All too often these days, we can’t even identify what we´re drinking. If, Swingers style, you’re going to order “any Glen” to impress the ladies, it’s probably best if you don’t mix it up with the bourbon your buddy ordered. So, with that noble goal in mind, here is your Whisky Cheat Sheet:
Whisky was first made in Ireland by missionary monks (who make the best booze and beer because the secrets are given to them by God) as early as the sixth century. Along with spreading The Word of The Lord, they also began distilling whisky, or as it’s called in Gaelic, uisce beatha, meaning “water of life.” Occupying British soldiers in the 12th century bastardised the pronunciation and it eventually came out “whisky”.
Whisky is a general term describing many spirits. Every region/country that makes whiskey has its own rules & regulations for the liquor to be considered official — so they can set themselves apart and then have a pissing contest to see whose is better. Whisky in the simplest of terms is comprised of water, a grain and yeast (if you add hops to those three, you get beer), and is aged in oak casks. The way you manipulate these ingredients accounts for all of the different varieties.
The four major types are Irish Whiskey (with en ‘e’), Scotch Whisky, American Whiskey (again with an ‘e’), & Canadian Whisky. The Irish & Americans spell it with the ‘e’; the rest of the world leaves it off to save on printing costs. Let’s break it down:
Irish Whiskey
Distilled three times. Uses pure-malted barley as the grain. Aged at least three years in oak casks.
Scotch or Scottish Whisky
Distilled twice. Also uses barley, which is dried over peat fire, giving scotch it’s characteristic smoky flavor. Aged at least two years in oak.
American Whiskey
Made from a mash (mixture) of cereal grain. Aged at least two years in charred, unused oak.
Canadian Whisky
Uses at least 51 percent malted rye as the grain. Aged at least three years in oak.
Other Fun Facts:
A whisky stops maturing after it’s bottled, so it won’t get “better” over time.
A closed bottle can be kept for more than 100 years and you’ll still be good to go. So, raid your parents’ liquor cabinet and grab that sealed Jameson from Christmas of ‘87.
An opened bottle is all right for five years. This is good to know for nicer bottles, but you should be drinking that handle of Beam way quicker than that.
The oak barrels give the whisky its caramel colour.
Whisky gains as much as 60 percent of its flavour from the type of cask used in the aging process.
Bourbon is an American Whiskey made from at least 51 percent corn. It no longer has to be made in Bourbon, Kentucky, but 90 percent of it is.
Bourbon County, is a dry county. Which is just stupid. Silly Americans.
The reason Jack Daniel’s is not considered bourbon is because they filter it through sugar-maple charcoal (“mellowing”) prior to aging.
While most people think that adding ice or water to whisky is sacrilegious, it is all about taste. One person might prefer his whisky neat (straight up), but a small amount of water or ice will bring out more subtle, nuanced flavors. Give it a try … just stay away from the mixers. You’re a man now.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/PaulSloane.
The most common method of thinking is verbal thinking. We have a range of intelligences including numerical, musical, spatial, emotional, verbal and kinaesthetic intelligences, yet it is verbal intelligence that we depend on most. We tend to think and express ourselves in words. Mastering the use of words is the most important skill we develop because acquiring further skills depends on our comprehension of language. A tremendous proportion of the early learning for an infant is in developing verbal skills – learning to speak, to understand speech, to read and to write. Whether a baby is brought up in Beijing, Sydney or Moscow it will surely spend thousands of hours acquiring expertise in its native language. He or she will become proficient with the amazing range, power, complexity and sophisticated subtleties of language. However, once a certain competence has been acquired most people stop developing verbal skills.
Studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between people’s abilities with words and range of vocabulary and with success in their chosen fields. People who can express themselves clearly are perceived as more intelligent and of higher status. They are accorded greater respect. So why do we not continue to enhance our verbal skills? Why do we stop doing what we spent most of our early years doing? The trouble is that we take our verbal abilities for granted. Once we have mastered reading, writing and speaking we move on to other things. We have acquired the most important tool in our mental toolbox. We depend on it for all sorts of tasks but we rarely take time to sharpen it. It makes better sense to maintain, enhance and extend the tool. Here are some ways we can do that.
Two of the most loyal companions on your desk should be a dictionary and a thesaurus. Use the dictionary to learn the meanings and derivations of new words you encounter. Also use it to check the exact meanings and spellings of words that you are unsure of. The thesaurus is very helpful whenever you are writing and need an alternative to a word in order to avoid repetition or to achieve a variation in meaning.
