More wine-tasting pics

TikiChris blogs his view of last night’s wine-tasting fun. Plus, he’s got a whole bunch of pics on Flickr; trust me, I had more fun than this one implies.

Having a wine

The smart folks at Qype continue to keep us obsessive reviewers sweet. Last month it was a special chocolate-tasting event; last night it was a wine-tasting event.

LVMH (the group that contains luxury brands like Moët Hennessy and Louis Vuitton) held a showcase of some of their New World wine producers in the swanky 19th-century event venue Il Bottaccio in Belgravia. It’s a really nice old building, well-suited for an event associated with luxury.

The six wine producers set up booths and we walked around and tried each. A representative from each winemaker was on hand to talk about their wines, locations, and production methods. Some had a bit of fun with their displays. Many had bits of food that were meant to accompany the wine-tasting.

I tend to prefer Old World wines so last night was a good event for me. Naturally there were some things I liked and some things I didn’t.

My non-professional thoughts on the wines being showcased:

• Terrazas de los Andes - An Argentinian producer that focuses on growing particular grapes at particular altitudes (thus Terrazas, or “terraces”). Their reserve Malbec was quite good, and was in fact the favourite red of much of our group. They had little snacks to go with each wine - a tiny spoon of crème brûlée for their Chardonnay, a speck of duck for the Malbec, and a bit of beef for their Cab Sav - that came in a little clear plastic chest of drawers.
• Green Point - From the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia. Their station was simply a long bar with stools, but it was very popular with the crowd. When we finally wedged in we found that they were making a big fuss about their carefully-paired tasters to accompany the wine. We all liked their non-vintage rosé, which came with some fruit jelly and foam in a shotglass. I really liked their reserve Shiraz (which came with - get this - a spoon of goat cheese foam with honey and cracked black pepper); it was probably my favourite wine of the evening.
• Cape Mentelle - From Margaret River in Western Australia. I didn’t care for their Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2007, but I did find their 2006 a bit more complex and enjoyable (although they don’t export it, I’m told). Their Cab Sav was okay. Their display was made to look like a beach, with wooden tables on a pile of sand, gauzy curtains surrounding, and with ocean sounds piped in.
• Cloudy Bay - From Marlborough, New Zealand. Plenty of whites, the only one of which I liked was their Te Koko.
• Newton - A Napa Valley, California, producer. Their set-up was behind a short hedge maze. Once through there was a mini-oasis: a large table, some benches, and a Chinese gate (a replica of a larger one at the vineyard back in the US; one of the founders is Chinese). They made a big deal of their “unfiltered” process. Maybe they should start filtering, because I didn’t care for any of their wines. They did have the best snacks, though, with fresh strawberries, currants, cashews, and delicious honey-roasted walnuts.
• Cheval des Andes - The last one we tried. They were the only producer set up on their own, in the library downstairs, giving them the air, at least, of exclusivity. This was an Argentinian wine, although produced in some sort of cultural joint venture with French producers Cheval Blanc. Their 2004 Malbec-Cabernet Sauvignon blend was very tasty.

It was definitely a fun experience. After a glass or two, you don’t mind being a group of six regular folks shuffling between the upper-crust types who actually paid £60 to hum and haw about how much pomegrante they can detect in the 2006. I certainly appreciate Qype getting us in. In addition to being a fun event, it was fun to hang with Rob and Andrew from Qype, and with my fellow free-event recipients (most of whom I’ve met at blogger meetups) Shiny Gemma, Annie Mole, Guernican, and TikiChris.

EDIT: here it is written up on the Qype blog, with a few pics of me looking weird.

To smash together protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland, is going to fire up this summer. I’m very excited, and much more optimistic than the guy who - as reported recently on Mental Floss - is suing CERN because he believes that their experiments might create a black hole that destroys the planet.

Check out that Mental Floss link, above, for a superb 15-minute video from physicist Brian Cox about the LHC and what mysteries of the universe they hope it will reveal: namely, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson and possible verification of supersymmetry. The bottom of that page also has some nice photos.

Sexy science, for sure.

Things Fade Away

I have to draw special attention to one of the albums I just listed in my current rotation: the Neil Young live album Time Fades Away. This is special for Young fans like me: it’s from 1973, is long out of print on vinyl, and to this day has not yet been published on CD (Neil’s a hardass about these things).

