autonomous_unit

Spot on autonomous_unit,

Your knowledge of load shedding etc indicates to me that you may be in the power station business.

Are you?  Just curious...

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No, but I lived in California recently where _everyone_ had to know the power business.

The way I look at it, the generators are always working at capacity, and no electricity is stored, so it's either used, or lost....that's the only way to waste it, from my view.

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Pedant alert: I am not sure if you are joking, but that's not accurate at all! It's not like there is a giant resistor pack where they dump all the excess power nobody consumes, nor a drain where they dump the fuel-oil that isn't being burned.

The generators have to adjust their output, by adjusting their fuel consumption, all the time to keep the voltage up and the power in phase. If there is too sudden a spike in demand, they may shed load so they can ramp it up more slowly. This is one of the causes of short blackouts in the summer. Here, they seem to just let the power quality fluctuate (brownouts) more often than proper load shedding. I gather that this is less feasible in a large grid, because it is difficult to keep the whole thing operating if parts are going out of phase or dropping voltage relative to other parts.

The way to handle large increases in load is to bring extra generators online. This can take many minutes to hours to get them to the point of producing real power, and they may take even longer than that to operate efficiently. Keeping them online and idle avoids the startup time but is also inefficient, kind of like idling your car in gridlocked traffic because you're not quite sure when you'll need to move.

The only generators that really have to "waste" fuel when there is no demand would be solar, or possibly hydro-electric. If the dam is at flood-stage and they cannot reduce the flow but simply must bypass the generator and dump it downstream. At other times, they can hold the water back and keep the "fuel" (gravitational potential energy of water) for later use in the generator.

A silly question: why do you guys say "retreating" when the baht is getting stronger relative to the dollar, and advancing when it is losing value? It sounds like someone shouting in celebration as their golf score increases.

I tend to look at cars now as the same kind of financial habit as drinking. You have to know what you want out of it and what your tastes are. In my opinion, many people foolishly buy cars (or drinks!) to impress others rather than to get quality they will enjoy themselves. I like to buy a 90 baht bottle of Erdinger hefeweissen at Top's to enjoy at home with dinner, but I don't feel shy about drinking local beers too. I don't care what others think of my choices, but I know what I like... I prefer to use my mouth to express myself, and keep my wallet for those things I like.

When I was 24, I hadn't entirely figured this out. I got myself a turbo, all-wheel-drive Audi A4 for around $30k US (financed) and loved it for trips to the mountains and coastal twisties, long-distance cruising, foul-weather driving etc. I told myself it was practical, but I am sure I was thinking snooty thoughts too. I only put about 40k miles on it in 6 years, and sold it for about $11k US to move to Thailand. Did I get $20k of value out of it (not considering maintanence, fuel, higher insurance, etc.)? I suppose so, just adding up all the holiday trips in 6 years. It was a nice change from my college days where I had a car that cost me more to keep going over a few years than it was worth at resale, even when I was doing the work myself.

Now in BKK, we'll probably join the practical brigade and get a Soluna. I would never pay the amount they want for a new Audi here, at least not unless I reach the point of not counting money at all. And I doubt I would ever buy a used car here, given what I have seen of maintenance practices.

Oh, I thought it would be cool to get a Lotus Elise as a summer play car. But sports cards really make so little sense in urban areas. Comfort, safety, operating costs etc. seem more important now.

I was coming back in a few weeks ago and the officer flipped open my passport and found an old O-multi visa and stamped 90 days before I could say anything. I was a little bemused, as I had put the arrival card on the right page for my current reentry permit but she just yanked it out rather than opening it to that page (as most officers seem to do).

So I said excuse me, did my best at a weak "this is embarrassing for us both" Thai smile and leaned over to point and say I had an extension of stay (in English)... so she flipped a few more pages and found that, then scribbled over and wrote the right "stay until" date over the stamp. She was apologetic but relaxed and I sort of mumbled mai bpen rai (not too confident in my tiny Thai vocabulary yet) and got a nice smile.

I can only agree that you get what you give in these kinds of exchanges. I think a lot of foreigners I have seen who get a Thai person's feathers up do so by expressing a dominant position. I don't know if this is because they subconsciously feel superior, or just because they are unaware of how poorly body position and mannerisms translate between cultures.