In the modern world we are so busy with work and we are bombarded with so much information by TV broadcast, telephone and the internet that reading books and articles can be squeezed out of our agenda. Reading the works of really good writers is one of the best ways to develop our abilities with words.
There is a regular feature in the Reader’s Digest magazine entitled, ‘It pays to expand your Word Power’. It is sound advice. Whenever we bump into new words we should turn to the dictionary and spend a moment learning the meaning and derivation of the word. It is easy to skip new words and race on through the text so we need discipline if we are not to lose this opportunity.
We all write, whether it is a text message on a cell phone, an email message or a novel, and we can all improve our writing. A good way to improve your writing is to read over what you have written and ask yourself these questions:
Children learn language by playing with words, testing, experimenting, making mistakes and being gently corrected. Adopt a playful attitude towards words and treat them as friends. Word games will increase your verbal dexterity and intelligence rating. Many standard IQ tests use word puzzles. Anagrams, cryptic crosswords, code-breakers, word searches, dingbats (also known as rebuses) and other verbal conundrums are excellent mental exercise.
In just the same way that you critically review your draft writing in order to sharpen it you should try to do the same with your speech. If it is possible try to view some video clips of yourself speaking. This is particularly useful it you are rehearsing for an important talk or presentation.
Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.’ They can paint amazing images, inspire and intoxicate. Continually work on developing your range of words and skills with words and you will reap the rewards.
You pay good money for your DVDs, but they’re hardly the only format you need these days. These five ripping tools ensure you can back them up, keep them on your media server, and load them on your favorite portable player.
Photo by jonasj.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite DVD-ripping tool. We tallied up the votes, and now we’re back to highlight the five most popular tools used by Lifehacker readers to rip, backup, and encode their DVD collections.
DVD Shrink is a free and capable ripping tool that excels at, as the name would imply, shrinking DVDs. DVDs come in two common formats: DVD-5 (4.7GB) and DVD-9 (8.5GB); the Reauthor mode in DVD Shrink helps you to ditch disc extras and strip most larger DVDs down to fit into a standard (and less expensive) DVD-5 disc. DVD Shrink does a good job handling many protection schemes, but hasn’t been updated to remove some of the newest schemes.
DVD Fab is a commercial DVD ripper that supports the removal of all current DVD copy protections. In addition to being current on protection schemes, it boasts a large array of options for stripping and repacking your DVDs once the copy protection is removed. You can rip the entire disc, rip only the main movie, or split it into pieces—among other options. Like DVD Shrink, DVD Fab also supports compressing DVD-9 discs to fit on DVD-5 discs.
Handbrake is a DVD-ripping tool with a strong emphasis on not just ripping media but recoding it for playback on computers, portable devices, and other non-disc based systems. Handbrake can help you convert DVDs and other MPEG-based video into MP4 and MKV files. You can tweak settings like video frame rate and audio codec playback to your heart’s content with Handbrake, and even batch encode all your media at one time to make filling up your iPod or other device relatively painless. The one major shortcoming of Handbrake is that it doesn’t have any copy protection removal tools built in, which means you may occasionally need to use a 3rd-party stripping tool to prepare your DVD for conversion.
AnyDVD is another commercial entry in this week’s Hive Five. It’s not cheap, with a one year license running $60—although the multi-year discounts quickly stack up—but it can boast that it stays on top of current protection and encryption schemes to makes sure you’re never locked out of your own discs. In addition to stripping protections from the disc, it also has the ability to control DVD playback speed so that DVDs played on media center computers will play slower and quieter, and it allows you to remove things like forced subtitles, warning screens, and disc material you don’t want.
Although DVD Decrypter hasn’t been updated since 2005, it still works on a significant number of DVDs and has a strong following resulting from both its original user base and new users who find it cuts through the copy protection on their current DVDs protected with CSS, Macrovision content protection, region codes, and other hindrances.
Written by Kevin Kelleher
In a famous passage from “Ulysses,” James Joyce recapitulates the development of the English language in 45 pages — from the archaic and formal (“Deshil Holles Eamus”) to the conversationally casual (“Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on”). Over the past decade, as more people have spent more time writing on the Internet, that same evolution has not only continued, it feels like it’s accelerated.