It has therefore long been a sought-after Neil bootleg. But to make it easy-peasy, our knowledgeable music friends at Buddyhead have put it up for download. Get it. As allmusic rightly says, there was some of that Dylan-goes-electric tension in these live shows:

Young’s natural inclinations to travel against the current of audience expectations were amplified by a stormy relationship between himself and his touring band, as well as the devastating death of guitarist Danny Whitten, who died of a drug overdose shortly after being given his pink slip during the first phase of tour rehearsals. The shows that followed turned into a nightly exorcism of Young’s rage and guilt, as well as a battle between himself and an audience who, expecting to hear “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold,” didn’t know what to make of the electric assault they witnessed.

Stinking thief

I was at the pharmacy a minute ago getting some shaving stuff. While I was browsing a guy came in, stood beside me, picked up a can of deodorant, and started spraying himself with it. He put it under his shirt to spray his armpits and his torso, then pulled it out and sprayed his shirt, his jacket, his arms. He really unloaded, all over, a constant spray for a good 30 or 40 seconds. It was just starting to cause a wafting haze in the aisle when he put the can back down and walked out.

How to be happy

Today I recognized one of the reasons why I’m a generally happy individual: little things please me. The minute, mundane accomplishments of life fill me with contentment.

An example: every Tuesday morning is when we have to put out our garbage, our recycling box, recyclable plastics (a separate bag), and any garden waste that we don’t compost (another separate bag). When I come home after work and see that empty box and that empty compost bag by the door, I feel exceedingly pleased. I actually smile. Success, I think. Result. Tick in the box. Another minor task completed.

Being a D&D nerd set us up to be the cool kids

Awesome Gary Gygax love from Wired editor Adam Rogers in the NY Times:

Mr. Gygax’s game [Dungeons & Dragons] allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars. Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, dies at 69

From the NY Times:

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

I spent more weekends than I care to remember playing Dungeons & Dragons in my youth. I had the 1st edition Advanced D&D books, and they seemed as strange and magical as the game stories they helped us generate. I owe almost all my knowledge of myth, a good chunk of my imagination, and - believe it or not - some significant socialisation skills to Gary Gygax. I played it from the age of about 11 until I was 20. I still, to this day, play in a play-by-email campaign.

Thanks, Gary.

Alright, back that up

I’ve just finished doing some data backups. All of my important stuff - photos and music, mainly - exist on at least two media (external hard drive and CD/DVD). I am pleased with myself, and rightly so.

You know you should be backing up your data. Seriously, make some time. Go do it. Don’t wait until your hard drive starts smoking.

Whew

Okay, I don’t know about you lot, but I am ready for this weekend.

Party hearty, everyone. Except Dan, obviously.

There’s more than one way to damp a cat

I’m going to cover two topics today, and take a dip into my engineering past by doing so:

1. I’ll describe the physical property scientists call damping.
2. I’ll discuss how engineers are often looking for easier ways of doing or measuring things, because we are inherently lazy, and how I did this for a case where I needed to measure damping.

Damping is a property of any system that makes it lose energy by opposing the motion of the system. It makes things slow down or wind down or lose energy.

Friction is a familiar type of damping. Shoot a hockey puck down an icy rink and it’ll keep sliding until it hits the other end (unless you’re a wuss); it’ll slow down only a bit as it goes, indicating there’s not much friction (i.e., little damping). Shoot the same puck across a sheet of sandpaper and it’ll come to a halt almost immediately because there’s a lot of friction (i.e., high damping).

The shock absorbers in your car are another familiar example of damping. Cars have a lot of mass, and their frames are suspended on springs so that your ride isn’t too rough. But if there was only the frame and springs your ride would be incredibly bouncy, and every bump would make you oscillate down the street. Thus, there are also shock absorbers in your car’s suspension to absorb and dissipate (dampen) some of that bouncy energy. If your suspension’s good, the springs will absorb the shock of a bump and then the shock absorbers will dissipate it quickly away.¹

Now on to the engineer laziness bit: when I started my Master’s degree a decade and a half ago I specialised in fluid mechanics and vibration. I was presented with a problem that I decided to tackle for my thesis: how to more easily measure the damping in heat exchanger tubes.

Let me back up. The common processes for producing electrical energy require boiling (whether by burning coal or by nuclear reactions) large quantities of water into steam and using that steam to drive turbines. This means you’ve got a loop of water that you boil into steam, condense back into liquid, and then you repeat this process over and over. This, in turn, means that you have some heat exchangers in the process. These heat exchangers are usually big banks of tubes with fluid of one temperature inside and fluid of a different temperature being blown across the tubes to heat (or cool) the first fluid.