I am not sure if I see the Universe as a program itself... but possibly as a set of Universal Laws. Law of Gravity, Laws of Chemistry, Physics etc etc etc. However, I still cannot in my wildest imagination, see that these laws can by happy accident, mutating, evolving, and produce Life as we know it. It seems to me that 'something' had to 'use' these laws in order to 'create' Life. I fail to see how 'organization' can come from chaos. No matter what time it takes.

Taking a stick, some sand, some carbon, metal elements and a crocodile... no matter how much time... how much happy accident... how many combinations of anything... will never, ever, by any evolution process whatever, make the watch I wear on my wrist.

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I think this is a false counter-example. A watch is not a self-reproducing mechanism, so I have a hard time seeing it appear spontaneously as well. To talk about "evolution" of watches, technology, fashion, or other passive structures, we have to wink and nod and pretend they are reproducing on their own rather than being developed by an outside actor or craftsman who bases their design on experience with previous works.

If you can make this leap of abstraction, an interesting variant is to consider how many "generations" of tools it would take a craftsman to build himself modern machine tools if all he has to start with are trees (fuel), rocks (ore, abrasives), dirt (for making bricks and containers), water, fire, and willpower. A good jack-of-all-trades can do this in a short amount of time (years, not lifetimes): building primitive wood and stone tools, processing ore, refining metals, doing a bit of smithy and making more accurate and durable tools to get from the first chipper or grinder to finally having good lathes and drills made only of parts he has made from scratch. I forget the name, but somebody did this in my lifetime and wrote a book on it, just to prove it was possible. It's a sort of engineer's antidote to the post-apocalyptic vision of humans returning to the stone age for eons...

As you would say, this is because he is following a program and knows which way to go. It doesn't seem like evolution. In some sense though, the various ages of Man were the blind or spontaneous version of this: many men made small, almost random, changes and improvements and the economy and society as a whole slowly developed modern tools without any single blinding moment of insight.

The idea behind evolution as the origin of species is that the first thing to erupt was self-reproduction. Strange molecules were busy catalyzing reactions that produced copies of themselves, long before these molecules resembled anything we'd consider interesting or alive.

The biggest unanswered question is what kinds of macro-assemblies of molecules were doing this in the span from simple amino acids to complex proteins or multi-molecular structures and finally to something resembling a very simple microorganism. What sets microorganisms apart is that they carry around a little controlled chemistry environment inside of themselves, rather than depending on a perfect and nurturing environment to allow them to function.

... [moth color adapting to environment during Industrial Revolution]...

'Something' caused the moths to change. Something in the genetic code possibly, or something in the Natural Laws of survival (if indeed they exist?)

My question is: What 'causes' such steps in evolution? What 'makes' the moth change color in order to survive?

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You're persistent. I'll keep playing the evolution fiddle for a while...

There wasn't a step where they changed color. There is always a spread of different colors in the population, much like there are spreads of different height, body type, tooth structure, etc. in human populations. It's the law of large numbers, much like what makes your casinos rake in a profit every year despite the randomness of each individual throw of the dice, etc. The overall population follows average probabilities, even though each member (or bet) shows sharp deviations from this average.

If humans were to evolve to be taller, let's say, it wouldn't be because our sperm thought it would be cool to start being tall. Rather, for some reason the taller guys and gals would have had more luck procreating, and even more luck procreating with each other. If there were sudden survival advantages to being either really tall or really short, you might find that we'd diverge into two subspecies because all the cross-breeders would have medium-build kids that usually died! This is overly simplistic, but hopefully shows the point of reproductive trends over generations...

What changed for the moths was the reproductive rates, most likely due to their variable rates of survival to reach reproductive age. The surviving moths breed and combine their coloring genes while the dead moths, poor suckers, do not. I don't know the details, but I am sure the moths reproduce at much shorter intervals, so what seems like a brief time to a human was actually many generations of successive breeding by the moths. This sudden environmental change that affected their visibility to predators is much like the exagerated impact we can have when we conduct selective breeding of plants or animals; the difference is that predators rather than our directed interference in breed pairs is what effected the selections.

These sudden pressures happen more easily in small environments, where migration patterns cannot weaken the effect by allowing individuals to "climb out of the water" instead of having to "sink or swim." This is one theory for why there were such interesting species on small islands in the Pacific instead of the same old dull ones from the Old World... interesting enough to actually inspire Darwin to ponder this question!

