My pours haven’t been precise up to this point in my unpeated living bottle.  The figures I gave last time about the relative volumes of the constituent whiskies were close but not perfect.  They summed to 175 mL (but I did not measure it) before I poured off a tasting sample.  My sample was probably about 25 ml, then I found another bottle to add (allegedly) 50 mL of to it, then poured off two tasting samples on two nights.  Now I’ve measured the volume, and it’s, as far as I can tell, exactly 200 mL.  I’ve made a measurement error.  Assuming my errors were constant up until now (a significant assumption, but reasonable since I’ve been doing the same equipment), I’ve been off by about 25% in my pours.  But I have calibrated my equipment now, and now we can begin newly calibrated.

What we need to do is to pour off enough of the existing bottle so that it matches the series as we want to continue.  Currently our formula for the total volume before the pouring should be ((7*8)/(2*7))*X=250, where X is the size of the pours I’ve actually been making.  Solving for X, we get X = 250/4, or 62.5mL.  I measured the amount I think I’ve been pouring, and it’s very close to this number.  We’ve already poured off 50 mL of this, or 20%, so we have therefore poured out 20% of our largest pour, 62.5 mL, leaving us at (ta da) 50 mL.  So what’s the amount we have to pour out to make this fit our series?  The hard way to do this is with division, but since we now have a bottle with 50 mL of the largest contributor in place and everything else in line, we can intuitively see that we just need to pour off a standard tasting sample, 25 mL, and our bottle will be ready for the next contribution.  Seen another way, (1/7 + 2/7 + … + 6/7 + 7/7) * 50 is (56/7)/2 * 50, or 4 * 50 is our current volume before the pour  (200 mL).  So hold on while I go pour one.

The whisky I added was Aberlour 100, a nice, Christmasy, sherried malt.

To run down the contributions so far, it’s:

• 7 mL Glendronach 15 sherry cask
• 14 mL Aberlour a’bunadh, euro bottling (heavily sherried)
• 21 mL Glenturret ‘80/’00 (Blackadder)
• 29 mL Glen Moray 12 Chenin Blanc finish
• 35 mL Glen Moray 16
• 43 mL Glen Garioch 8
• 50 mL Aberlour 100

Nose: Candied fruits, spiced apple cider, raspberry fudge truffles, rye crackers.

Palate:  Prickly, warm, reminiscent of a young sherried Glenfarclas, cinnamon imperials.

Finish:  Somewhat muddled at first, then resolving into licorice and hints of cherry sours.

Notes:  As you can see, the sherry casks are back, making up 36% of the volume, letting the worse whiskies take on filler roles.

Score: 86/100

I’ve added one more sample to the bottle, which I’ll leave to marry for a week and have another installment of the series.

Click “living bottle” below (grey metadata box on the site itself) for the other entries in the series.

I thought Eddie Vedder was born in 1963.  That would mean that I was coming right upon the day where I would be the same age as he when Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten was released.  Turns out, I misremembered.  He was born in 1964.  That means I reached this age last year.  In fact, I’m older than all the artists on Ten were when it was released.  So, everyone who knows me, realize that all that accomplishment on Ten was by people younger than me.  Impressive.

If that’s not humbling enough, think about the fact that Robert Plant was just twenty years old when Led Zeppelin’s first album was released.

(Look at those low used prices below!  No, I don’t get a kickback when you buy used merch from Amazon.  Just, seriously, if you don’t own the CDs, shell out the seven dollars it would cost to pick them both up.)

eBay Pack Your Bags & Win It Contest Rules: “All random drawings will be conducted on or about 12:00 pm, P.T. by Strobe Promotions, Inc., the independent judging organization, in Hicksville, NY … As a condition for receiving any prize, winners who are residents of Canada will be required to correctly answer (unaided) a time-limited mathematical skill-test question.”

What?

Enter the contest.

Article XI

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.  (Translation from the Arabic.)

Signed in Tripoli, subsequently unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams.

integrals.wolfram.com.  Powered by Mathematica.