The tubes in these heat exchangers are very long, and need to be supported (the positions of the baffles in the above image give you an idea of how this might be done). Because the metal tubes expand and contract as they heat and cool, they cannot be tightly fitted in their supports: a little gap must be left. This means that when fluid is blown across the tubes they tend to rattle around in their supports. And, unsurprisingly, the point where they’re supported is where the tubes tend to wear out most quickly, due to banging around in their supports.

So, to design good heat exchangers, or estimate the life of existing ones, you need to understand how those tubes bang around inside those supports. And to understand that you need to know a bunch of things: what the tubes are made of, how long they are, where the supports are, and what the flow conditions are. But one thing you need to know - and the most difficult thing to measure - is the damping that happens between the tube and its support.

There are several types of damping that could happen. If the fluids in the exchanger are mostly gas, then the friction damping of metal-on-metal will be most important. But if there’s liquid in the exchanger - and there often is - then you get some strange types of damping. You get viscous damping, which is like friction within the liquid (think of the difference in viscosity of water versus oil). You also get something called squeeze-film damping, which has to do with compressibility of liquid as the tube gets closer to the support.

The typical method for measuring damping is to shake the tubes, measure the resultant motions of the tubes, do a fancy frequency response analysis of the motion data,then do a complicated curve-fit of the data that you plot to calculate a parameter that corresponds to the amount of damping in the system. I did some lab experiments on a heat exchanger tube under different temperature conditions, with some heavy data acquisition and analysis programming. It was very difficult to get measurable results. The data were often very “noisy” which made it hard to plot and curve-fit. Often a non-linear analysis was needed, which took some programming skill to handle.

All that work, for results that were often impossible to measure, didn’t sit well with this lazy engineer. The point of my research was to find out if there was an easier way to measure the damping of the tube system. Discussions with my mentor had led us to believe that since damping is just the rate at which energy is dissipated it should be possible to estimate it by simply measuring the rate of energy (power) into the system and the rate of energy out (as measured by the tube banging on the supports). So, at the same time that I was measuring the motions of the tube to do my fancy frequency response analysis, I fitted it with sensors to measure the forces with which I was shaking the tube and the forces that resulted where the tube was banging around in its supports.

Surprise, surprise: it worked. The damping I estimated through a simpler energy in/out balance matched what I measured through the standard, but more complicated, frequency response method (and was more reliable since I was always able to make a measurement, which wasn’t possible with frequency response analysis).

This had, at the time, never been accomplished for heat exchanger tubes. I was pretty proud of it. The agency I worked for took this information and used it for further programmes. I don’t know what the status of my work is today, or what’s state-of-the-art in heat exchanger vibration analysis. But it illustrates that while pure science continues to push the frontiers of what we know, the applied science of engineering continues to try to make life easier with what we already know.

If you want to read the details of my thesis work, it’s available online in the government of Canada’s online collections (warning: that link is a large PDF).

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¹Damping happens in electrical systems, too: resistors are electrical dampers and dissipate (in the form of heat or light) electrical energy that’s flowing through the system.

You stab ‘em, we slab ‘em

Someone seems to have mistakenly distributed my home phone number as the number for nearby Gunnersbury Cemetery. I don’t think this error was distributed too widely, because we’ve only had two calls for the cemetery in the last few weeks.

The first call wasn’t too bad, since they said, “Oh, hello, is that Gunnersbury Cemetery?” to which I obviously said no.

The one today was a little creepier, though. I said hello, and the caller started right into how she was from this funeral home and so-and-so’s uncle had passed away and what cremation options did we have and…it took me a moment before I realised what was going on and cut her off. She was quite apologetic.

What’s odd is that our phone number is nowhere close to the phone number for the cemetery.

Mixed bag

Yesterday was a good day.

• I ran 10km in the morning. It was sunny and not at all busy in the parks.
• SWMNBN and I hopped in the car and drove down the M3 to Winchester. I’m not sure how we’ve missed it before, it’s a really nice town. We were going to see the famous cathedral there but it was partly closed for the day, so we didn’t bother. We also had a super lunch in nearby Cheriton at one of the best-preserved country pubs I’ve ever seen, The Flower Pots Inn.
• We went to the neighbours’ for drinks and dinner. It was delicious. They had some other friends over as well, who were very nice folks.