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Apparently there are laws of 'cause and effect'. 'Something' causes the 'organization'. Some law/s, or program/s, or mixture of, 'makes' the basic building blocks of Life 'organize' themselves in order to survive. For the whole Life system to work, 'some' Amoeba and single celled animals must remain Amoeba and single celled animals and 'cause' them not to evolve, in order to keep the food chain in tact. It would therefore seem that ALL life is 'organized' in some way.

It is, I think, irrefutable, that Life is 'organized'. That human brains and memories are 'organized'. It would seem that 1,000,000,000,000,000 ‘organized’ and "hardwired" electrical neurological connections within the brain would be sufficient to provide for memory of a lifetime. But research has shown that is far too small a number. Trillions of electrical connections are minuscule in comparison to what occurs in memory.

Where are these memories? How do you find them? What magnificent 'design' can provide for the recording of sensory perception, thought and logic into particular molecules - and then index them for instant retrieval?

How does 'organization' come from random mutations? At what stage did randomness, 'decide' to 'organize' itself? Or is the alternative... a creator... out of the question?

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Yes, I think you are getting my point and I yours. I think you are calling the universe itself a "program", i.e. made up of all the natural laws that govern motion, chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, etc.

There are folks who worry about how these natural laws came to be... how many dud universes must have sputtered out with the wrong balance of equations such that everything burned up in a flash or froze solid, or went poof and ever got to go beyond some exotic matter stage. I am not one of these people... I simply think it is unknowable how our universe came to be, because we (by definition) are trapped within it and cannot observe or understand anything that is beyond it.

So, if you take for granted that gravity, and time-space, and energy, and all that funs stuff just Are, then we can talk about how evolution, the quintessential self-organizing process, might have developed things from "primordial ooze" into the rich state they are in now. When we consider evolution to be a possible (or likely) explanation, we still have to explain the genesis of the first self-replicating chemicals of life... the best story I have heard (from the reductionist side of town) is that through brute force of having countless planets throughout the universe, ours was lucky enough to have the right mixture of raw materials, geology, temperature, etc. to get things over that hump.

I don't preclude there being a creator, as I am an agnostic. But neither do I preclude there _not_ being one. My work predisposes me to accepting the viability of self-organizing systems. Such systems do not have to "decide" to organize, but rather they are compelled to by their underlying, self-reinforcing structures. Just as a small amount of kindling can induce a blaze by firing its own draft. The meta-stability of organic chemistry, combined with our Sun and seasons, allows a multitude of reactions to occur which pump energy around without violating thermodynamics... life converts one form of order and structure into other forms, but overall it does work and must increase entropy (disorder) in the form of waste heat, etc. What keeps us going is the steady stream of sunlight that supplies temperature gradiants (ordered energy) in our biosphere, and heat loss out the night side of the Earth that keeps us from just getting hot and dead. There are nearly disjoint undersea ecologies driven by the latent geothermal gradient, e.g. volcanic vents fed by the cooling process that the Earth 's interior has been experiencing since it fell together from clouds of space dust.

As for the amount of memory we have---I think some research in areas like situational awareness demonstrate that our memories have a lot less information in them than one might expect. People often think they remember all the sensations of a past experience, but in fact they seem to remember a very small number of key facts and the brain reconstitutes the memory using these facts and a template or formula for filling in the details. Even worse, suggestibility means that people can manufacture convincing memories for events they never experienced!

This is pure speculation, but my feeling is that much of our dreamscape comes from this inherent ability... our brains regenerate an entire experience full of abstraction, symbols, and meaning out of scant few sensory details. I cannot tell you the number of times I've incorporated alarm clocks or other senses into a dream story that had little to do with the original signal...

So has anyone found any link of a site that display products with a 360 degree drag view around the product ??

I am thinking this is a very tough task and thats only in one plane not all around drag in 3 dimensions..

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Check out http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/PTVJ/helpers.html for a quick explanation of how this works. There are also tools linked from this site which might be useful.

You basically maintain a 2D array of images with background and/or alpha mask, and these represent the object from different yaw/pitch coordinates. To view it, you have to morph between adjacent images in the array. The Apple QuickTime VR viewer can do this, and I think I've seen that on an automobile manufacturer's website before.

