Much of my whisky reviewing has been bogged down on Oban. It came with such high praise from my two most frequent commenters, Matt and Elpeebee. I had it once, but was with some others so I couldn’t exactly dig in and take mental notes, let alone written notes. I then opted for Oban again when a friend was buying at a bar in San Antonio (it’s a wee bit more expensive at a bar in the US than at a pub in Edinburgh; $11 versus £2.50 = $4). I knew I liked it, but I don’t recall being overwhelmed. So I went to Leslie’s and gave it a proper review. It seems dangerous to review a whisky that the only two whisky review readers on this blog already have a strong, set opinion for. I tried not to let them taint me.
Oban 14yr
Highland
43% abv
Color: It’s the color of resin. (When I was trying to place the color, my mind immediately jumped to the scene in Jurassic park where the resin has preserved the prehistoric mesquito.) {The color category, I’ve decided, is stupid. Look, it’s whisky. It has roughly the same color as other whiskies, some are a bit lighter and some are a bit darker. Anyway, I tried very hard to describe this one and have decided that I will try less hard in the future. Would you really not drink a fabulous whisky because you didn’t like its color?}
Nose: nicely strong, you can feel it in the nostrils. It is sweet, and smells exactly like my brains idea of what good whisky should smell like. You know it has alcohol, but the scent is inviting, not revolting. (After a few sips: even better, now also a little spicy.)
Palate: pumpkin pie spices, soft, warming, peppery. It’s like adult candy.
Finish: boldness that fades quickly and leaves a warmth which gently disappears.
Overall: delightful but dangerous. It seriously tastes like candy and smells like baked goods. The finish is lovely and fades so quickly it isn’t very easy to pace yourself. These are all nice features save the 43% alcohol content. If you’re strong-willed, put this on your shelf.
Tuesday 30 March 2010
Sunday 28 March 2010
Blogging is hard.
I guess blogging isn't hard if you are doing anything interesting. I'm doing things that I find interesting, but I can imagine they won't make for good blogging material. I am working a whole heck of a lot, which might just be a reflection of inefficiency. I'm learning this new programming language for GPUs which is based on C. Problem is, I didn't know C either. But I am now making reasonable headway. My goal is that I will have a program which performs Iterated Hard Threshholding on the GPU by the end of the week.
The Heatherlea has had some turnover. Rad, the polish guy, and Elodie, the french girl, have both moved out. Cat, an Australian girl, and Essam, an Egyptian - UK resident, moved in back in February. Essam was on faculty at a University in Glasgow and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in the business school. His family is in Glasgow. He commuted for three years and then decided he wasn't going home during the week. Afterall, he has to cross the entire country to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh. If you live in a major US city, it probably takes you longer to get to work than it would take to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The train is 105 minutes. Cat is a young lady who just doesn't really want life to start yet so she's globetrotting. I would guess her life is similar to the life of our blog follower Elpeebee after his triumphant days at Emory.
Very recently (last two weeks?) a Japanese girl moved in, and I think her name is Chica. Her boyfriend is around often. Two nights this week, I made myself some dinner and ate it in the kitchen while they chatted each other up. It is the most amazing conversation: Chica speaks Japanese while Boyfriend speaks English. If they really want to make fun of each other (or maybe me) then they use the other person's language. At one point, Chica asked Boyfriend to get something and was trying to explain where it was. He was aimlessly shuffling around the kitchen. It was very bizarre to witness because I know where things are in the kitchen, but I had no clue if he was getting closer. I finally snapped, asked what he was looking for, and directed him to it. It was clearly not that he didn't understand Chica, I think Chica was saying something like, "No over there."
Anyway, I asked them about this and they both said that they understood the other language perfectly, but when they speak it they slow down their conversation. I can't imagine my brain working that well. Later I find out that Boyfriend has done this his entire life as his parents only speak Icelandic to him and he only replies in English. What a weird set of languages to know: English, Icelandic, and Japanese.
On that note, I am working diligently on my bilingual quest as I now understand both English (US) and English (UK), although I usually only speak English (US). {If you don't think these are different languages, look at the language options on your Facebook page.}
The Heatherlea has had some turnover. Rad, the polish guy, and Elodie, the french girl, have both moved out. Cat, an Australian girl, and Essam, an Egyptian - UK resident, moved in back in February. Essam was on faculty at a University in Glasgow and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in the business school. His family is in Glasgow. He commuted for three years and then decided he wasn't going home during the week. Afterall, he has to cross the entire country to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh. If you live in a major US city, it probably takes you longer to get to work than it would take to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The train is 105 minutes. Cat is a young lady who just doesn't really want life to start yet so she's globetrotting. I would guess her life is similar to the life of our blog follower Elpeebee after his triumphant days at Emory.
