Teacher's Highland Cream: Good blended whisky for less than $20

I used to hate scotch, whisky, whiskey, bourbon (well, still do) and anything else that tasted of alcohol from many years of being a bouncer and ejecting free booze on a weekly basis.

Then I had Lagavulin 16.  Just fantastic.  Of course, even on a crazy sale it's $50.   And more typically is $62 (plus tax).

So I've been on the lookout for good, cheap liquid that is vaguely like a great single malt.

Perhaps one of the smoothest, easiest to drink blended whisky is Teachers "Highland Cream."  It really is very easy to drink.  I bought this bottle earlier today and already got through about 1/5th of it while watching Top Gear w/o noticing.  (Notice the empty glass, which was a constant source of irritation.)

I'm going to put it down a floor so I don't interact with it further (the high cost to society of alcoholism, the unlikelihood of me hitting PRs as a boozehound, etc) but I really could easily drink the entire bottle.  And then probably do something stupid that costs much more than $20.

The good: it has a vanilla/honey/something scent and taste that I really like.  There seems to be a set of blended whiskys --- Johnnie Walker Gold, Chivas 18 and Teacher's --- that have this smell and taste and I'm really a sucker for them.  (To be honest, it might just be the nose of well-tempered grain alcohol.)    This is below Chivas 18 and both are below JW Gold (one of my favorites, neat and at room temperature) but it's very drinkable.

The bad: there is a slight odor of grain alcohol.  Perhaps a slight taste too, if I pay attention.  A bit of water (or ice) seems to kill that.  I'm going to pour 1/2 Highland 10 single malt from Trader Joe's (also $20) into the next glass to see if that mellows it better.

I only bought it b/c so many different whisky blogs recommended it as a good value / cheap / best buy bottle.  They were right.  I much prefer it over Famous Grouse, Finlaggan, and the usual budget booze recs.

Actionable advice in case of nuclear explosion

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/science/16terror.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.

 The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

Whiskey party.

One way to spend a few hours on a saturday: sampling from several thousands dollars worth of scotch (mostly not mine).

Various conclusions:

• Laphroaig 30 is great but not worth $300.
• Oban distiller's edition is one of my favorites.  About $70 from the cheapest online store.
• I like Caol Ila 12 and 18 alot, but don't care much for the other 4 samples I had
• The Macallan 12 from 10 years ago is crazy good compared to what they release now.
• Glenfarcias 10 is pretty smooth and not that expensive.
• Master of Malt has a really nice selection of samples (http://www.masterofmalt.com/drinks-by-the-dram/).   They charge in british pounds, however, so not the greatest exchange rate.
• Google's droid phone has a cool feature where you can take a picture of a bar code and it will look up that item on the net, finding the cheapest price (I paid $100 for the oban above, it found it for $67).

Here's my friend, looking a bit worse for wear, but well neigh invincible behind a fortress of scotch bottles.

$20 trader joes highland 10 single malt is actually...

Pretty damn good, at least for the price.  Smooth.  I've drank a quarter bottle in two days without meaning to.  Short finish, not super complex, but cheap.

Their $9.99 blended scotch on the other hand is undrinkable.  The main smell you get upon opening in rubbing alcohol.

XM2010

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/snipers-will-soon-shoot-taliban-from-a-quarter-mile-away/

Starting next year, the snipers will be outfitted with the XM2010 rifle, capable of hitting a target from a 3,937-foot distance — about three quarters of a mile. The current sniper rifle, the M-24, has a range of 2,625 feet, by contrast. “You want to give guys the capability to do those things they need to do at those ranges,” Colonel Douglas Tamilio, the Army’s weapons program manager, told USA Today.

The craziest rifle ever: XM25

Range find w/ laser.  Pull trigger.  Mini grenades explode by target (which means shrapnel goes around corners, behind walls, etc).  Grenade figures how how far it's gone by counting rotations.  You can manually adjust the range.