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So if you can hardly see one's eyes clearly, how can they be attractive to you ?

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They open up just as wide as any... you must not be doing something right.

I keep my wife busy, or barring that, irritated.  I'm getting so good at it that I still feel idle sometimes. 

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Maybe we should form a union.

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Shush! Any sign of agitators and we might be subject to a lockout!

The liberal masses in California.

OK, yeah I miss Carne Asada.

And Muir Woods is nice for walking around a little, but I'd never trade it for any of the national parks of the Sierra Nevada... the Winter silence and Spring roar of Yosemite is pretty special.

I guess I miss having an affordable, all-wheel drive, German sedan for getting to those mountains, too...

I hardly think the two compare. Types of rock, stone, crystals and a watch?

I think your example is too extreme, so I was trying to show some structure or order coming from the other extreme... to primitive societies, however, I wonder if caves could have seemed like divinely supplied shelter?

As for evolution being a program or not, I mean it is no more a program than gravity, thermodynamics, or conservation of mass. It is understood by proponents as a mathematical (statistical) property of large systems.

The entire universe might be a program, running on some god's home computer. Or it might all be running in your head, or mine, but I do not think speculation of that form will get us anywhere.

... You believe that these accidental mutations created a code that instructs another mechanism how to produce the particular 100,000 different proteins that are essential for life, and you believe that these same accidents made all of this information retreivable, such that upon the demand for a particular protein the retreival mechanism singles out the precise1/100,000th of the molecule needed, copies it and then produces the particular molecule. This molecule is perhaps smaller that 1/1000 of the size of one of the pixels on your computer screen.

Does this not rather stretch reason and credulity to argue that all of this came about through an unobserved process of chance and dying animals? Or did 'something' code it?

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It is not difficult for me to imagine the development of more complex organisms from simpler ones, particularly considering the huge timescales and the much shorter reproductive cycles of the primitive microorganisms where much of the hard chemistry had to be resolved. I am an expert in computation and information sciences rather than in biology. The idea of complex, yet structured information developing via mutation (under the influence of basic chemistry "laws") does not bother me, though I leave it to chemists and biologists to examine the potential for organic chemistry to support such incremental developments.

I do not have a strong belief in how the "genesis" of the very earliest microorganisms happened; In the meantime, I am willing to allow for the possiblity of random genesis because of two things: viruses and prions demonstrate how non-living chemical assemblies can reproduce at different levels of complexity beneath the cellular, and I do like the simplicity of such a system if it could be possible (Occam's razor).

I also am intrigued by the fact that many "primitive" animals and microorganisms have extremely large genomes. By modern accounts, the human genome is extremely concise for all the complexity of our physiology; we actually seem to be the product of much refinement and weeding out of useless junk compared to some preexisting "solutions" to the life problem. The ability to selectively express genes, and even to recombine them in different recipes within a cell, seem to be tricks acquired later after a large hodge-podge of genes were already available.

Again, because of my profession I find this as reinforcement of the evolutionary theory. There are randomized search techniques which are applied in many engineering disciplines where the problems are otherwise intractable: simulated annealing is a process of randomly perturbing one or more solutions and selectively retaining or discarding them based on their consistency to some underlying constraints (laws) and their relative efficacy according to some metrics (fitness). The logical extension of this is a research area called genetic programming, in which a sexual reproductive model is used to combine aspects of different solutions (as if by gene mixing) to produce the next generation of possible solutions. By comparison, simulated annealing uses an asexual mutation model.

These searching programs serve to simulate an abstracted form of evolution in order to tune solutions to problems such as integrated circuit layout, and it is interesting to note that they will sometimes produce qualitatively different solution structures that still have similar fitness for purpose. Also, the annealing process will yield crude solutions or finely tuned solutions depending on how long you let it run. These behaviors were not completely engineered into the algorithms, but are emergent properties of the mutation and selection process.

Wow you guys are fast! I also experienced almost identical sensations to the December quake at our condo in BKK, Bangkoknoi. I am not sure if it was shorter though, or whether being in the evening meant I was less aware of when it began (on our floor, it is not so much shaking as strange noises from the structure). The December one seemed to continue steadily for at least 45 seconds, but this one I only noticed for 20-30 seconds at most.