I just finished reading Nicholas A. Basbanes’ Among the Gently Mad, a book about book collectors and book collecting that has many insights to offer about the phenomenon of collecting in general, how a germ of an idea will snowball into a major quest, and the value-adding properties of assembling a choice lot, wherein the whole becomes far more valuable than the separate parts.  Speaking as a collector of various things, I read with interest his insights into the mind of the collector — I frequently wonder the value and purpose of my collecting pursuits, and Basbanes’ analysis of the art and science of collecting do much to mollify.

The book cites two intriguing books: Double Fold, about the betrayal of the public by librarians who destroy books to save them, and Understanding Book Collecting, which is less intriguing to me now that I read that it is targeted for the British collector.

Check out magiccards.info for advanced searches on Magic: The Gathering cards and a cool random card feature.

Do autocard links like this: http://magiccards.info/autocard/Forest.

Inspired by a friend, I’ve begun two “living bottles” of scotch whisky, to populate as I finish bottles.  This is doubly cool: it allows me to have living bottles, of course, but it also gives me an excuse to finish off bottles, which I otherwise would leave with two pours left in them for all eternity.

It’s essentially a solera system.  Every time I get close to finishing a bottle, I’ll pour 50 mL from the bottom into a living bottle.  Then I’ll shake it up, let it settle, and pour off 25 mL as a tasting sample.  I worked out the math, and the solution for concentrations is really elegant.  To wit: count the number of generations; let’s say there have been six generations.  Then, the oldest contribution will have 1/6 of its original contribution, the second-oldest 2/6, and so on, until the newest, which has 6/6, or one times the original contribution, namely 50 mL.  I’ll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader.  If you need help send me an email.

I started two bottles.  No grand theme.  One is “peated”.  One is “unpeated”.  I did this because a little peat (for non-afficionados, that’s the phenolic flavors generated by burning peat moss to dry the grain) goes a long way.  (It’s a good way to stretch your peated whiskies, actually: mix a splash of peated stuff in with a bunch of cheap “carrier”.  Your detection of phenol concentrations is not in any way linear, so you’ll get the peaty enjoyment without the cost of the peaty whisky.)

I added the sixth generation to my unpeated bottle tonight.  I’m going to post tasting notes.  I’ll maybe make this a regular feature depending on the reception.

It contains, roughly:

1. 8 mL Glendronach 15 sherry cask
2. 17 mL Aberlour a’bunadh, euro bottling (heavily sherried)
3. 25 mL Glenturret ’80/’00 (Blackadder)
4. 33 mL Glen Moray 12 Chenin Blanc finish
5. 42 mL Glen Moray 16
6. 50 mL Glen Garioch 8

Nose: The sherry monsters are in low concentration, and it shows.  No discernable sherry note.  Malty, mellow highland grain, with a hint of marshmallowy lowland character.  Golden raisins, Malt-O-Meal, American oak.

Palate: Sharp at first, then cabbage soup, malt, leaves.

Finish: Toasty, marshmallowy, malty, slightly briney (odd).

Notes: Not showing the best right now, as it is more than half really mediocre whiskies (Glen Garioch 8 and Glen Moray 16, both of which are good cooking whiskies.)

Score: 79/100

“As a thank you to our great customers, we are happy to announce that all snipes entered on our site [Auctiva] from 12:01am PDT to 11:59pm PDT Friday, May 26th will be free!”

I’m not sure if Steven Seagal ever bothered to jump the shark or whether he was just born with a school between him and the mainstream public, but he’s still jumping something.  As his physical fitness declines and he relies more and more on slow-motion to hide his slow reactions, he’s portraying ever more benign characters forced into violence by ever more tragic circumstances.  I mean, it used to be sufficient for him to be an EPA agent forced to punch and kick by ruthless big-business profiteers.  Then, it escalated.  He had to be a Buddhist recluse forced to punch and kick when his daughter is kidnapped.  I don’t know where he can really go from here.  I mean, what, maybe a guy who nurses sick birds back to health at a wildlife refuge forced to punch and kick by a gang of thugs selling little orphan girls as sex slaves?  I mean, maybe I could write that up this weekend and sell it.  “Birdman rescues vestal orphans.”  It could fly.

(Hold on, gotta take this.  Hi.  Yeah.  No, I hadn’t heard.  Really?  Really?  Oh.  OK then.)

