem, annealing can, in theory, short-cut classical
computers to the best answer.
Working
together
The
authors of the latest study used one of the qubits as a "probe" to
provide information on the other qubits in D-Wave's processor. Using this
information, they were able to calculate how much entanglement there was in the
system.
Dr
Federico Spedalieri of University of Southern California's Viterbi Information
Sciences Institute and co-author of the paper, said: "There's no way
around it. Only quantum systems can be entangled. This test provides the
experimental proof that we've been looking for."
Prof
Alan Woodward, from the University of Surrey, told BBC News: "One of the
three quantum effects that you need for it to be defined as a true quantum
computer is entanglement."
Calling
the result "a big deal", he added: "It does appear to be conclusive
that they have a large number of qubits entangled and they do see to be working
together."
D-Wave's
processor uses 512 qubits, but the technique in the latest study was able to
characterise only eight qubits.
Sceptics
about D-Wave computers such as Prof Scott Aaronson of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) say the machines show "pretty good"
evidence for entanglement at a local level, but not necessarily on a large
scale.
But
in response, Dr Williams said there was reason to believe entanglement is
pervasive across the processor.
"We
could have chosen any part of the processor to do this experiment on," he
explains, adding: "There's no reason to believe the entanglement is
limited to just these eight qubits.
"We've
done other experiments to determine entanglement in different unit cells and we
see similar results."
Prof
Woodward commented: "In quantum physics, one of the really difficult
things is to witness something because as soon as you witness something, you
interfere with it.
"By
being a witness, you have to be careful you don't become part of what you're
seeing. But the techniques they've used are generally accepted as showing what
they are able to show: entanglement among a fairly large number of stable
qubits."
However,
sceptics doubt that the machines are leveraging quantum physics for any
performance boost relative to classical machines.
While
entanglement is required to get quantum "speed-up", they argue that
it is perfectly possible to have entanglement without speed-up.
In
one study released in 2013, Catherine McGeoch of Amherst College in
Massachusetts, a consultant for D-Wave, found the machine was 3,600 times
faster on some tests than a desktop computer.
But
a study published earlier this earlier year by Matthias Troyer from ETH Zurich
in Switzerland and colleagues pitted the D-Wave machine against a standard
high-spec desktop computer.
On
some tests chosen by the team, D-Wave's machine was found to offer no
performance boost over the regular computer.
However,
D-Wave maintains that the tests used by Prof Troyer's team were not ones where
the company's computer offers any advantage. Indeed, Dr Williams even argues
that the random challenges were too easy for the computer, which was designed
to tackle a very difficult and specialised class of problems.
Dr
Williams said the stability of entanglement revealed in the latest study
further underlined that quantum annealing was more robust than the gate model
of quantum computing.
Lab
devices based on the gate model suffer from dropout, where the qubits lose
their ambiguity and become straightforward 1s and 0s. This has in part ensured
that quantum computers remain confined to the lab.
Quantum annealing is not as
susceptible to this dropout problem, but advocates of the gate model argue that
D-Wave's approach can't provide the performance boost theoretically possible
with gates.
From BBC News, 30 May 2014
** **
Qubits
- synchronized entanglement – D-Wave and quantum annealing is what hits your
mind, but ‘synchronized entanglement’ goes deeper, to the heart. That’s how it
reads in here, boy.
2035
hours. Why is that, Amorella? The way it looks from my perspective is that
whatever my ‘heart’ is, it feeds on imagination as much as it does on
probability (no matter how little) in science.
Since you asked, here is what it comes down
to – back in 1954 or so you had seen a flying saucer movie at the drive in
theatre with the family and you got the idea in your head that it might be
possible to communicate with aliens via the short wave radio as you scanned
through the dials most every night listening for short wave broadcasts from
around the world. Later, in the late seventies you put these concepts to work
in your first science fiction novel, Anno Dominae and other ‘starter’ works.
The key literary work was a short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry
Bates. It was suggested to you by Vladimir R. at Escola Graduada de Sao Paulo
in 1970.
** **
"Farewell to the
Master" is a science fiction short story written by Harry Bates. It
was first published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It provided the basis of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still and its 2008
remake. In 1973, the story was adapted by Marvel Comics for its Worlds Unknown series with Bates'
blessing.
Plot
The story is told from the
viewpoint of Cliff Sutherland, a free-lance picture reporter, who is present
when a mysterious "curving
ovoid" ship instantaneously appears in the grounds of the United States Capitol in Washington,
D.C. Two days later, "visitors from the Unknown" emerge: a
"god-like" person in human form and an 8-foot (2.44 m) tall
robot made of green metal. The former only manages to state "I am Klaatu
and this is Gnut" before he is shot and killed by a lunatic. Klaatu is buried
nearby. In the days that follow, Gnut remains motionless, while laboratories
and a museum are built around it and the ship. Both prove impervious to the
investigations of scientists.
Sutherland discovers that
the robot enters the ship each night when no one is watching, emerging to
resume its position for the day. Gnut is aware of the reporter, but ignores
him. After several odd encounters, Sutherland informs the world what he has
learned. Gnut is encased in "glasstex", finally forcing the robot's
hand. It breaks out, unaffected by all attempts to destroy it, picks up
Sutherland and travels to the mausoleum containing Klaatu's corpse. It opens
the tomb and takes a recording of Klaatu's voice stored there. It then returns
and goes inside the ship.
Sutherland daringly boards the
ship before the entrance closes and learns that the robot is working on a way
to create a copy of Klaatu from an audio recording of his greeting. The new
Klaatu is flawed, because the recording is imperfect, and he dies soon after speaking
with the reporter. Sutherland then suggests retrieving the original recording
device, to study it and discover how to compensate for its imperfections. Gnut
eagerly adopts this idea. Sutherland arranges that the equipment be brought to
it; later, when he intuitively senses that the robot is ready to depart, he
impresses upon it the need to tell its masters that Klaatu's death was an
accident, leading to a surprise ending. Gnut replies, "You misunderstand, I
am the master."
From - Wikipedia
** **
Deep
in your adolescent fantasies you wanted to speak with aliens and learn from
them. So, the aliens continued until the late eighties when you happened upon
the concept of marsupial humanoids and here we are. – Amorella
2108
hours. I remember reading the short story while we were overseas and what I
remember most was that the short story, was, to me, much more impressive than
The Day the Earth Stood Still which was, to me, a wonderful science fiction
film in its day. I liked the remake also, but neither had the affect on me that
the short story had – to make the mistake that the ‘humanoid’ had to be the
master.
It
was the twist that turned my mind inside out. I remember Vlad’s explanation. He
looked at me straight on with those honest and mischievous eyes of his, pointed
his right index finger to his right eye and his left index finger to his left
eye and then flipped his right finger to his left eye and his left finger to
his right eye. That was his visual of “You misunderstand, I am the master.” I will never forget that moment. The two of us
had an immediate understanding of the other in that context.
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