You missed my point I think. The watch would indeed be thought of as a mystical event and I think the finder would have to decide that the watch had been 'created' by somebody, or something... not just a very strange pebble on the beach that got there by some accident/s of nature.

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I think 'man' created Chocolate Banana Torte. It was not found in a pot on any beach that happened by natural causes or Pure Mathematics. No?

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Yes, but 'what' is it that 'dictates' this evolution? Where did the Life come from to evolve in the first place? What wrote the genetic code? Program?

I think this part of the thread has more to do with Existence than the knowledge and belief part, which was steering back towards that Do Dogs Think thread.

I took the point about the torte as: the idea of the torte emerged out of the environment as a new combination of ingredients and did not require divine intervention to impart a recipe on man. This is an awkward analogy because the environment is human culture and we're talking about evolution of recipes. It's sort of one foot in, and one foot out.

Ravisher, rather than your watch on a beach, imagine you found an opening in the ground and crawled through it to find a chain of immense caverns, each lined with brilliant crystals and towering stalgmites and stalagtites. Do you think to yourself, "hmm, I wonder where I can find the architect and interior designer who did this?" Or do you think, "hmm, I wonder what physical processes caused all of this interesting structure?" Each of us can contrive loaded questions here...

Evolution isn't a program or template, i.e. there is not a gene that says, "evolve". Evolution is considered to be an essential truth of populations competing for limited resources until they reach some kind of equilibrium, just as game theorists can mathematically distinguish good and bad strategies for individuals and populations in an abstract game or economy. The participants don't have to be programmed with the theory for it to accurately model their statistical outcomes. Futhermore, it is not really "survival of the fittest" but "differential development of the good enough."

Those of us who think evolution could explain Existence are assuming (or waiting for) an explanation of processes to boot-strap the complex organic chemistry to the point where the simplest single-cell organisms began. It has already been shown how amino acids can form "spontaneously" in a stew of simple organic chemicals, heat, and electricity as might have existed in primordial (geological) earth.

It is also conceivable (to proponents) how single cell organisms would evolve given the kinds of mutating processes that biologists have observed within and among such organisms. There are many avenues for swapping and editing of genes, as well as wholesale theft of larger structures. For example: some suggest that our mitochondria might have begun as separate parasitic organisms which entered into a symbiotic relationship with larger hosts; producing excess energy and not needing to develop their own defense mechanisms. Umpteen generations later, they are inseparable parts of our cellular machinery yet they still have oddly asexual reproductive quirks compared to the rest of our genome.

I don't think anyone has explained how the first self-contained organisms got these chemicals working sufficiently to get a metabolism and the ability to reproduce its macroscopic structure. One school of thought is that geological processes of crystallization, precipitation, erosion, etc. (much like those that produce caverns) might have formed an "organized" substrate in which these processes could develop.

I forgot to add: making a full spherical map is the same problem as the limited "panoramic horizon", just with the camera rotating in all directions (looking outward) or around a sphere (looking inward) until enough images are taken to cover all points on the map. More pictures means that the overlapping edges can be discarded and there is less distortion/blur due to optical problems at the periphery of the camera's images. I've never tried to make one of these.

A typical outdoor panorama is just the pictures covering a 360 degree circle with maybe +/- 20 degrees from the horizon (whatever the field of view of a single image turns out to be w/ the chosen lens). A typical night-sky "hemisphere" would of course be a 360 degree circle with 180 degree field of view above the horizon and none below.

There used to be a very nice share-ware or open source package (I don't remember the licensing, exactly) called "Panotools" or something very close to that.

It algorithmically stitches together panoramic pictures taken by a regular camera, including extensive support to help correct for errors due to improper camera alighment. With careful work and a tripod, you can make flawless 360 degree panoramas without a special lens. It lets you interactively select key points on pairs of images to tell it how they overlap, and it then attempts to find the optimal math to merge everything. Its interface is not for the faint of heart, but its results can be breathtaking.

The "reverse" panorama of circling around an object turns out to be a degenerate case of the same mapping problem, as I recall. Rather than trying to rotate a camera to take a set of pictures with the focal-point staying in exactly one spot in space, you want to sweep the camera around with the focal point remaining on a circle and the image centered at the center of the picture.