Hi, I’m back.  Umm … seems he’s got that one covered.  Anyone else with a spec script?  I’m out of ideas.

Welcome, visitor from Armenia (.am)!  He or she searched Google Armenia for information on Megaproxy and found my Best of the Web page.

151 down, 113 to go.

Today is my seventh anniversary with my incredible wife, Jennifer.  Jenn, when you read this, I love you, and thank you for the best seven years of my life, and a lifetime more.

I just learned of the band Lacuna Coil last week, and purchased their most recent LP, Karmacode, last night.  So what are they?  Progressive Italian metal, maybe.  Or ambient goth metal.  AMG tries “Symphonic Black Metal”, which may get as close as anything.  In all, really hard to classify.  They live in the n-space neighborhood of Nevermore (who get a liner shout-out), Sabbath (ditto), and P.O.D. (right, them too) — but all that and ambient goth, too.  Your first handhold might be Evanescence, but legitimate.

They’ve apparently been around for eight years, but either I’ve been living in a ditch or they haven’t really hit the mainstream yet.

Karmacode features dense-and-rich-as-gold production, intricate layerings of traditional and electronic instrumentation, and either a recording studio or a digital signal processor that gives the feel of performance inside an abandoned cathedral.  They are two full-time guitarists, two full-time vocalists (one male and one female), a bassist and a drummer.

The guitar-playing is at times barely competant.  The band have us wait until track 12 to show that they can play anything more than power chords.  The male vocalist — well, I deleted what I just wrote about him and will instead say, subtly, he’s not very good.  The English lyrics are like high school goth girl poetry, but it doesn’t scan, so it’s like random lines of high school goth girl poetry (“I’ll be there when there’s nothing left / Night and day holding you / Harmony deep inside your soul / Meet me there / Can you feel me?”)

But Cristina Scabbia, the female vocalist.  Oh, Cristina.  As a first-order approximation, she is the band.  In fifteen years we may think of this group as her Y Kan’t Tori Read.  Her voice is soaring, ethereal, haunting, mezmerizing.  She sings her descants as if she’s standing on a Spanish minaret and her leads with gravelly earnestness.  She’s stunningly attractive, too.

Intrigued?  I am.  I’m going to buy the rest of their discography, as well as checking out AMG’s other “Symphonic Black Metal” bands, such as The Gathering, Moonspell, and Opeth, of which I now know nothing.

If you are mailing items from the US to other countries, or have been assigned the task of writing software that can handle every country (and would like some indigestion), check out this exceptionally good guide to international mailing.

Example of content:

In MAURITIUS, the use of postcodes has been introduced on a trial basis in a single delivery office. This trial, limited for the moment to the Curepipe office (742CU001 CUREPIPE), has not yet been extended to other offices owing to numerous difficulties, such as the lack of street names, house numbers, etc.

Also, you can check out the USPS International Mail Manual.  More from this to follow.

I was on hold to 911 for three minutes today.  This is unacceptable.  That is more than enough time to mean the difference between life and death.

I remember several years ago I found a book on Amazon called Dial 911 and Die, via a review the author had written about a legal humor book I had purchased.  His conclusion, as far as I can determine, is to equip oneself with a firearm.  While I’m a lefty gun control advocate, the three minutes gives one pause.  This time I was reporting a witnessed auto accident — but next time?

The book, by the way, is distributed by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, self-described as “America’s Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership.”  Their website includes the essay Some Judaic Sources on the Right to Bear Amrs:

The common thread in [Biblical] narratives is that being disarmed when danger threatens is seen as a national disaster and a cause for lament. Disarmament of individual citizens is a problem — not a solution … We indeed yearn for the time of the Final Redemption when “They shall beat their swords into plowshares” but it is a very poor idea to do this unilaterally before that point in history!

Google has a new calendar function.  Predictably, it’s really slick.

Also, try texting stuff to 46645 (GOOGL).  Try define sherried, for instance.  (Fun, huh?)  Or 1 furlong per fortnight in parsecs per microsecond.  Or 1 usd in gbp.  Or price squeezebox.  Or lakers.  Or gdp of norway.  Or the proposition 91775.  Or translate “this is impressive” to french.

So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html.  A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me.  So it’s spam, right?

Well, technically.  StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header.  But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.