Being used in Afganistan


Info from  wikipedia:

The XM25 is an airburst grenade launcher derived from the XM29 OICW.

It fires 25 mm grenades that are set to explode in mid-air at or near the target. A laser rangefinder in the gun is used to determine the distance to the target. The user can manually adjust the detonating distance by up to ten feet (3 m) shorter or longer. The gun automatically transmits the detonating distance to the grenade in the firing chamber. The grenade tracks the distance it has traveled by the number of spiral rotations after it is fired.^[1] These features make the XM25 more effective than traditional grenade launchers at the task of hitting targets that are behind cover or dug into the ground.

The system has been developed by Heckler & Koch and Alliant Techsystems, while the target acquisition/fire control is developed by L-3 IOS Brashear. The most recent deployment plans call for a purchase of 12,500 XM25s at a projected cost per weapon system of $25,000.^[2]

In the summer of 2010, the U.S. Army began field testing the XM25 in Afghanistan. The initial per unit cost of the early models range from $30,000 to $35,000. The army plans to purchase 12,500 XM25s in 2011 and have them fielded by 2012, enough for one XM25 system in each infantry squad and Special Forces team. ^[3][4]

According to U.S. Army project manager for new weapons, Colonel Douglas Tamilio, the rounds for the XM25 will cost about $24 apiece. ^[5]

Debt doubling.

From USA Today (yeah, I know).

So you think you can bench?

Excellent set of videos from an ex-powerlifter.  Fairly technical, so if this isn't your thing, not worth it.  Otherwise, many interesting tips.

One of many good articles on the Elitefts website.


Then there is always Westside Barbell, led by L Simmons who squatted 1000+ lbs at 50+ years of age.  I love how their articles start:

Westside has 30 members who bench more than 700 pounds and four who bench more than 800 pounds. We also have Laura Phelps, with a 505 at 165 body weight, who has the greatest female bench coefficient ever. Five members have held all-time world records in the bench....

Let’s start with Tony Bolognone, who has a 2700-pound total at 325 bodyweight and an 860-pound bench. He explains some of his workouts:

In praise of the Chicago 16th manual of style

I think I'll have to buy a copy

Chicago's examples could be recondite or mischievously witty or of a weirdly resonant blandness. You could be boning up on the proper use of brackets (section 5.129) and be hit with quotes like this:

During a prolonged visit to Australia, Glueck and an assistant (James Green, who was later to make his own study of a flightless bird [the kiwi] in New Zealand) spent several difficult months observing the survival behavior of cassowaries and emus.

You'd feel an urge to procrastinate, to follow these intrepid antipodean emu watchers, but alas: The sadistic authors of the fourteenth knew that less is more.

Where did these fragments come from? What did they mean? Sometimes there would be a message just for me. On late nights while I waited for proofs to materialize, I would think of the poem disguised as 5.136, which asks the reader to "consider the range of expressiveness achieved by the following changes in punctuation":

Go home.

Go home!

Go home?

Go home?!

Detroit's last gunshop

Short, but interesting.

http://www2.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=13488

Cool real life Noir.

From Vanity Fair where I've actually seen a large number of interesting stories.

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.

leaked diplomatic communications

I'm a bit surprised at how low key the initial coverage seems to be (perhaps b/c it's a weekend).  It seems like this has the potential to be the story of the decade.

Some initial thoughts: WSJ and Chris Good with some snippets.  Interesting: Saudi Arabia and Bahrain both urged taking out Iran.

It would be amusing if the state dept had allowed this to happen as a way to very convincingly disseminate misinformation.  But since we're not a in spy novel, the probability is epsilon, where "epsilon" is a mispelling of "zero."

If they are right that this is (again) the work for 23 y/o Pfc Manning, it's a resounding demonstration that any secure system is as weak as it's weakest link.  Why the hell were these available, unencrypted, to one guy who clearly didn't need them?    Given his openly gay persona, perhaps not the best marketing move given the current dismantling of DADT.