There are really three steps here:

1) take pictures with the correct geometric alignment

2) use software to stitch the images into one continuous image map

3) use some viewer interactively project the map into a more familiar view

The viewer is important, since you would need something to distribute from your website. I have no idea what licensing issues there are here; I don't know if panotools has any support for this.

The other trick is to get color-balance and exposure to match for all pictures in a set. The panoramic mode on digital cameras does this by fixing those settings on the first image and then only allowing you to adjust the framing and focus on subsequent images. The PC-based software does the actual stitching and tries to be easier, more automated than panotools.

Other things you can do with the map besides viewing it interactively are to print a mosaic to plaster onto a globe, view directly like one of those whole-earth composites of satellite imagery, project into a cylindrical mode etc.

Sorry, I wasn't suggesting anyone was being critical of Thais or their language. I was suggesting that maybe the sound problem is sometimes with your own ears, rather than the Thai mouth.

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Would you give any specifics? My wife (highly educated, but not in linguistics) was pretty emphatic that there is a proper way to say it and the majority of Thais do not do so for the same reasons that many in the UK or US do not speak what is considered "proper" in those countries, i.e. some combination of not knowing what is proper, not being able to break early habits, or wanting to express certain class markers. I've noticed her use different pronunciations of "l" and "r" depending on whether she is speaking to her friends and coworkers versus taxi drivers... whatever communicates clearly, I suppose.

I am nearly certain that what she meant by "proper" was the dialect of the central Thai government, etc. that is pushed out to the provinces through the government-run schools. I do not know much about the dialects of Thailand, so I do not know if this is synonymous with what the royals and aristocracy speak or if there are different dialects even in the upper crust? (I know there are grammatical markers for royalty and I do not mean those, but rather pronunciation and vocabulary.)

Our rented condo in BKK has a little Stiebel Eltron heater on the wall in the shower, with its output hooked into a two-tap mixing faucet. Even dialed to the lowest temperature available, we have the same problem that it switches on and off with the shower becoming too hot or too cold every minute or so n the cool season, as the water pressure varies. (In the rest of the year, we do not use it at all.) I have also noticed that it seems as if the mixing ratio changes abruptly when the pressure drops and actually stays that way after the pressure returns. I do not have in-line water flow meters to verify my hypothesis.

Is it just a matter of being penny-wise and pound-foolish that the plumbing is so bad here? From the US, I am used to having vent stacks to the roof and proper water traps on all drains, plus a shock-absorber in the form of a capped vertical segment of pipe (filled with air) at the end of each water "circuit". Together with reliable sources (pressure at or above expected levels) and a pressure-regulator at the entry to the dwelling, these provide very nice service without needing larger expansion tanks etc. These are not just a matter of comfort but also reduce the stresses on all of the fittings and joints...

BTW, I believe water does compress a little in practice because it is very difficult to get all the dissolved gases out of it. :-) That is one reason hydraulic systems usually use some other fluid rather than water. The other reasons being to get a higher boiling point and to prevent corrosion. Remember, brake fluid actually gets "soft" when it absorbs water from the atmosphere!

This is a truly interesting question. From what I read about some experiments done on babies, I think it was in the 1950's or 60's, when they were only fed and cleaned, but not touched or talked to in any other way. They all died. The experiment was stopped immediately.

But if we imagine your scenario here... I should say 'try' to imagine... The baby, having no reference to 'self' would probably not become self-aware. The brain needs 'information', just as a computer needs information. It is not enough just to have an 'operating system'. The child would have an operating system, but no Audio Card, no Word Program, no Graphics Card... etc etc. Therefore thoughts may never occur in the infant brain that is denied all means of input. Much like being in permenant 'coma'. Thoughts are manufactured by the brain. Such a brain would have no means of manufacturing thoughts.

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The first comment above sounds like a likely urban legend to me. The only "experiments" I know of that were anything like that were a large number of Soviet Bloc orphanages, but this was due to neglect rather than scientific inquiry. Kids were malnourished emotionally and nutritionally. I am not sure how often it leads to infant death versus ongoing neuroses. It is quite terrible, however. As I understand it, the problem has more to do with basic emotional development than abstract thought: the children become extremely detached, because we are social animals who develop most of our personality after delivery. More disturbing, the staff often played favorites, so the children who showed signs of sociability got more reinforcement, while the withdrawn children became ever more isolated.