It turns out to be a social-network Alexa.  And it’s really cool, and highly reliable.  You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.

I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites.  They are wonderful.  Haven’t hit a bad one yet.  And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good.  But I expect they are.)

Check it out.  It’s really good.  And check out this, this, and this for fun.

The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.

You can use my utility to generate a random English word.  You are welcome to call it from scripts.

“As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.  Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.  Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?  Is this fair?“

I’ve upgraded my Random TinyURL script (it was giving a lot of “not found” errors, and I think I figured out why: “o” and “0″ are not present in any assigned TinyURLs).  Try it out, and please report the TinyURL of any TinyURL failures (not 404s).

Niall climbed up on the coffee table today.

“What am I doing up on the table?” he asked, unprompted.

“That’s right, what are you doing on the coffee table?” countered Jenn.

“I’m on the table.  I need to get off the table,” he said.

Holy [something].  Or whatever the secular equivalent of holy is.  Majestic [something].

It’s not their Led Zeppelin IV — not an album for which each song could, individually, be coupled with fifty minutes of filler and still be historic — but it is amazing.  Yes, I’m saying this as a rabid PJ fan, but you might want to take my word this time anyway.

The single, World Wide Suicide, the mind-blowing Marker in the Sand, and Gone could each carry an album.  Severed Hand could carry a boxed set.  World Wide Suicide, Gone, and Severed Hand could top modern rock charts, and Marker in the Sand could top album rock charts.  Come Back may even be sadder than Thumbing My Way from Riot Act.  I was sobbing, and had to go wake up my wife, and it’s going to be a long time before I can listen to it without crying.  Big Wave is a wonderful, passionate Darwinian surfing song.

Unemployable and Army Reserve are both striking character portraits.  One wonders if Life Wasted is written to the same person as their previous works Save You and All Those Yesterdays, or if Ed has more than his fair share of self-destructive friends (either way, he, she, or they have my best wishes.)  Inside Job is a masterful, sprawling close to the album, and the band are unfathomably gracious, emotionally, not to make us end on Gone or Come Back, which they easily could have done.

The number of stylistic touches in Ed’s voice on the album, the range of musical influences inspiring the songs, the tightly woven unity of the different composers’ works — man, I’m rambling.  I cannot honestly say, “Even if you’ve never liked a Pearl Jam album, check this out.”  But I can certainly say, “If you’ve ever liked a Pearl Jam album, get it as soon as possible.”

And, as always, try to listen on good studio monitor headphones the first time.

If I don’t lose control
Explore and not explode
A preternatural other plane
With the power to maintain

Like a tear in all we know
Once dissolved, we are free to grow
“What is human, what is more?”
I’ll answer this when I get home.

Is there a date that you accidentally date intervals to, when you are determining how old something is, instead of using the current date?  For me, when I see something was produced in, say, 1976, I first think “That’s almost twenty years ago,” not “That was thirty years ago.”  Some part of my brain is still locked in the mid nineties.  Never to escape?

The Theocratic Inclinations of the Republican Electorate.  From The Nation.

I am ten thousand days old today.

Please click on the title of this post to go to the post page, and check the grey box under this very text.  It has date and time and some other stuff.  I think I’ve just made it easier to read.  Is there anything that could improve it, and are there any other links you would like?

Whale apparently thanks rescuers.  Is this too much anthropomorphizing?  I expect not.

For several years, I have had a primary, private intellectual guiding principle.  I have called it Joshua’s First Law.  It goes as follows: “Everything is more complicated than it first appears.”  Or, with a nod to Hofstadter’s Law, “Everything is more complicated than it first appears, even when Joshua’s First Law is taken into account.”  And I’ve sometimes attached the revision, known as Joshua’s First Anti-Corrolary, which reads “Except when it isn’t.”  But never have I seen this expressed by another.  Until I read a version of it on MJD’s Blog.  He wrote, “Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine.”  Kudos to him.

I get tons of visits from USPS employees to my Postal Cancel Art pages.  That warms my heart.

Zxaxgr is right.  There is something wrong with our eyes.  Interesting article on yellow as a perceptual problem.  I’ll note that near the top of my reading list is Hardin’s Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, and I’m looking forward to it.