Ray Manzarek, incredibly influential keyboardist for The Doors, has passed away. His bouncy, jazzy organ melodies and rhythms were an essential ingredient in what made that band what it was.

Paul Dirac. Predicted the existence of antimatter, created some of quantum mechanics’ key equations, and laid the foundations for today’s micro-electronics industry. Won a Nobel prize. Turned down a knighthood because he didn’t want people using his first name.

I couldn’t put together a better list of great physicists than the Guardian has done. It’s good to see the ones that aren’t household names (but should be) like Maxwell, Rutherford, and Dirac.

1. Isaac Newton
2. Niels Bohr
3. Galileo Galilei
4. Albert Einstein
5. James Maxwell
6. Michael Faraday
7. Marie Curie
8. Richard Feynman
9. Ernest Rutherford
10. Paul Dirac

Of course there’s a strong case for the inclusion of Nikola Tesla.

My favourite bit in the Guardian bios of the above physicists is this:

For his achievements, Carlsberg brewery gave [Niels] Bohr a special gift: a house with a pipeline connected to its brewery next door, thus providing him with free beer for life.

Now that’s a satisfying career.

This is Kiera Wilmot. She’s a 16-year-old American schoolgirl who carried out a mildly risky chemistry experiment on school grounds. For this she was arrested, expelled, and is presently being charged with a felony that could result in up to 5 years in prison.

Kids do stupid things that put themselves and others at risk of harm all the time. But this was not a stupid thing: it was curiosity. Arresting and expelling her seems like an incredible overreaction. Experimentation is one of the fundamental ways in which an interest in science is expressed and nurtured.

Here are two good responses that reflect the general opinion of the community that cares about science more than sealing kids in bubble wrap:

• The Urban Scientist (Scientific American): Scientists’ Support for Kiera Wilmot
• Starts With a Bang (ScienceBlogs): Why Science Is Anything But A Crime

Melbourne band Kingswood (named, I can only assume, after the classic Australian car) have some of that sound. Perhaps it’s the shared initial five letters in their names. Or the beards.

Kingswood have less of the southern rootsiness in their guitar-rock sound. But they have immense energy, and a knack for a catchy hook. And they have that other thing I love: falsetto. Gets me every time.

I love their new song, “Ohio”: 

Click here to check out more from their first album, like this blues-infused rocker:

1973.

The opening act was some NZ ’90s hard rock outfit called Shihad. We only caught their last song. Meh.

Then, because my mate Vince is charming as hell, he got all our nosebleed rooftop seats swapped for way-down lower-bowl right-beside-the-stage seats. Well done, Vince! A prompt start by Sabbath meant we missed the first few riffs of “War Pigs” as we moved, but we soon settled in.

Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tony Iommi.

What followed next was legendary metal with a bit of awkward farce thrown in.

I was really impressed by the band. Tony and Geezer still have it, completely. The guitar riffs were dark and epic. The bass was fuzzy and menacing. Original drummer Bill Ward declined to take part but Tommy Clufetos did the metal drummer thing to perfection, including a 7-minute strobe-powered solo.

Ozzy’s voice was better than I expected, mostly. He can still hit the notes, and he’s largely intelligible, and his tone fits the unsettling music just right, as it did on the albums all those decades ago.

I remind myself several times during the night that these guys invented this stuff. Countless generations of black T-shirt wearing metal bands and fans owe a massive debt to those arpeggio riffs, to those minor-keyed laments of alienation, to all those tempo changes. Black Sabbath came out 43 years ago. It was awesome to hear it played live by the guys who dreamt it up, and to hear them still being able to lay it down.

“Children of the Grave”, “N.I.B.”, Black Sabbath”, “Fairies Wear Boots”, and encore “Paranoid” were thrilling highlights to hear.

Downsides: Ozzy gets a little annoying. It’s fascinating to watch his shambolic shuffling about and fun to watch him throw buckets of water on the audience. He’s as energetic as any other mid-60s frontman out there (except Iggy) especially considering that he’s spent so many decades in a chemical fog. But it’s still tiring to hear him ask us to “Show me your fucking hands!” or “Go fucking crazy!” over and over and over again. His crowd banter is pretty limited and repetitive.

Also, he wasn’t on top form for “Electric Funeral” or, sadly, “Iron Man”. And the new songs, plus iffy mid-career tracks like “Dirty Women”, weren’t great. The show slumped in a few of these songs.

But overall the good was much bigger than the bad. I got to see musical legends do what they did, and what they still do, live. The show was fun and good-natured (metal shows I’ve attended are always the most friendly) and epic. We thrashed and sang and shook and fist-pumped and yelled. Dark, brooding riffery has been part of the musical landscape as long as I’ve been alive; I’m glad its creators got to show me how it’s done.

You can see a couple of videos from the crowd in the embedded YouTubes below. Rock on.

Sheryl Crow covering Hank Williams. She’s got plenty of great songs of her own, of course, but tributes to a true legend like Hank are something special.

Joan Osborne singing “Right Hand Man”. She had a smash hit with that stupid song about God being a slob like one of us, but this 7/4 blues rocker is way better.

Hole’s “Miss World”. Raw punk grunge was so good.

Artist’s impression of a single phosphorus atom, placed in the vicinity of a silicon transistor.

Why is this important?