(I did not study this directly, so I do not know how much it was distorted by the authors reporting it to the laymen's venues where I must have seen it. Some might say that this "experiment" continues in slums around the world.)

As for the computer analogy, you might find Helen Keller's biography interesting, if you haven't read it already. She was born deaf and blind in early America, and did not acquire any language until adolescence, when a heroically persistent teacher taught her a modified sign language. It's been a long time, but I recall that she describes her cognitive world leading up to the breakthrough where she first understood that the teacher was communicating using symbols. Of course, such powerful stories are risky in the sense of all anecdotal evidence; we cannot be sure how much reinterpretation has gone into the records based on Keller's or her peers' prevailing attitudes towards cognitive development.

LOL.... hahaha... that's why I sometimes won't put a smiley after a bit of dry humor... such as the colostomy bag photo comment. Part of the humor is the confusion it might create in this often-too-serious forum.... I certainly didn't expect to snare Ajarn as he's very intelligent and does possess a very good sense of humor.... not sure what happened??

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Right, I could not find a :deadpan: emoticon among the clickable options. The best dry joke is when you can get someone to laugh at one interpretation, then cloud over in confusion, then laugh at the other interpretation, then cloud over with suspicion and finally then laugh at the whole situation. It's a bit like joke haiku!

I wish there were emoticons to show the _readers_, so we know how well the joke worked.

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I have to agree entirely with this post, other than the last sentance. I think the search for knowledge, as in truth, IS the human condition. As a child my father nick-named me "Why". It is our very nature to 'question'.  And you Mr. autonomous_unit have obviously done an awful lot of questioning yourself... 

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Yes, as a kid I was the one all the other kids turned to when they wanted to know "why". The way I see it, I knew it all when I was 13, and now I know a lot less at 31. At this rate, I can hopefully know nothing at all by the time I am ready to retire!

I agree the human condition is to seek out truth. But I also think the human condiiton is to not be able to accurately recognize it when we find it. It's that old catch-22... nobody ever said life was going to be easy.

What I meant about the human condition is that our senses, and even our logic, are not very reliable. I spent formative time caring for the mentally ill and at the same time having buddies who got a bit too recreational in their use of chemicals (San Francisco Bay area, yaddah yaddah). Spend enough time talking to people in altered states, and you realize just how weakly we are bound to reality! It is a rare and moving event when someone in a delusional state somehow reflects on that and decides to trust their caretaker or buddy more than their own sense of reality.

And then there are the "normal" folks who are often so easily convinced by a bit of charisma or well-placed marketing. The prevalence of cults, fashion, fads, and political "cycles" only emphasizes to me that the human condition is to be at constant risk of being bamboozled. The frightening part, for me, is that we can do it to each other without there necessarily being some clever director to coordinate everything according to a malicious script.

I think "The Lord of the Flies" unfolds much more frequently than Jonestown...

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I think you both missed the point. I think there was no reference to Asians because they are happy to say hello. I find I have no trouble with that. I think I try to at least say hi to a farang more so someone in a work outfit of sorts. Gee, whats wrong with being nice anyway. On that the farangs I've seen recently don't read TV or perhaps its dickie and serendipstick. 

Cc

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Are you sure they missed the point? How many Thais/Asians do you see in a day? What percentage of them say hello, smile, or otherwise acknowledge you? I'm guessing of the five hundred or so Thais I saw yesterday going to an office, taking a few taxis, and then going through the local Tesco Lotus and walking home with arms full of groceries with my wife, maybe 1 or 2% tried to make eye contact and about half of them smiled while doing so. I'm counting only strangers, of course...

If I expected more than 2% of farang strangers to do the same, then I have an expectation that they should give me special treatment because I am a farang! Of course, since I see only a handful of farangs on a similarly busy day (let's say 5 for nice even numbers), that means I should not expect any farang acknowledgement on about 9/10 days in order to match the welcoming spirit of the locals.

Clearly the bag is not the reason he was apprehended. As we all know, photos documenting the charge will always have at least five smiling officers and/or witnesses pointing at the scene of the crime.

I suspect he was apprehended for illegally having handcuffs in his posession.

Just wondering what kinda jobs everyone does in Thailand to keep 'em busy apart from teaching English.

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I keep my wife busy, or barring that, irritated. I'm getting so good at it that I still feel idle sometimes.