With so much discussion about how the Internet is changing journalism and media, there’s surprisingly little said about how writing itself has transformed. But it has changed in a dramatic if subtle way.
Nine years ago, I remember being one of 100 or so journalists gathered to listen to a veteran writer speak. I don’t remember the topic, just that when he asked how many of us enjoy writing, I was surprised that only a few hands went up. Today, so much of the typical day is taken up with writing emails, tweets, updates, text messages, chat sessions, blog posts and the occasional longer form writing. And few complain how onerous it all is.
On balance, all of that practice is making online writing better. Which is not to say that all online writing is good. Much of it’s terrible – see the average YouTube comment for an example of how bad it can be. But it’s been said that excellent writing is a matter of good thinking – if you’ve got the thinking part down, that’s most of the battle. And many of the thoughtful people I know are producing some great stuff on the web.
The Internet isn’t just prompting us to write more, its open structure pressures us to write in a way that’s at once more concise and flexible. One problem newspapers and magazines never could fix is that articles are assigned arbitrary lengths. Pay writers per word and they’ll write as many as they can. Assign a 12,000-word story and you’ll get just that, even if 1,000 are all that’s necessary.
On the web it’s different. Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen looked at how people read web content (basically, they scan it) and argued web writing should
Many web writers, whether they’ve read Nielsen’s advice or not, use these practices because readers respond to them. The impulse to scan is a good thing because readers’ impatience inspires economy among writers.
At the same time, people are mastering more kinds of writing. Other technologies that grew more popular this decade required a different mode of expression: Instant messaging invited a breezy, fast-thinking tone; blog comments (again, the thoughtful ones) sharpened our debate skills; Twitter enforced even more economy onto our words. In all of these, we were nudged toward something all writers aspire to: a strong, distinct voice.
Having a clear voice has grown more important on the web, where writers worry about brand-building, news sites grow interactive and blog posts resemble conversations. Some don’t regard texting and chat as writing, while others argue that they’re killing longer and more formal prose. Both notions are wrong. The informal writing we do on the web doesn’t supplant formal writing, it complements and influences it — and is influenced in return.
Not all of the Internet’s effects on writing have been positive. Many bloggers tailor headlines and posts so that they’ll surface at the top of search results, making them at once easier to find and less enjoyable to read. And this decade, a lot of other bloggers mistook a strong writing voice for caustic irreverence. But most eventually learned that writing with snark is like cooking with salt — a little goes a long way.
On the other hand, concerns about the Internet hurting writing feel overblown. Some educators worry that the Internet is making teenagers way too casual in their writing, so that they never learn more formal composition. I disagree. The best way to learn good writing is to write a lot.
Besides, language is always evolving, and a more conversational English isn’t a bad thing. “Writing, when properly managed…is but a different name for conversation.” Laurence Sterne wrote that in Tristram Shandy 250 years ago. Thanks to the Internet, it’s more true now than ever.
1 Hacker originally meant “one who makes furniture with an ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt nature of that approach, the word came to mean someone who takes pleasure in an unconventional solution to a technical obstacle.
2 Computer hacking was born in the late 1950s, when members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, obsessed with electric switching, began preparing punch cards to control an IBM 704 mainframe.
3 One of the club’s early programs: code that illuminated lights on the mainframe’s console, making it look like a ball was zipping from left to right, then right to left with the flip of a switch. Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!
4 By the early 1970s, hacker “Cap’n Crunch” (a.k.a. John Draper) had used a toy whistle to match the 2,600-hertz tone used by AT&T’s long-distance switching system. This gave him access to call routing (and brief access to jail).
5 Before they struck it rich, Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made and sold “blue boxes,” electronic versions of Draper’s whistle.
6 Using a blue box, Wozniak crank-called the Pope’s residence in Vatican City and pretended to be Henry Kissinger.
7 Hacking went Hollywood in the 1983 movie WarGames, about a whiz kid who breaks into a Defense Department computer and, at one point, hi jacks a pay phone by hot-wiring it with a soda can pull-ring.
8 That same year, six Milwaukee teens hacked into Los Alamos National Lab, which develops nuclear weapons.
9 In 1988 Robert T. Morris created a worm, or self-replicating program, purportedly to evaluate Internet security.
10 The worm reproduced too well, however. The multi million-dollar havoc that ensued led to Morris’s felony conviction, one of the first under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (PDF).