• Quantum computing means a potentially massive (like, exponentially massive) increase in computing speed and capacity.
• This UNSW experiment was done in fairly normal conditions, with solid-state devices and normal silicon circuitry. Qubits with similar accuracy in the past have required very specialised conditions: atoms in a vacuum suspended in a magnetic field, for instance.

So the real breakthrough here is the practicality by which they were able to achieve their quantum computing result. It’s one step closer to being able to deliver quantum computing on a practical scale. Remember, the regular computers we’re familiar with used to weigh many tons and fill entire rooms. Quantum computing will likely go through a similar process.

You can read the media release or get even more background info about quantum computing from the UNSW.

The opening act was a substantial set from R&B legend Mavis Staples. And yes, anyone who started performing as a member of The Staples Singers family in 1950 is a legend. She and her tight band served up a whole bunch of gospel soul. It was polished but heartfelt, a classy old-school set of songs that appealed to pop as much as civil rights protests as much as God. Mavis can still holler. They did a stirring version of The Band’s “The Weight”, and pledged some love to the departed Levon Helm. And Bonnie Raitt even came out early to play “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” with Mavis and the band.

Bonnie was soon out for her own set, though. Most people know of Raitt through her easy-listening blues-pop hits since the early ’90s, though she had been recording – and critically acclaimed, if never commercially successful – for two decades before that. She’s a comfortable songwriter and performer, a competent bottleneck slide guitarist, and has a knack for introducing a variety of musical styles into her songs in a really approachable way.

All of these aspects came out on stage. She never missed a beat, even with some ostensible on-stage confusion as she changed the setlist. Everything just seemed cool and smooth, every guitar lick sounded great. Bonnie herself sounded and looked amazing (for any age, we agreed, not just the 63 years she actually is).

The close proximity to the previous night’s punk antics made some of it a little too smooth for me, maybe. But you can’t hate Raitt, nor chastise her overmuch for being classy and caring about tone. She is the anti-Iggy.

Of course she played “Have a Heart”, “Thing Called Love”, “I Can’t Make You Love Me”, and “Something To Talk About”. I was surprised she didn’t do “Love Letter” or “Love Sneakin’ Up On You”, but those are pretty lightweight hits so nothing was lost.

Highlights for me were songs that can serve as near bookends: her 1974 version of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” was beautiful, and her 2012 rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Million Miles” was spookily intense. You can watch live versions of both of these, from a show last year, below.

Note that “Million Miles” is one of two songs on her last release, Slipstream, that are covers from Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind album (the other being “Standing in the Doorway”). Good taste, Bonnie.

The blues – in one of its many and varied forms – lives on in Bonnie Raitt.

First up was Beasts of Bourbon. Tex Perkins is one of those musical gems that never really made it outside Australia. I’d never heard of him until I saw him in a Johnny Cash tribute here a few years ago. But last night I became a convert to the Beasts. It was primal pub rock with punk sensibilities. Tex’s growl, the insanely loud guitar drone, and verse after chorus of profane, nihilistic blues made some of the best stuff I’ve ever heard that came out of the ’80s. I’m sorry I missed it. They opened with “Chase the Dragon“, kept the pace with songs like “I Told You So” and the newer “I Don’t Care About Nothing Anymore“, and closed with the nutty “Let’s Get Funky“.

Then, The Stooges. I remember hearing whispers about these guys from my cousins as a kid. How they were the most insane band ever, how Iggy had been institutionalised. Later I heard their music and saw how they took rock to its next, necessary evolutionary step.

I saw it written this week that The Stooges were, in the late ’60s, the first rock ‘n’ roll band to be completely devoid of any of the R&B influence, and I think that’s exactly right. It’s raucous, dangerous, everything that’s rough and scary and confrontational about rock music and nothing that’s groovy. Iggy Pop is the frontman that Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison gave birth to. Altogether it had to spawn punk, and that gave popular rock music the shot it needed.

Last night they (and “they” has, other than Iggy and drummer Scott Asheton, changed a lot over the years) showed that The Stooges’ vision remains a pure one. And “primal” remained the word of the night. The band are all old guys but they rock hard enough that my ears are still ringing today. They provided the aggressive aural world in which Iggy Pop could writhe and taunt and scream and spit and do things that no 65-year-old ex-junkie should be able to do.

“Raw Power” and “Gimme Danger” were fun and brutal and noisy and joyous. The three-song run of “Search and Destroy“, “1970″ and “Fun House” with its usual stage-dancing crowd invitation was one of the most powerful live things I’ve witnessed. Closing the main set with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun” was brilliant. Even new song “Burn” was pretty cool.

Here’s the band playing “1970″ a little more than a year ago. Primal energy, love it or hate it: see what I mean?

Iggy and the Stooges: does what it says on the tin.

Bonus video: Iggy Pop and Tom Waits try to out-cool each other in Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes”.

In yet another marvelous convergence of science and music researchers at Western Washington University claim you can rid yourself of an earworm by solving anagrams* (that is, rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to form another word or phrase). And if that doesn’t work you can just read a book.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, allowing it to  be replaced by other, more amenable, thoughts.

But the researchers warn against trying anything too difficult because this can allow the melodies to wiggle their way back into your consciousness

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel can do the trick.

Me, I’m always getting Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” in my head. But doing an anagram of “dooby dooby doo” is pretty limiting; it doesn’t get much better than “Yo, Do Booby, Dodo”.

*Exciting finding: Google still has a sense of humour.