Today has not been as good as yesterday, partly because I’ve been lazy but mostly because I decided to watch Flightplan. When did Jodie Foster become an over-actor who chooses poor films?

“Allons-y.”

Yesterday I finished reading Shake Hands With the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It’s by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who was the military head of the UN peacekeeping effort in Rwanda in 1994, and is his account of the genocide that he tried - and that the world failed - to stop.

The book made me angry. I don’t think that any reader could help but be angry at the indifference of the world to a small African nation that was slaughtering nearly a million of its own men, women and children for stupid reasons of ethnicity. It’s easy to be angry at the soulless perpetrators of genocide and rape inside Rwanda. It’s easy to be angry at the colonial power, Belgium, who provoked the crisis by exacerbating ethnic differences decades before. It’s easy to be angry at UN bureaucracy that stymied every effort by Dallaire and his team to prevent the crisis they saw so plainly all around them. It’s easy to be angry at the US and France, who actively campaigned to prevent the UN from acting on the genocide. It’s easy to be angry at all those nations of the UN who provided few troops and even less money or equipment. It’s easy to be angry at the media who didn’t report the story to the world until far too late.

The reason it’s so easy to be angry is because Dallaire seems to be such a caring, unprejudiced, earnest leader. He berates himself throughout the book for not doing more, for not being able to stir the will of the world’s nations to help. But it’s clear from his book that he did more, and went farther, than I could believe any person would. He faced down guns, didn’t bathe or eat properly for weeks, and paid for things out of his own pocket. He saw children mutilated, and dogs and rats feast on their corpses. He crossed rivers on bridges choked with dead. He lost men under his command. He nearly ruined his own mind and life during his year in Rwanda. And he stayed neutral throughout it all. It made me understand how and why things happened as they were shown in Hotel Rwanda.

This book made me realise that we don’t yet live in a world where a human in Africa is worth a human in Europe, but that I’d like to live in one where that is the case. And so does he.

I understand there’s now a film about Dallaire’s story. I’m not sure if I could watch it.

EDIT: according to Dan, in the comments, I guess there’s two films: the documentary I linked to, and a dramatisation.

Samurai Jack

A few years ago, when we had cable TV, I saw some episodes of the first series of a cartoon called Samurai Jack. The creator of that show, Genndy Tartakovsky, also created or produced cartoons like The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, and Star Wars: Clone Wars.

I was struck by Samurai Jack: it was beautiful, sparse, and paid homage to old martial-arts flicks.

Because she’s wonderful, She Who Must Not Be Named got me the complete four-series DVD set of Samurai Jack for Christmas. It’s wonderful. I never saw anything past the first season. Still, I’ve started at the beginning, and have watched the first three episodes so far. It’s so stylish and wordless and almost existential that I can’t take my eyes off it.

Tasty memories

I’ve just finished a bottle of Aberlour whisky that the lads got me during the wedding festivities back in September. They bought it in France. It came in a suede leather case. It was exceptionally tasty.

Driving it home

You know what I blogged earlier, about the timely notification of data breaches? Looks like the government lost the details of 3 million people with learner’s driving permits. In May. In the US.

Petitioning the PM

For about a year now the website for the office of the Prime Minister of the UK has run a petition facility. I think that the effectiveness of petitions is highly variable, but at least this tool removes the difficulty of getting your signed list to the person in power.

While you’re browsing the list of worthy causes, Brits, make sure you sign the data security breach notification petition. Today there is no legal compulsion for organisations to immediately notify the subjects of their data records if that data security is compromised. This was demonstrated recently when the government lost the names, addresses, and bank details of 25 million child benefit recipients and didn’t tell them until 10 days later.

Indy’s back soon

Led Zeppelin O2 setlist

Check out the setlist.

01. Good Times, Bad Times
02. Ramble On
03. Black Dog
04. In My Time Of Dying
05. For Your Life
06. Trampled Under Foot
07. Nobody’s Fault But Mine
08. No Quarter
09. Since I’ve Been Loving You
10. Dazed and Confused
11. Stairway To Heaven
12. The Song Remains the Same
13. Misty Mountain Hop
14. Kashmir

Encore:

15. Whole Lotta Love
16. Rock and Roll

AAARRRRRGGGHHH!

Staying up to watch footage on the late news.