Floating (Jape song)

"Floating" is a 2004 single by the Irish band Jape, taken from the second studio album, The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me and described as "Jape's trademark song". Co-produced by David Kitt, the single was the first release from the album and was generally viewed by critics as the standout track on the album. In 2007, it featured on the EP, Jape is Grape, for which a video was made. Brendan Benson of The Raconteurs is a known admirer of the song and has performed a cover version during live shows.

Reception

"Floating" was a popular single on late night alternative music radio shows in Ireland. The national broadcaster RTÉ described the song as "part drugs story and part love song" and noted its "quirky instrumentation and Gregorian chanting". It described the lyrics as having "a definite feel of amateur philosophy at 5am" but it said that that was "not necessarily a bad thing".

Cover versions

The song was famously overheard being played in Whelan's in Dublin by the musician Brendan Benson who immediately requested a copy of the album. A friend at the venue informed the band of this development following a show at The Bloom Festival during The Rose of Tralee festival in County Kerry. Benson then praised Jape in The Guardian (however, the newspaper spelt it "Jabe") and rang the song's writer to inform him he would be covering "Floating" with his band The Raconteurs. Benson did not actually receive permission to cover the track although it has been said that he would have been allowed to had he asked. Jape witnessed the cover live at the Olympia Theatre and was later to describe it as "a great moment". "Floating" is also covered by the Belgian bastard pop duo Soulwax during their DJ sets.

Damping

Damping is an influence within or upon an oscillatory system that has the effect of reducing, restricting or preventing its oscillations. In physical systems, damping is produced by processes that dissipate the energy stored in the oscillation. Examples include viscous drag in mechanical systems, resistance in electronic oscillators, and absorption and scattering of light in optical oscillators. Damping not based on energy loss can be important in other oscillating systems such as those that occur in biological systems.

The damping of a system can be described as being one of the following:

For example, consider a door that uses a spring to close the door once open. This can lead to any of the above types of damping depending on the strength of the damping. If the door is undamped it will swing back and forth forever at a particular resonant frequency. If it is underdamped it will swing back and forth with decreasing size of the swing until it comes to a stop. If it is critically damped then it will return to closed as quickly as possible without oscillating. Finally, if it is overdamped it will return to closed without oscillating but more slowly depending on how overdamped it is. Different levels of damping are desired for different types of systems.

Floating (play)

Floating is the name of a stage production created and performed by "emerging Welsh performance artist" Hugh Hughes, in collaboration with British touring theatre company Hoipolloi. It tells the story of the Isle of Anglesey floating away from the mainland of Wales and voyaging around the world. Hughes performs alongside actor Sioned Rowlands. Hughes introduces the story to the audience and re-enacts the story, playing himself, with Rowlands playing all the other parts.

Floating won a Total Theatre Award at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Following its run in Edinburgh, the show has continued to tour to venues and festivals across the World including Sydney Opera House, Barbican Centre, Barrow Street Theatre in New York and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver.

Since Floating, Hugh Hughes has created two new stage shows, Story of a Rabbit and 360.

In September 2011, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new version of Floating as an Afternoon Play.

References

Eöl

Eöl, called the Dark Elf, is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He is introduced in The Silmarillion as an Elf of Beleriand and is a character existing in some form from the earliest to the latest writings.

Appearances

Eöl, the Dark Elf, was a Sinda and lord of the forest of Nan Elmoth, a fief, north-east of Doriath. Even before he encountered the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains in Eriador, he had close relationships with other Dwarves, whom he met (and learned much forging skills from) along his travel through Middle-earth. When he entered the lands of Beleriand, the Sindar from Doriath recognised Eöl's kinship, and accepted him fairly quickly among the high court of Menegroth, due to his skills.

He was vassal of the High-king of Beleriand, Thingol. Before the wars began he lived in Doriath. When Melian enclosed it with her magic Girdle of Melian to aid its defence he became uneasy and moved to Nan Elmoth outside the Girdle. One of the greatest Elven-smiths of Middle-earth, he forged Anglachel and Anguirel two great, black, magic swords. Made from a meteorite's metal, they can cut all earth-delved iron and have an entrapped sentience. His smithwork rivalled that of the greatest of the Elven-smiths, Fëanor and Celebrimbor, in both fame and fate. One sword, Anglachel, he gave to Thingol as tribute for living in Nan Elmoth and it was eventually used by Túrin to slay Glaurung the dragon. The other sword, Anguirel, he kept for himself. Eöl devised galvorn, a black metal of great strength and malleability, which he fashioned into armour that he wore when he went abroad. He was friend of the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost and, until the founding of the realms of the Noldor, all the traffic of goods between the Sindar and Dwarves passed through Nan Elmoth.

Euler–Lagrange equation

In calculus of variations, the Euler–Lagrange equation, Euler's equation, or Lagrange's equation (although the latter name is ambiguous—see disambiguation page), is a second-order partial differential equation whose solutions are the functions for which a given functional is stationary. It was developed by Swiss-Russian mathematician Leonhard Euler and French-Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the 1750s.

Because a differentiable functional is stationary at its local maxima and minima, the Euler–Lagrange equation is useful for solving optimization problems in which, given some functional, one seeks the function minimizing (or maximizing) it. This is analogous to Fermat's theorem in calculus, stating that at any point where a differentiable function attains a local extremum, its derivative is zero.

In Lagrangian mechanics, because of Hamilton's principle of stationary action, the evolution of a physical system is described by the solutions to the Euler–Lagrange equation for the action of the system. In classical mechanics, it is equivalent to Newton's laws of motion, but it has the advantage that it takes the same form in any system of generalized coordinates, and it is better suited to generalizations. In classical field theory there is an analogous equation to calculate the dynamics of a field.

Essl

Essl may refer to:

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