Business and Obama.

From Politico:

“These weren’t issues that got the president any votes or political leverage,” said one insider to the conversations. “These were issues that demonstrated that this administration doesn’t get it. It’s like talking to your dog.”

UN might be cause of cholera in Haiti

Good intentions perhaps, but not too insightful about the effects of effluent in drinking water.

Chinese thought bubble: "We are the masters now"

Interesting article by Niall Ferguson, perhaps best summed up by a simple picture:




Hat tip: The Browser.

Taliban leader involved in months of secret talks = fake

NY times:

 KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.        

 “It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”        

Kazushi Sakuraba.

In his prime, Saku was amazing.  His movements in the seconds before a win were moments of WTF violent poetry, written on guys   almost always 20-50lbs heavier than him.

His decimation of the entire Gracie family was typical.  They beat everyone.  He beat all of them.



Often a favorite fighter of fighters:

Bas Rutten

Having some medical problems so watching old PRIDE FC mixed martial arts fights to make the time go  by quicker.  Bas Rutten and The Professor have to be one of the best announcing teams for any sport ever. Warm, knowledgeable, funny, and badass (well, Bas was in his day).

Bas talking about his early fighting:



Bas doing some fighting. Note the use of open hand hits when not using gloves to avoid breaking hand (and the affect on the recipient if you doubt the efficacy):






Bas' very heavily watched street fighting video:

Under: just don't get it. Vapid Iran twitter diplomacy

From Claire Berlinski:

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/RT-Happy-Birthday-Raisuli-It-Would-be-Great-if-You-Released-Perdicaris

I've been working on an article all week about Turkey's bafflingly supine diplomatic position toward Iran. Now I read this.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's spokesman sent a birthday greeting to the president of Iran, who turned 54 this week.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley urged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to send American hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer home.

In a tweet sent Thursday on Ahmadinejad's birthday, Crowley said, "What a gift that would be."

Let me get this straight. Our Secretary of State has wished the president of a regime that kidnapped American citizens a happy birthday, asked him nicely to give them back, and thinks Twitter is the appropriate medium for this communication? Could this all be true?

I can't believe I've been working all week on a piece arguing that Turkey doesn't seem to grasp what it's dealing with.

CA + business = FAIL

CA is the absolute worst state for business, as rated by 600 CEOs.  Texas comes out as the best.
http://www.chiefexecutive.net/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=59FD13C5177B40B0B2D3EBA9E4384572&AudID=F242408EE36A4B18AABCEB1289960A07

 

Yet more evidence for what a shithole NJ is.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/15/brian-aitkens-mistake

Moving, has legally-owned handguns locked in trunk, sentenced to 7 years.

Cool hack: stuxnet virus destroys nuke centrifuges by jacking motors up and down

 http://volokh.com/2010/11/19/is-israel-behind-the-stuxnet-cyberattack-on-iran/

The new forensic work narrows the range of targets and deciphers the worm’s plan of attack. Computer analysts say Stuxnet does its damage by making quick changes in the rotational speed of motors, shifting them rapidly up and down.

How Detroit does strip clubs

Writer is a bit of an effete prig, but color is interesting: http://nplusonemag.com/postcard-from-detroit

A larger collection of Detroit writings: http://thebrowser.com/topics/front-line-detroit

How much taxation is too much?

A good metric from Bainbridge:

Michael Kinsley tells us that "although I favor Obama’s tax increase, I could not defend [a top marginal tax rate of] 90 cents on the dollar." Why not? Once you accept the liberal view of taxes, why not go all the way to a top rate of 100%? It's the Alice Trillin tax. She argued that, over a certain level, the government gets everything.