11 They all come home eventually. Morris now researches computer science at…MIT.
12 British hacker Gary McKinnon broke into 97 U.S. Navy, Army, Pentagon, and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002.
13 McKinnon’s defense: He wasn’t hunting military secrets; he was only seeking suppressed government files about space aliens.
14 According to rumor, agents of China’s People’s Liberation Army attempted to hack the U.S. power grid, triggering the great North American blackout of 2003.
15 It took IBM researcher Scott Lunsford just one day to penetrate the network of a nuclear power station: “I thought, ‘Gosh, this is a big problem.’”
16 Unclear on the concept: When West Point holds its annual cyberwar games, the troops wear full fatigues while fighting an enemy online.
17 Think your Mac is hackproof? At this year’s CanSecWest conference, security researcher Charlie Miller used a flaw in Safari to break into a MacBook in under 10 seconds.
18 Cyborgs beware: Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington recently hacked into a wireless defibrillator, causing it to deliver fatal-strength jolts of electricity.
19 This does not bode well for patients receiving wireless deep-brain stimulators.
20 The greatest kludge of all? Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has proposed building a giant sunscreen in space to hack the planet’s climate.
The world's tallest tower, 'Burj Khalifa' is 828 metres (2,716.5 ft) high.
The Burj Khalifa, developed by Emaar Properties, was unveiled on the evening of January 4th, 2010. Thousands of people present, and viewers around the world, were treated to an extravagant show of fireworks, lasers, and fountain displays.
Burj Khalifa is now the tallest building in the world, according to the three main criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). The CTBUH ranks the world’s tallest buildings based on ‘Height to Architectural Top,’ ‘Height to Highest Occupied Floor’ and ‘Height to Tip.’
At 828 metres (2,716.5ft), Burj Khalifa is 320 metres taller than Taipei 101, which stands at 508 metres (1,667 ft). Taipei 101 had held the record for the world’s tallest building measured to the architectural top since 2004, the year the project was announced.
Burj Khalifa also achieved the distinction of being the world’s tallest structure – surpassing the KVLY-TV mast (628.8 metres; 2,063 ft) in North Dakota, USA – 1,325 days after excavation work started in January 2004.
The tower also beats the 31-year-old record of CN Tower, at 553.33 metres (1,815.5 ft) which had been the world’s tallest free-standing structure on land since 1976.
Burj Khalifa Opening Ceremony
Burj Khalifa includes a record-breaking 330,000 cubic metres of concrete, 39,000 metric tonnes of steel rebar, and 142,000 square metres of glass; it took 22 million man hours in all to build.
Other world records for Burj Khalifa include the highest occupied floor in the world, at over 550 metres (1,800 ft); the highest outdoor observation deck in the world, At the Top on Level 124; and the tallest service elevator, which travels to a height of 504 metres (1,654 ft).
Mr. Mohamed Alabbar, Chairman of Emaar Properties, said that with the unveiling of the final height of Burj Khalifa, the world now had a new reference point for high-rise developments:
“Burj Khalifa is an example of collaboration on a global scale, and the tremendous positive energy that can be generated when people from all over the world come together to work towards a common goal. Thousands of professionals and skilled workers from around the world worked on this once-in-a-lifetime project.”
“More than 60 of the world’s leading consultants including South Korea’s Samsung Corporation and New York-based Turner Construction International realised the design for Burj Khalifa of Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM).”
Emaar Properties employed the latest advances in wind engineering, structural engineering, structural systems, construction materials and methods building Burj Khalifa. All design plans took into account the 12,000 people who will live and work in the tower. The handover to residents of the various components of Burj Khalifa will begin in February.
With a total built-up area of about 6 million sq ft, Burj Khalifa features nearly 2 million sq ft of residential space and over 300,000 sq ft of prime office space, in addition to the area occupied by the highly-anticipated Armani Hotel Dubai and the Armani Residences. The tower also features modern lifestyle amenities including clubs, health and fitness facilities, gourmet restaurants, and the 124th floor observation deck, ‘At the Top.’
Burj Khalifa is the focal point of the 500-acre ‘mega-project’ by Emaar Properties, described as the new heart of Dubai.
Impressive, sure, Burj Khalifa is a modern marvel. The way it was unveiled will remain spectacular, and the records it set won’t soon be eclipsed. But like all achievements, there’s more to the story. Dubai basically got bailed-out by Abu Dhabi a few months ago… and now they roll out a world-leading, billion-dollar project.
