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CaptHaddock
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Posts posted by CaptHaddock
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Best solution seems to be an Acer Chromebook for $259, which I ordered from Amazon. I'll install fedora on it.
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My old HP mini 1101 netbook is no longer taking a charge. So, I need a new netbook on which to run fedora. Any recommendations of a cheap unit locally available?
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With any luck the Brexit disaster and the resulting economic losses should shut the Tories out of power for a generation. And Corbin is looking more like the guy who can make that happen.
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1 hour ago, ilostmypassword said:
It's not a question of May's granting permission. It will be up to the post-Brexit EU.
Not true. Britain can unilaterally grant whatever permissions it wishes to foreign residents once it has left the EU and can promise to do so now. Post-Brexit the EU will have no say on Britain's immigration policies except to the extent that those are covered by the exit agreements. But even in that case Britain can always be more flexible that it is required to be under any agreement.
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16 minutes ago, Knee Jerk Reaction said:
The building is 43 years old so probably not equipped with a sprinkler system. Local people are saying it spread quickly up the outside of the building.
If so, the building standards in London are crap.
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In New York City the firemen who would come to our office building every year for the fire drill and safety talk would always point out that no fire in any high rise building in NYC had ever spread to more than three floors because the construction of the building is designed to contain fires for some period (one hour?) and the fire department always gets there in eight to ten minutes and puts it out before it can spread. (The exception was 9/11 of course.) I am shocked that a high rise can burn like this in London. Where are the fire barriers? Where are the sprinkler systems?
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1 hour ago, Odysseus123 said:
Herbert Blix?No-but he is on my must read list.
I have been trying to approach things from more of an "Asian" angle rather than a "Pacific" one for ,as Dower points out,because the US were the primary victors this gave them that particular historical/geographical viewpoint.
So I have been studying,
S C M Paine-"The Wars for Asia 1911-1949"
Rana Mitter "Forgotten Ally-China's World War II 1937-1945."
and Christopher Bailey and Tim Harper's
"Forgotten Armies-the fall of British Asia-1941-1945"
"Forgotten Wars-Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia."
If it is at all possible,I would like to continue to discuss this interesting topic upon my return from Bangkok in three days time.
It's "Bix," not "Blix" actually. Essential for understanding WWII from the Japanese perspective with particular attention to the deficiencies in decision-making that led the leadership to expand the war at every point of failure.
My own focus is on interaction between the West and Asia on the one hand and the economic development of Asian countries, but the wars are quite relevant, to wit, the Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, (cf. "God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan" by Jonathan Spence), but also "The Empire of Cotton: A Global History" by Sven Beckert which explains the economic base of the British Empire as its global control of the first globally produced commodity, cotton, and the role of war capitalism in creating the first modern, industrial economy.
The key book I find for understanding the economic structure and the underperformance of SE Asian countries is Joe Studwell's "Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and SE Asia." The short story is that unlike the countries of NE Asia, S. Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the Asean countries do not face any serious military threat and therefore lack the urgency behind economic development of the kind that drove Park Chung-Hee to enable S. Korea to join the rich nations in only a couple of generations, starting from an economic and educational base below Thailand's, by the way. Meiji Japan is the same story.
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I just noticed that the same device is available from aliexpress.com. I should have checked there first.
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If you are interested in both your health and new gadgets, you might want to take a look at the Smart UV Checker for smartphones from Amazon.
You plug it into the headphone jack and download the software from Google Play (or iTunes.) Hold the phone in the sunlight and press the button. It then reports the UV index reading. The UV Index provided by weather services like Yahoo, by contrast, is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. Does the difference matter? Probably not. Right now Yahoo report a UV index of 3 in BKK while my Smart UV checker shows 2.5. At midday without clouds Bangkok's UV Index frequently reaches the extreme high of 11.
Attention to the UV Index here in Thailand is important, especially for us melanin-deficients, since the tropical sunlight is dangerous, even potentially lethal.
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29 minutes ago, pegman said:
Yes, has already started.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/jp-morgan-jobs-dublin-london-brexit
You would think if Teresa May had any wit about her she would immediately announce some version of unilateral permission for people like JP Morgan employees to remain in Britain after Brexit just so that those companies were not forced to relocate their enterprises.