Graffiti animation

File under OMFG: graffiti animation. Spray can + walls + objects + camera = crazy animation. Hard to describe. Just watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMoKcsN8wM8&feature=player_embedded

Mini-cannon gone wrong

Cannon - size = lolz.

http://kottke.org/10/10/mini-cannon-will-explode-your-tiny-mind

Good J Brown Vs Whitman Article at Reason

 http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/20/sacramento-ber-alles

neat: DNA day = $99 to get DNA mapped at 23andme.com

They look for disease and racial markers and other things.

They are reputable.  Sergey Brin (google co-founder) used to find that he was predisposed for parkinsons; also married their co-founder.

https://www.23andme.com/

cool edge finding trick

from: http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/general-archive/best-cheapest-edge-finder-76080/

Here is what I do when I have to pick up an edge dead "**uts" : 

Take a ring gage of known size - any size works that you can get the tip of your indicator inside of. I always grab my .5000.

Stick it down on top of your part or your vise with double sided tape, location does not matter, all you want to do is set your indicator center to that gage. When the indicator is set on zero (rotated the spindle to do this) .. you now know that the center of the spindle is exactly 1/2 of what the size of the ring gage hole is. (.500 ring gage, .2500 off center) 

Now without touching the indicator to knock it out of this position, bring the indicator and spindle over to the edge you are trying to find and sweep the edge. When you see zero on the indicator again you are within (if using the .500 ring gage) .2500 exactly from the edge. 

With a tenth indicator you should be able to pick up this edge within a tenth. This is very reliable, takes all the variables out. 

Of all the electronic center finders and even the "u" shaped finders, I find this to be the most accurate center finder of all. It never lies. 

famous filmmakers direct super bowl

Pretty damn funny:http://slatev.com/player.html?id=64790979001

hat tip: MR

evil eye

Mistaken IDs are far and away the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Nearly three out of every four prisoners who have been released after being exonerated by DNA evidence had an eyewitness identifying them.

Guy on hunting trip falsely ID'd by highschool alumni as at a nightclub 100s of miles away beating another guy to death. Since exonerated, but got lucky:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime/witnesses-to-beating-dead-wrong-about-man-charged-219392.html

More Haiti

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/haiti_three_weeks_later.html

More Richard Epstein

On what is jacked about the health care bill.  I'm not a lawyer, but this guy is a badass:

           http://fora.tv/2009/09/17/Richard_Epstein_Breaking_Down_Healthcare_Reform#fullprogram

Various quotes, but here's one: "I want decentralized engineering: that's the only thing I want because I am convinced that no one is super smart and you want a number of runs at this thing so you are much more likely to come up with one that's going to work"

More wide ranging:
             http://fora.tv/2009/03/23/Uncommon_Knowledge_Richard_Epstein


"Would you give him tenure?"
"NO!  NO!  Nono."

On the presidency:

"The fundamental mistake of his entire world view is that he treats contracts as devices for exploitation; he doesn't treat them as devices for mutual gain and he assumes that redistribution can take place without any negative impact on production.  And if you live in that kind of fairy land..."

John Yoo on his new book on youtube

Sharp guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deh05-KtKqw

"We certainly haven't gotten a lot of intelligence from operatives we have arrested and put on trial in our federal courts."

Interesting cross-exam before the above: Yoo vs Richard Epstein:                                         http://fora.tv/2006/10/29/Uncommon_Knowledge_Richard_Epstein_John_Yoo

Kasparov on computer chess

Interesting article.  On the surprising results of ubiquitous grandmaster level programs:

There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

More at:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

Hat tip, Marginal Revolution.

man bites dog: suing debt collection agencies.

High bit: if they say they can garnish wages or take your house, then you can get an easy $3500 settlement, at least in TX.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2010-01-21/news/better-off-deadbeat-craig-cunningham-has-a-simple-solution-for-getting-bill-collectors-off-his-back-he-sues-them/1

A bright red line: Mass graves in Haiti.