Very recently (last two weeks?) a Japanese girl moved in, and I think her name is Chica. Her boyfriend is around often. Two nights this week, I made myself some dinner and ate it in the kitchen while they chatted each other up. It is the most amazing conversation: Chica speaks Japanese while Boyfriend speaks English. If they really want to make fun of each other (or maybe me) then they use the other person's language. At one point, Chica asked Boyfriend to get something and was trying to explain where it was. He was aimlessly shuffling around the kitchen. It was very bizarre to witness because I know where things are in the kitchen, but I had no clue if he was getting closer. I finally snapped, asked what he was looking for, and directed him to it. It was clearly not that he didn't understand Chica, I think Chica was saying something like, "No over there."
Anyway, I asked them about this and they both said that they understood the other language perfectly, but when they speak it they slow down their conversation. I can't imagine my brain working that well. Later I find out that Boyfriend has done this his entire life as his parents only speak Icelandic to him and he only replies in English. What a weird set of languages to know: English, Icelandic, and Japanese.
On that note, I am working diligently on my bilingual quest as I now understand both English (US) and English (UK), although I usually only speak English (US). {If you don't think these are different languages, look at the language options on your Facebook page.}
Thursday 25 March 2010
Our Hero!
Watch this video to see something amazing! I tell you it is worth it. There is a 99 second introduction for the video to load, and you can't skip it. If you are thinking, "I don't watch stupid videos that people post," think again. Furthermore, please select full screen (in small print on the bottom of the video screen) as half of the movie is cut off in my blog.
Link to the movie.
PS: If you are friends with Were Wolf on Facebook, you've seen something similar! I stole this from him/it.
PSS: 1000
PSSS From March 28: Had to take the film box out because it was annoying. It automatically played everytime you came to the blog. If you want to see it, just click the link.
Link to the movie.
PS: If you are friends with Were Wolf on Facebook, you've seen something similar! I stole this from him/it.
PSS: 1000
PSSS From March 28: Had to take the film box out because it was annoying. It automatically played everytime you came to the blog. If you want to see it, just click the link.
Monday 22 March 2010
Glenlivet, 12yr, Speyside
Today, I post a review I meant to post two weeks ago. If you have had a single malt, there’s a good chance it was this one. Now I like me some Glenlivet, but it would be a shame to drink Glenlivet in Scotland unless you were visiting their distillery. I say this because it is so fantastically easy to find in the USA. For example, I found this rendition aboard a United flight to San Antonio to attend the 13th International Conference on Approximation Theory.
Glenlivet 12yr
Speyside
40% abv
Color: Golden, but I couldn’t really see it in the poor lighting of the first class cabin.
Nose: sweet, fruity, hints of cinnamon. (After a few sips, it’s even sweeter smelling with the cinnamon fading.)
Palate: spicy, not as smooth as it smells, still a comfortable, fruity whisky with a bit of zing.
Finish: surprisingly harsh and a taste of alcohol, then bitter, and a warming but not a burn.
Overall: pretty good, but not an all star. This is one of the largest single malts in the world based on distribution and is #1 in the USA. The nose is the best part; it was very nice to smell. (Actually, the best part was that it was free in the first class cabin and the poor saps in coach didn’t even have the option to buy it … only a blend back there for the discounters.)
Glenlivet 12yr
Speyside
40% abv
Color: Golden, but I couldn’t really see it in the poor lighting of the first class cabin.
Nose: sweet, fruity, hints of cinnamon. (After a few sips, it’s even sweeter smelling with the cinnamon fading.)
Palate: spicy, not as smooth as it smells, still a comfortable, fruity whisky with a bit of zing.
Finish: surprisingly harsh and a taste of alcohol, then bitter, and a warming but not a burn.
Overall: pretty good, but not an all star. This is one of the largest single malts in the world based on distribution and is #1 in the USA. The nose is the best part; it was very nice to smell. (Actually, the best part was that it was free in the first class cabin and the poor saps in coach didn’t even have the option to buy it … only a blend back there for the discounters.)
Thursday 18 March 2010
48 Billion Calculations Per Second
Now we know how blogs die ... I hope someone comes back and reads this. Blogs die when they get dormant and people stop checking on them. I had a bad run there. The fact is I was traveling for most of the three weeks. Now, I'm settled back down in Edinburgh. Last night I didn't drink any whisky, but I did have a McEwans70, a Spanish red, and a red from South Africa. I went to a dinner with the optimization group: smoked salmon, rump steak, panacotta! Very lovely. I was reminded why my wife loves Europe. The food is very good, but most importantly, they think of fries (chips, pommes frites) as classy enough to serve with steak.