Anyway, maybe Dublin can recover some of the prosperity and eminence it enjoyed before the Act of Unioin.
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2 minutes ago, Odysseus123 said:
Alperowitz?
Yes-a very thought provoking book indeed and one that I read in conjunction with Richard B. Frank's "Operation Downfall" which tends to stick closer to the official line.
On another related issue;what do you think of Dower's argument that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal's treatment of the Class A "Accused" was-due to the rigid SCAP exclusion of any negative mention of the emperor -all but a hollow legal mockery?
The War Crimes trial was illegal, as Robert Taft believed, since the victorious powers had no legal jurisdiction nor was there any such thing as international law except to the extent of treaties such as the Geneva Convention, to which Japan was not a signatory. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that the victors would punish the losers. Certainly, the exculpation of the emperor was egregious. (Have you read Herbert Bix's biography of Hirohito?) I suppose you know that MacArthur and Hirohito had a secret joint bank account during the Occupation. (But then MacArthur had previously profited from the war having agreed to ferry Philipine politician Carlos Romulo out of the country before the fall of Corregidor on the submarine for a price of $500,000 in gold.)
At any rate the Class A war criminals didn't stay in prison very long. MacArthur later rehabilitated one of them, Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of Shinzo Abe, to be prime minister.
It's all just power politics. The veneer of legality or humanitarian principles is always quite thin.
Apropos of interesting, if not corroborated, speculation, have you read "Yamashita's Gold" by the Seagraves?
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I wonder if the Irish could take advantage of this opportunity and get some of that business in Dublin. Ireland has high education levels and plenty of English-speakers.
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1 hour ago, Odysseus123 said:
Currently reading,
John W.Dower
'War Without Mercy'-A startling study of both Japanese and U.S racial hatred in World War 2.
Which is an excellent companion volume to the author's
'Embracing Defeat-Japan in the wake of World War II'
Both good books. On a related topic, if you haven't read it already, you might like "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," by Gar Alperowitz. Alperowitz has been among the leading revisionists of the official history of the bomb.
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On 2/22/2017 at 3:09 PM, Odysseus123 said:
Referring to Grant's Memoirs..
Most definitely and written at a time when Grant had virtually lost everything due to stock market speculation.He basically wrote the Memoirs to save his family from penury and at a time when the cancer-which was to kill him-had already made its appearance.
Well worth a read even today and being a westerner Grant was never popular with the eastern establishment-and neither was Lincoln for that matter.
I have just finished L.A Carlyon's 'Gallipoli' and immediately purchased the sequel 'The Great War'.A superb book if one is looking for a fresh look at that campaign.
Grant wrote his memoirs at the suggestion of Mark Twain. Grant was dying of throat cancer, probably brought on by smoking cigars. He was indeed broke at the time, not because of stock speculation, but because his partner in the brokerage firm, Grant and Ward, founded by Grant's sone. The partner Ferdinand Ward carried out a scam involving shares held as collateral for multiple loans that caused the firm to fail, but not before Grant put all his own plus borrowed money into the company to try to save it.
Grant's memoirs are so well written that rumors circulated at the time that Mark Twain had ghost written them, but that was not true. Grant wrote daily for a year and finished the manuscript a week before he died. His purpose, which he accomplished, was to provide for his wife after his death. The memoirs hardly mention his scandal-ridden presidency and focus almost exclusively on the war. For Grant fighting the war was a chess game especially in the latter period against Lee. Grant never so much as mentions the vast human suffering which surrounded him. What's striking about the memoirs is the clarity of Grant's writing style, which probably arose from his need as a commander to be fully understood by subordinates carrying out orders.
Sherman's memoirs by contrast are a complete snore.
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6 hours ago, swissie said:
In my view, basically all the possible negative-effects may well be incorporated in current exchange rates already. What could come next? The UK sinking to the bottom of the ocean?
Have been trading currencies for all of my adult live. Mid-Term, I rather see a buying opportunity as far as the £ is concerned.
"The night is always darkest, shortly before sunrise".
Cheers.That's possible of course, but it could also be the case that the market has underestimated the effects of leaving the EU, the UK's largest trading partner, since there are no precedents.
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Exchange rates depend mostly on cross-border trade. The UK's trade level can hardly be expected to increase from exiting the EU. It will certainly go down. The only question is by how much. The Brexiteers have cut their own throat.
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Which hospital and doctor in BKK would be best for a knee replacement for a Thai family member? Anyone have recent experience? I am guessing that there is one govt hospital that has a lot of experience doing them.
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How about:
มั่นใจในความชอบ
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6 hours ago, ilostmypassword said:
No. You don't crave attention but you announce that you've solved the biggest scientific question there is but refuse to release the results. If you didn't crave attention you'd have kept any intimation of it to yourself. However, if you suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you probably would do just what you have done.
To say nothing of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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20 minutes ago, Grouse said:
Sonar / ASDIC are compression waves? No?
Sonar is sound. That is why you can hear it. Sound, including sonar, can travel through water even better than through air. But it can't travel through the vacuum of space.
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Just now, Andaman Al said:
So is it your turn to be completely clueless now? I am well aware you cannot hear radio waves until they are converted to the audible spectrum, just the same as you listening to Radio Thai Visa, which cannot be heard until you use that clever little box of tricks you take for granted. It is rich that you come on here calling another member clueless and then proceed to be clueless yourself. There are MANY processes in the universe from which radio waves in a specific band are generated.
Your little box converts radio waves to sound because the radio waves were produced by encoding some sound originally. Radio waves which do not encode sounds can only be translated into sound by some completely arbitrary mapping of radio frequencies to sound frequencies. Such an arbitrary mapping is meaningless. You could similarly arbitrarily assign middle C to fire engine red. But then in what sense is middle C the "sound" of fire engine red? In no sense.
So that takes care of radio waves which, however, play no role at all in the topic under discussion which is gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are neither radio waves nor sound waves. The massive colliding black holes which together had the mass of 49 suns made their collision in complete silence. It never generated a peep because it is in the vacuum of space which is not a medium like air that can carry sound waves.
So the claim that the recorded blip is the sound of the colliding black holes is equivalent to my telling you that cobalt blue is the color of the colliding black holes, i.e. meaningless.
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5 minutes ago, Andaman Al said:
Well it is not a sound wave exactly is it? It is a sound that is made from the radio waves that are generated near the event horizon, Whatever it is, it is very cool to listen to and to consider that waves that make the sound took millions of light years to get here and they came from one of the most feared phenomena in the Universe.
A thing which is not a sound wave exactly is not a sound wave at all. Which is to say that we cannot hear it. We cannot hear radio wave, light, x-rays, cosmic rays or any other portion of the electromagentic spectrum, including the very latest not-sound-wave phenomenon, gravitational waves. The sound clip is the equivalent of demonstrating what magenta would sound like if you could hear it, i.e. meaningless.
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7 minutes ago, ExpatOilWorker said:
Gravity is a force. There is so far no conclusive evidence that a graviton with wave-particle duality even exist.
Gravity is also by far the weakest of the 4 fundamental forces.
You are truly clueless. Ever wonder what your life would have been like if you had stayed in school?
Three billion years ago, in a third of a second, two black holes crashed into each other and merged into a single entity, converting two solar masses into energy that shook the fabric of spacetime, sending gravitational ripples across the universe that were detected on Earth last January, researchers announced Thursday.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gravity-waves-from-black-hole-merger-detected/
Gravitational waves escaped from the colliding black holes traveled across the universe for 3 billion years then jiggled the laser in the LIGO and made the newspapers.
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5 hours ago, boomerangutang said:
Science is infinitely amazing. Yes, audio has been detected from black holes colliding.
Sure this isn't some kind of "translation" of gravity waves into the sound spectrum? Like those multi-colored pictures of dust clouds in other galaxies that turn out to be "colorized," i.e. artificially colored. In fact, that must be the case since if light waves cannot escape a black hole then sound waves certainly couldn't even if there were a medium to carry them, which there isn't. Only gravity waves escape a black hole.
High speed not the only risk with railway
in Thailand News Headlines
Posted
The funniest part of the latest announcement by the govt is that "technology transfer" will occur despite the invocation of S44 to overrule Thai law. Technology transfer is when the Koreans let the Japanese build automobile factories and then later the Koreans build their own automobile factories. Does anyone seriously think that Thailand is going to go into the high speed rail business itself?