Ylem

Ylem is a term that was used by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and their associates in the late 1940s for a hypothetical original substance or condensed state of matter, which became subatomic particles and elements as we understand them today. The term ylem was actually coined by Ralph Alpher.

In modern understanding, the "ylem" described as by Gamow was the primordial plasma, formed in baryogenesis, which underwent Big Bang nucleosynthesis and was opaque to radiation. Recombination of the charged plasma into neutral atoms made the Universe transparent at the age of 380,000 years, and the radiation released is still observable as cosmic microwave background radiation.

History

It reportedly comes from an obsolete Middle English philosophical word that Gamow's assistant Ralph Alpher came across while thumbing through a dictionary, which means something along the lines of "primordial substance from which all matter is formed" (that in ancient mythology of many different cultures was called the cosmic egg), and ultimately derives from the Greek ὕλη (hūlē, hȳlē), "matter," probably via an accusative singular form in Latin hylen, hylem. Restated, the ylem is what Gamow, et al., presumed to exist immediately after the Big Bang. Within the ylem, there were assumed to be a large number of high-energy photons present. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman made a scientific prediction in 1948 that we should still be able to observe these red-shifted photons today as an ambient cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) pervading all space with a temperature of about five Kelvin(when the CMBR was actually first detected in 1965, its temperature was found to be three Kelvin). It is now recognized that the CMBR originated at the transition from predominantly ionized hydrogen to non-ionized hydrogen at around 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

Ylem (Stockhausen)

Ylem is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen for a variable ensemble of 19 or more players, and is given the work number 37 in his catalogue of compositions.

History

Ylem is "phoenix music", in that it represents the continual rebirth of the universe, according to the theory of the oscillating universe, which holds that the universe periodically explodes every 80,000,000,000 years. The title of the work is taken from the term ylem, a word used in medieval Latin, the accusative of the borrowed Greek term hylē (ὕλη, "matter"), and adopted in the 1940s by the physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher to refer to the essential material of the universe, in the context of the "Big Bang theory (Peters 1999, 98–99). The subject of the composition is, in short, "the 'breath' of the universe" (Lavery 1980, 21). The score is dedicated to the composer’s son Simon, who was five years old at the time of composition. It was composed in December 1972 for a tour with the London Sinfonietta, who gave the premiere on 9 March 1973 under the composer’s direction, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London (Stockhausen 1978, 212). The next evening, the same forces rehearsed and performed the piece on a live television broadcast from 10:50 to 11:30 pm on BBC2's Full House, hosted by John Bird, with questions from the studio audience and phoned in by viewers. Three studio recordings of this version were made on 21 March 1973 in the EMI Studios, London (Stockhausen 1992, 2 and 5).

Ylem (album)

Ylem (pronounced e-lem) is the sixth full-length studio release from German melodic black metal band Dark Fortress; and the second to feature new vocalist Morean. The album was released on January 22, 2010 in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and on January 25, 2010 for the rest of Europe. It was also released on February 9, 2010 in the United States of America.

Track listing

Bonus tracks on Slipsleeve version only

Personnel

References

External links

Plasma

Plasma or plasm may refer to:

Biology

Computing

Media and entertainment

KDE

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The goal of the community is to develop free software solutions and applications for the daily needs of an end-user, as well as providing tools and documentation for developers to write such software. In this regard, the resources provided by KDE make it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.

History

Origins

K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

KDE Plasma 4

KDE Plasma 4, subsequently renamed from KDE Plasma Workspaces, is the umbrella term for the fourth generation graphical environments provided by KDE. It comprehended of three workspaces, each targeting a certain platform: Plasma Desktop for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks, Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablet PCs and similar devices.

KDE Plasma 4 was released as part of KDE Software Compilation 4 and replaced Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba, which formed the Desktop in earlier KDE releases. They are bundled as the default environment with a number of free software operating systems, such as Chakra,Kubuntu,Mageia (DVD version),openSUSE, or PC-BSD.

With the release of KDE SC 4.11 on 14 August 2013 KDE Plasma 4 was put into "feature freeze" and turned into an long-time stable package until August 2015. On 15 July 2014 KDE Plasma 4’s successor, KDE Plasma 5, was released.

Features

Plasma features containments, essentially an applet that contains other applets. Two examples of containments are the desktop background and the taskbar. A containment can be anything the developer wants: an image (either raster graphics or an SVG image), animation, or even OpenGL. Images are most commonly used, but with Plasma the user could set any applet as the desktop background without losing functionality of the applet. This also allows for applets to be dragged between the desktop and the taskbar (two separate containments), and have a separate visualization for the more confined taskbar.