I am involved in an adventure where I am trying to write source code for doing large scale calculations on the graphics card in your computer. This is taking a wacky amount of time as only a programmer should be attempting such a ridiculous undertaking. I am very far from a programmer/developer, but I am having a lot of fun. Today, I got someone else's program and my laptop was doing calculations at 48 giga-flops (floating point operations per second). That was for geeks. If it meant nothing to you, let me describe it a different way. My laptop computer was doing
48,000,000,000
single precision calculations per second.
Your computer has a graphics card, technically a graphical processing unit (GPU), which does lots of calculations to display your graphics. It does them very fast and many of them at the same time. Now all a GPU can do is simple calculations. A central processing unit (CPU), your computer's brain that you might call "the processor", can do much more complicated things. But, hey, if you want to multiply and add about 80 trillion numbers, you should do that on a GPU!
If you can watch HD on your computer, the graphics card is pretty good. My laptop has a pretty nice GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M. It has 48 cores on it. So, when I send calculations over to the GPU, it is like using 48 CPUs simultaneously. That's in my laptop. We are trying to get all of our code ready for the arrival of a new machine in late April. It will have multiple, very accurate GPUs designed precisely for this purpose and should perform at roughly 2 TERA FLOPS. That means this computer, which will be a desktop, not a supercomputer, will do
2,000,000,000,000
double precision operations per second. It will cost roughly $10,000. In contrast, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, with 224,162 CPUs and located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which presumably cost significantly more, can do only 1000 times as many calculations per second.
(Single precision versus double precision is about accuracy and I list it only for those who care. A single precision number is accurate up to 8 decimal places and a double precision number is accurate up to 16 decimal places. So one double precision calculation is 100,000,000 times as accurate as one single-precision calculation.)
Update: I'm at 615 pushups. (A very small number for this post.)
I am involved in an adventure where I am trying to write source code for doing large scale calculations on the graphics card in your computer. This is taking a wacky amount of time as only a programmer should be attempting such a ridiculous undertaking. I am very far from a programmer/developer, but I am having a lot of fun. Today, I got someone else's program and my laptop was doing calculations at 48 giga-flops (floating point operations per second). That was for geeks. If it meant nothing to you, let me describe it a different way. My laptop computer was doing
48,000,000,000
single precision calculations per second.
Your computer has a graphics card, technically a graphical processing unit (GPU), which does lots of calculations to display your graphics. It does them very fast and many of them at the same time. Now all a GPU can do is simple calculations. A central processing unit (CPU), your computer's brain that you might call "the processor", can do much more complicated things. But, hey, if you want to multiply and add about 80 trillion numbers, you should do that on a GPU!
If you can watch HD on your computer, the graphics card is pretty good. My laptop has a pretty nice GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M. It has 48 cores on it. So, when I send calculations over to the GPU, it is like using 48 CPUs simultaneously. That's in my laptop. We are trying to get all of our code ready for the arrival of a new machine in late April. It will have multiple, very accurate GPUs designed precisely for this purpose and should perform at roughly 2 TERA FLOPS. That means this computer, which will be a desktop, not a supercomputer, will do
2,000,000,000,000
double precision operations per second. It will cost roughly $10,000. In contrast, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, with 224,162 CPUs and located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which presumably cost significantly more, can do only 1000 times as many calculations per second.
(Single precision versus double precision is about accuracy and I list it only for those who care. A single precision number is accurate up to 8 decimal places and a double precision number is accurate up to 16 decimal places. So one double precision calculation is 100,000,000 times as accurate as one single-precision calculation.)
Update: I'm at 615 pushups. (A very small number for this post.)
Friday 5 March 2010
1,000 Push ups
Hey Matt and Elpeebee (and anybody else). I am going to do at least 1000 push ups in March. How many are you going to do? I'm at 120. Good form is essential. (It's really not that many; average 40 per day starting tomorrow and you make it to 1000.)
I'm off to San Antonio tomorrow.
I'm off to San Antonio tomorrow.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Where have you been?
Sorry for the lack of posting. Unfortunately for my many fans, this will have to continue for about a week. Check back next week. I promise the blog is not dying. I have had some birthdays to attend to, a paper to get back to the publisher, some GPU programming code to download and get running, and some significant preparation for an upcoming conference.
By the way, if you're in San Antonio next week, let me know. On Sunday morning (yeah, weird timing) I will be speaking at the 13th International Conference on Approximation Theory. If you're around, I promise it'll be real hoot!
I tasted the Oban. It was so long ago and I can't find my notes, that I'll just have to taste it again.
By the way, if you're in San Antonio next week, let me know. On Sunday morning (yeah, weird timing) I will be speaking at the 13th International Conference on Approximation Theory. If you're around, I promise it'll be real hoot!
I tasted the Oban. It was so long ago and I can't find my notes, that I'll just have to taste it again.
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