As one quantitative metric for how bad things are:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959804575007782151239548.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLENews

good eDit interview

One of the best glitch dj's alive: http://www.koldcast.tv/video/edit

Articulate & gets it done.

emco v13 schematics

At sears(!?!) parts direct of all places: http://www.searspartsdirect.com/partsdirect/getModel!retrieve.pd?modelNumber=MAXIMAT%20V13&productCategoryId=0728000&brandId=0351&brandName=EMCO&modelName=LATHE

completely bizarre.

Now, if the motor on my v13 would just turn I'd be in good shape.

Well, that's a good attitude

I don't follow football (and not just b/c I don't have a TV), but this seems like a good, low-drama view of the world:

For the first time, Brady confirmed he has been playing with a broken bone this season.

A league source told the Globe Brady has a broken finger on his right hand. The injury is believed to have happened in early December.

“I’m feeling really good now. I’m feeling really good,’’ Brady told WEEI. “Everyone breaks bones over the course of the year. I’m feeling pretty good. This is the best I’ve felt in a while.’’

 http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/articles/2010/01/05/brady_fully_aware_of_backup_plan/

A managerie of ported revolvers (and others)

I've been experimenting with porting using a mill rather than an  EDM machine.  The biggest challenge is cutting a hole so that there are no burrs inside the barrel.  There are ways to do this, but to reduce risk I've been looking for porting that allows enough clearance to deburr after if need be (possibly using a custom ground deburring tool).

So this is a collection of different porting methods for inspiration.

There's a good writeup on a ported S&W 500 at: http://www.gunblast.com/SW-500.htm

One way to deal with burrs is to bore out the barrel after cutting the ports, removing any burrs in the process. I don't think this is what they did here, but S&W has done it on other revolvers I've seen:

Ireland is insane: new blasphemy laws

Just when I think california is beyond retarded, the EU guys step up to the plate and knock it out of the park.  Quote'd in  Volokh:

Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.

The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

It defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted”....

But Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the new law by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Björk, Frank Zappa and the former Observer editor and Irish ex-minister Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Michael Nugent, the group’s chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if it were charged with blasphemy.

Nugent said: “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

Titanium just isn't that expensive.

I bought 22" of .25" round stock titanium on ebay for around $10 (including shipping).

I'm going to see if making a Ti firing pin actually helps a colt. "Probably not" is the expected verdict, but on the other hand "my python has a titanium firing pin" sounds cool.

So what can you do.

Just arrived: Emco V13

My "new" emco v13 got dropped off yesterday. It's the long bed version, so has a bigger footprint than the one it is replacing. It seems to be the last model they made: there's a boatload of different speeds (topping at 2,500) and has a couple switches my other one did not. As a bonus it came with a Royal 5c collet assembly.

In the spirit of the holidays,the freight company this time only bent the sheet metal on the back and break the cheap shelf underneath as opposed to ripping a bunch of rods and knobs off with a forklift. I have insurance so we'll see what happens.

There's a couple of negatives. One is that the bed seems more worn than my old one at least judging by the increased torque necessary when you move the carriage from the headstock towards the tail. On the flip side, it has much much less backlash.

The other downside is that there was a non-trivial amount of surface rust on the ways and industrial gunk in all sorts of other places. I've spent the last few hours cleaning all of this off with 0000 steel wool, wd40, and brake cleaner. I had to dump a few pieces in the ultrasonic cleaner.

This one came from a real shop rather than a tech school, so the above problems are not unexpected. Still.

The main challenge was that it was over 12" in the air when the freight guy left, so tonight I spent a bunch of time lowering it and putting it where it's supposed to be.

Here's the start, around 1,500lbs way up high:


First thing is to remove the lowest pallet using a couple of handy little car jacks I got from Kragen:


Then cut away a lot of the 4x4s and then put a way-too-enthusiastic amount of wood to hold up both ends:


Eventually lower an inch at a time all the way around (using a level so it didn't get too far out of wack):


Finally lower it onto a few bars:


And then push it into the right place: