honu

It's funny how we'll take flights within Asia, leaving for anywhere within a few hours to a half dozen, and everyone on the flight will pass out immediately even though it's noon.  I can definitely sleep on a plane if it's an early or late flight but I don't get the attraction of taking drugs to sleep during the day like that.

Tied back to the original question it seems dodgy to try to take prescription drugs onto a flight without a prescription.  It might slip through but I don't have any experience with it.

I think he'd be a good Bond, but at the same time there's really no reason to mix things up and change the character's race just to be trendy.

It's funny how people comment that having a white actor play a real black person (eg. MLK) wouldn't fly, when Bond is a fictional character instead.  It's like when those comic book fans get upset because a character is too powerful / not powerful enough in a movie; it's just fiction.

The idea that white actors have successfully played minorities had worked, in the past.  In The Lone Ranger and Ghost in the Shell it was a main reason that the movies failed.  Times have changed.

I just saw an interesting video about what it's like to be knocked unconscious by an MMA coach yesterday.  I don't remember the details--what he saw--but he said it was like experiencing very unusual and vivid dreams, with the sensation that he was dreaming for a very long time.  He was unconscious for half an hour or so, so really knocked out.

I'm not saying this woman definitely experienced the same thing as that form of brain trauma but it seems possible.  The idea that she was actually dead for 27 minutes doesn't sound right.  My grandmother died on the operating table, getting a dual hip replacement, and was gone for several minutes, and when they brought her back the brain damage was so severe that she barely ever spoke again, and had no idea who she or anyone else was.  Flat-lining for a few minutes would probably typically cause enough brain damage that you'd never really come back, even if they did manage to resuscitate you.

I could see how a processed product like that could be helpful, to mix some fiber, protein powder, a bit of vitamin, and limited flavoring to provide a healthy meal supplement or snack. 

All the same I'd just avoid that type of thing myself, and maybe get protein powder to use as an ingredient in a smoothie version, a version that contains no sugar.  People tend to react negatively to fruit for providing sugar but the levels of natural sugar from making a smoothie out of banana and fresh pineapple are nothing like drinking a soda.  Then again a 12 ounce Coke contains 140 calories or 39 grams of sugar, and a banana serving (more or less one) contains 30 grams of carbohydrate, not all of which would be sugar:

https://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-sodas-soft-drinks-cola-soda_f-ZmlkPTEwNzg1MQ.html

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/271157.php

To answer more directly Lazada would have lots of related products, it would just take some sorting through to find a near equivalent.

I'm 50 and at this point I'd never even consider taking testosterone or any related drugs, but I have noticed that athletic training is a completely different experience than when I was younger from taking up running a few months ago.  So it goes. 

All the same it's interesting watching the occasional video on steroid use just to hear what some of those hormones and other compounds do, mostly in the course of taking relatively high dosages, but it extends back to learning the normal functions of many too.  HGH (growth hormone) is interesting, and Stallone seems to have gotten away with using it for a long time.  Professional wrestlers and body builders don't always.  This video by a professional bodybuilder was interesting for listing out some of what people take.  Obviously I can't critique it, to suggest changes or to endorse it as practical or safe:  

That's a great idea, they should put a Taco Bell in Bangkok

Definitely gay, and I think that guy riding the elk looks a bit gay too, and if I remember right the snowman has a touch of a lisp.  What's up with all the gayness in the Disney movies?

My daughter is 5 so I'll be seeing that, and hearing the soundtrack.  We just saw the Lego 2 movie; I'm not sure anyone was gay in that.  Now that I think of though Wreck-it-Ralph might have been a pedo.

12 hours ago, Frogmountain said:

I love these! Wish I could pop over there and get a few for my daughter.

There would be a way to do that, I'm just not familiar with it.  The clothing is an absolute steal too; the outfits alone sell for 100 baht, or about $3 US.  280 baht, the price shown, includes the doll (about $8 US). 

Shipping would end up costing as much as a half-dozen outfits but the real problem would be finding a reliable service to pick them up and put them in the mail.  There is no chance you could get the department store to do that.  They don't even take credit cards, never mind expand on basic retail services.  It does feel a bit like a museum in there.

I first visited them last Saturday, then swung by on Monday to buy a few more outfits and a doll (I had only bought two), and just visited a third time to buy one for my daughter's friend.  She really wanted to give one away to her best friend but couldn't part with the ones she sees as her own.  Now I'll see if she can actually give away the last one I just bought, the doll in the red outfit in the middle.  Maybe not.

This seems a bit trivial compared to all the education and custody issues on here, but I was happy to run across traditional Thai silk dresses for a Barbie doll when checking out the Nightingale Olympic department store.  My daughter loved them.

It's the oldest department store in Bangkok, right beside the Old Siam shopping center.  That place has a dated feel to it too, but not on the same level.

Although I work in IT I'm not really a "tech guy," but I can pass on a little about our experiences with putting in a CCTV system.  We had an issue with something going missing that was probably related to our maid / housekeeper, and the system was as much to keep the help honest as to limit risk from an intruder.

We looked into three different options, a Samsung CCTV system (seemingly a standard option), a Chinese version of such a system (relatively inexpensive for comparable coverage and features), and a wireless communication based independent camera option.  The last comes with some degree of drawbacks; although it's an inexpensive solution there are risks related to someone else being able to hack into seeing the camera feed.  In actual practice that risk may be low but it's something to think about.  Related to that version being easy to monitor from a phone app it worked really well.

We bought the Samsung system and a couple of wifi cameras to test those out.  In the end reliability became a main issue.  Those two independent cameras lasted awhile but then failed (3 years or so).  It might be possible to buy a better version but per our experience they didn't last all that long.  The Samsung system had problems too, and past the warranty period you're paying for resolution of any issues, probably adding up to the initial cost of the system before all that long (within 5 to 8 years).

Nothing lasts forever but a lot of electronics goods seem to be designed to fail these days.  It might be a reasonable approach to buy the Chinese system solution and plan to completely replace it every 5 years or so.

There is a St. Andrews branch in Dusit, the closest to Ari by quite a bit.  Both of my kids have went there and my daughter still does, now 5.  It's fine.

I can't really compare it to those other two branches because I wouldn't have any exposure to them, or to any other international schools, for that matter.

15 hours ago, BritManToo said:

Don't even need to read it.

Just more BS from the same people who published the last BS.

We've been doomed every 5 years since 1980, and yet we're still here and the doom is still 5 years in the future.

The doom is scheduled for within the end of this century, but if you got killed in a wildfire or hurricane this year that seemed to come a little early.

Indians are actually dying more and more of record hot weather, but then those people are too far away to be concerned about.  For many that's no more relevant than a polar bear dying.

You guys' bar-stools will be roughly as safe as they've been for the next 20 years, probably as long as the climate change deniers on this site have left to live, so in that limited sense you are right to reject it.  Some people tend to take a broader view of the world but in the end it doesn't make much difference. 

The U.S. Global Change Research Program just released a full report about what the impacts of global climate change will be:

https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/

But this should mean nothing to those of you who think climate change isn't real.  It's all a hoax, right?  Like those crazy theories about lead or DDT.

Most of climate change denial discussion is probably just trolling.  Those people have no idea if climate change is occurring or not and really don't care; it works to ramble on a little to get a reaction.  It's just a form of shitposting.

Climate scientists believe that carbon dioxide moderates climate, particularly global temperatures, and that carefully observed trends in both rising are tightly linked. 

But barstool philosophers don't necessarily accept that, based on their own intuition.  I'm not so worried about guys who are drunk at lunch time spouting deep wisdom, framed with catchy intros like "and let me tell you one more thing buddy...," but when national leaders get in on using intuition and poor reason to make national policy decisions there's a problem.  About half of all Americans don't believe climate change will affect them, per polling this year:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17173166/climate-change-perception-gallup-poll-politics-psychology

More people than ever before had their homes destroyed by hurricanes related to climate change, or in wildfires related to droughts related to climate change.  It's well summarized in this quote from that article, tied to reference sources cited there:

Extreme weather events — like wildfires and hurricanes — are also becoming more extreme. These changes are consistent with a warming world, scientists say. That sort of makes sense: though the Gallup poll found that while only 64 percent of Americans think that global warming is caused by human activities, 97 percent of climate scientists believe that.

1 minute ago, Catoni said:

Getting back to perhaps a better level of CO2. We apparently got as low as 180ppm in the past. 

    Dangerous!  That’s only 30ppm from the 150ppm level. 

    Guess what would happen if we went below 150ppm?  Have you any idea?

   400 ppm is still extremely low compared to most of the past 600 million years. In that time we’ve usually been around 2000ppm or so. 

   Our greenhouse industry in my area keeps CO2 levels a 800ppm - 1300ppm depending on the crop being grown. I have to say the tomatoes and peppers are simply amazing. But they grow other veggies and flowers also. (Along with cannabis now also).

All of this is relatively irrelevant.  So what if the carbon dioxide level was higher a half a billion years ago, in the past by 1/8th the time the Earth has existed, 10 times further in the past than when the dinosaurs went extinct?  Oxygen has only existed in present levels because of ancient long-term activity of algae; but so what? 

Plants love carbon dioxide, it's what they ingest for biological processes, similar to us requiring oxygen.  But so what?  Some plant species will love the changes in centuries and millennia to come, when climate is so unstable that agriculture won't be possible in the current form, and sea levels change dramatically, with a lot of current cities underwater.

People are changing the climate by changing the level of carbon dioxide in the air; it's going to get very hot.  Current models of what's coming and all sorts of knowledge of climate cycle inputs could be better but we know that much.  Then some people want to claim the opposite is true because they feel like arm-chair quarterbacks by favoring their own intuition over science.

My problem with this conspiracy-theory approach to climate science is this:  it's not good that it has become so popular to embrace ignorance.  Once people get a taste for rejecting what is known they can move on from saying that maybe no one ever visited the moon, or that maybe evolution isn't right, onto thinking that maybe the earth is really flat, like a plate. 

From there a politician who can't tell his own ass from a hole in the ground (or close an umbrella) can tell them his opinion about issues like climate change, or contradict himself altogether, rejecting that he said what he said in public the week before, and people can accept it all as "their truth."  Stupidity becoming fashionable has went too far.

This is a film about climate change (called global warming) made back in the 1950s.  At that time it was still just a theory, but after collecting data for another 60 years it's now a confirmed theory:

It's not a trivial, insignificant amount of carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere; the amount has went from around 280 ppm (parts per million) before the industrial revolution, not long ago, to over 400 ppm now:

https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2

I see that as a separate problem.  The US as a country produces more weapons than any other, and the official US position right now is climate change denial.

The two don't seem to connect to me, but wasting the US's economic potential on making individuals tied to arms production even more wealthy is a separate huge problem.  If the US had cut military spending in half over the past 20 years and had put those same resources into renewable energy research humanity would be much closer to carbon dioxide output neutral now. 

Of course nothing remotely like that was ever going to happen because oil interests are too influential.

I think I took that to be some sort of long term global average, not as a temperature that it would be on average if everyone were to walk outside, but as an averaged global temperature range over some time-frame with 0 set as the middle.  That's just a guess.

One tends to see graphs of different time-frames explained in different ways depending on people trying to make one of two separate conclusions; the sky is falling, or there is no global warming.  It's my understanding that the sky really is falling this time.  That's not based on being liberally inclined, at least as I see it.  I started researching climate change related to doing an ethics paper more than a decade ago (I'm older than that implies; it's a long story).

Since saying what people don't want to hear at length is a personal interest I'll tell that story.  I wanted to find out if the "save the rain forest" types had any argument to make, or if it was just hippies being hippies.  As I kept researching the theme shifted; it turned out that the evidence for climate change was so compelling and so easy to follow that the ethical issue was with the current Bush administration censoring government coverage of it.  They had sanitized websites of any current status.  I didn't make a big deal of that in the paper; I wrote an off-topic summary of what I could piece together about climate change (called global warming back then).  That was just before Al Gore made a stink about it.

The situation is a good bit clearer now due to further study and working from more than a decade more data.  The models are still just projections but at least there are better models now.  Climate researchers are consistent in their assessment of what climate change is, why it is, and the general range of expectation.  When people say that some researchers think something else they're talking about people paid to have the opposite opinion, as occurred with the opposing view saying that lead wasn't poisoning people in the 20th century.  Of course it was.  And of course climate change will be a disaster for humanity within this century, quite likely the worst event in human history, making WW 2 look like a bar fight in comparison.

Funny how so many people commenting here are intentionally oblivious to the obvious.  That last graph I posted shows stable global temperatures over the last 10,000 years, right?  But comments still make whatever claims to the contrary serve whatever desired belief, that it has already been warming, or cooling, or whatever else.

I get it that the subject is unfamiliar, and that different graphs of different time-frames seem to be showing completely different patterns.  They are.  The ones showing a cycle of fluctuation over 100,000 years indicate we are due for another ice age.  The problem is that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has thrown off normal cycles; we're not on that cycle now. 

We can choose to believe people studying climate science and accept that the near-consensus interpretation of observed new patterns will hold, that the Earth is about to warm faster than we've ever experienced, and has been doing that for the last few decades at a rate that's accelerating.  Or else people can believe whatever else they want to believe, based on next to nothing.  Like Donald Trump people commenting here seem to put a lot of faith in their own intuition. 

Here's a graph showing a correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature; you can refer to conventional climate science perspective related to what to make of it or else read into it whatever you want:

Luckily it doesn't matter if the average guy on the street believes in climate change or not, any more than if they think the Easter Bunny is real, but it could be problematic if that enables the leaders of countries to make decisions for the wrong reasons.  Of course in places like the US that's going to happen anyway, or maybe nearly everywhere.

One really simple, clear thing that seems to get left out of any discussion of climate change is that temperatures over the last 10,000 years were unusually even and stable.  That was the anomaly.  Over the last 10,000 years temperatures have been as stable as they've ever been on that time-frame, which is probably why human civilization flourished.  That party is over.  Then the joe-sixpack all-subjects-expert types still say "it's all more of the same; nothing to worry about," oblivious to the exact opposite being true.

This last comment leaves out that we are measuring that the climate is changing, that the Earth is warming, doesn't it?  Data from the last few decades isn't a guess, or model, or projection, it's what is actually happening.  What will happen over the rest of the century and beyond can only be a model but what is happening now can be observed and is being watched closely.

In the broader context the idea that professionals studying climate change wouldn't know best what is going to happen is part of the problem; the rejection of science.  It's all along the same line as Trump claiming that he has a good intuition for scientific findings, so his opinion is on equal footing with a consensus among climatologists; it's absurd.  It would be hard to say something that's more foolish.

I suppose it's even pathetic that holding absurd views based on ignorance is now so common that it's essentially accepted.  Flat earth theory goes too far, but it's not far off a mainstream position to deny that evolution occurred, when it clearly has been confirmed, in incredibly well documented fashion.

On 11/3/2018 at 5:23 AM, canuckamuck said:

The most obvious thing to observe in these three charts is dramatic heating that occurs right before the Ice age and that it occurs on a cycle. By looking at the chart it is obvious that we are in the brief optimal climate window that occurs directly before cataclysmic cooling. There is a slight chance that we may post pone the cooling with the increased CO2, that would be the best scenario.

That is an interesting point.  I take this to be the reason why "global warming" changed to "climate change" awhile back, because people weren't sure if this transition wouldn't trigger the next ice age, which is due. 

The best scenario is hard to describe; the models aren't clear enough to break into a set of distinct possibilities with assigned probabilities.  Most likely we're completely off the natural cycle of climate changes (almost certainly), and the Earth is going to get very, very hot very fast.  It doesn't work to look back to conditions that didn't relate to people adding a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (which has already happened, and is continuing to happen) and then try to guess how those same patterns will apply in the future.  One of the main variables has been changed. 

People concluding that we can't know what will happen, or that the changes may be positive, or that we are still in some form of natural cycle just aren't reviewing the matter from an informed perspective.  The best current models probably aren't completely right but moving from that to "we can't know anything" is absurd.  We only know as much as we know, and there's no reason to throw that out for including uncertainty.