honu

that Heaven's Gate guy looked pretty clear and stable too; who saw that coming?

he looks fairly clear and stable too, beyond a very mild case of the crazy eyes.  he should do Thai reality TV.

Back in the US he could parlay this into a reality television role if it had happened there.  Here he's going to need some sort of follow-up theme and a different end-game instead.

It would be hilarious if he took it on himself to document a much more dramatic follow-up stunt and ended up filming a reality video blog series from jail.  He could probably relay all sorts of unusual interactions and character impressions based on what his roommates were doing to him on a daily basis.  He should go there.

Very interesting; thanks.  We switched from using Singha bottled water (the water cooler type) to a multi-filtration system for drinking tap water about a year ago.  I guess it seems possible my kids were ingesting fluoride through that bottled water, since Singha is listed there testing at .43 mg / liter.

Note the article mentions a recommended input range is .6 --.7 mg / liter for hot climates (people would drink more water here).  Of course not everyone is on that page, that any is good, but per my understanding .43 is completely safe.

I drink quite a bit of tea myself so I almost certainly wouldn't benefit at all from any supplement to what that would provide.  Ordinary tea-bag teas test in the range of 2 to 2.5 mg / liter for brewed teas, or lower for most high quality loose tea sources, more in the range of .5 to 1.5 mg / liter.

I wrote a follow-up summary for another site (TChing) and turned up a reference related to how much is in tea.  I'd already mentioned a study in India that passed on a range (1 to 3 mg / liter), but this mentions more commercial types:

Lipton and Tetley tea bags are around 2 to 2 1/2 mg / liter, roughly double the treatment level of .7 - 1.2 mg / liter (or ppm, the same thing).  I'm wondering if the benefit isn't really greater for children since their teeth are still growing, and they would be less likely to drink tea (at least in the US or Thailand; maybe in England they drink it, and in China many definitely do).

As to limit the latest best-practice EPA advice is to limit long term exposure to .08 mg / kg body weight per day, or 6 mg / day for a person that weighs 75 kg (155 pounds).  Three cups of tea a day might reach that, depending on type, with no input from water source at all.  One of the highest real risks is from naturally occurring fluoride in water sources; untreated versions can have 10 mg / liter in them, although that would be rare outside North Africa and the Middle East (not sure why there is more of it there).

That blog post (really just a cleaned up summary of the first one, with more about that table at the end):

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/08/fluoride-in-tea-summary-version.html

No matter what military actions would be taken Seoul is going to be vaporized; it's just too close and too easy a target, and North Korea isn't going down without taking millions of people with them.  

The next question is if North Korea really can destroy a Japanese or US city at present.  Probably not the latter, but it doesn't look good for Japan.

Trump really shouldn't be trying to escalate the threats, or conducting lots of additional military exercises, and South Korea shouldn't be starting into bombing.  Look at that guy in the picture; does he look so stable that he's definitely not going to decide to go out with a bang?  The same guy that just had his half-brother executed?  I get it that within another year or two he really will be able to destroy a couple of US cities on the way out but pushing towards nuclear bombs destroying Seoul and Tokyo isn't a conceivable outcome.  It sucks that there is no fix but what can you do.

he's as crooked as a dog's hind leg

On 8/17/2017 at 11:35 AM, KittenKong said:

 

Not that it's of any great importance but, for the sake of accuracy, those are in Chonburi province, not Rayong province. And they are about half as far from central Pattaya (around 20km) than they are from Rayong (around 40km). To Jomtien (which is widely considered to be part of Pattaya, and contains many attractions with Pattaya in their name) they are even closer.

 

Sorry about that then, getting the provinces mixed up.  They are close to each other, those two parks, and closer to Pattaya, and exactly that far from Rayong (maybe 45 km from our hotel in town center, or a good bit further to some beaches on the other side).

At least that drive goes really fast compared to any travel inside Bangkok, where it takes 45 minutes to cross part of town.  There was the usual odd highway traffic slowdown and some lights but it went fast, maybe around an hour.

I just wrote a review of three different water parks in that area (including a local alternative in the Rayong Adventure Park, not the same thing since it's based on those bouncy-castle type slides).  It's all pretty much the same as covered here though.

Both parks are running about 1200 per person for admission now, close to the same as each other, with an occasional special dropping that for either.  They're relatively equivalent.  The main difference might be that the Ramayana park had a much better slide selection for younger kids, for those 5 or under.  For kids 7 to 8 or up the range would probably be more similar, since they could do the medium sized versions at Cartoon Network.  Ramayana is a lot bigger in terms of space, and food options were broader, and slightly lower in cost, but Cartoon Network is selling local foods for the typical 60 to 70 baht per dish range if that's a concern.  Both places do search you to make sure you don't bring food in.

They closed the Ramayana park down at 5:30, an hour before CN shut down, a half hour before the listed closure time, so if you ran late you might need to rush to get enough play in.  From there lots of little details varied.  CN had a better wave pool, and a free simulated wave riding area, and water volleyball, and those characters dancing around every hour.  Ramayana had more recliners under umbrellas, more space to hang out, and a sand play area.  

That local area, Rayong Adventure Park, is worth a visit but sort of a different kind of thing, with admission there a bit over 200 baht, as I recall.  For people in Bangkok the Pororo water park is a nice option, located on the top of the Central Bangna mall in Bangna-Trad road down at Bangkok.  Their pricing seems to vary a lot with specials but it's well below 1000 baht, more on the order of 600, I think, with a lot less slides (four larger ones), but enough that it strikes a good balance.  There aren't lots more details in this post but more about my own experience and a few pictures (in a blog that's really usually about tea):

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/08/three-water-parks-in-rayong-thailand.html

8 hours ago, Khun Han said:

Great report in the link. Thanks. There is a lot of really good stuff about Ramayana and CN in this thread:

 

 

 

Might be worth posting a link to your blog report in there. Even though it's a fairly old thread, it would collate good info .

Thanks for the suggestion.  It's a bit late for me to get input about those places since I just visited but it will be interesting to compare notes, or maybe add thoughts related to others'.

In a blog I normally write about tea in I reviewed three water parks in Rayong, which we visited over the past two months.

All were nice, just different.  Cartoon Network and Ramayana are comparable, both a little closer to Pattaya than the town center of Rayong but still in the Rayong province.

That local place, Rayong Adventure Park, is a bit under the radar, with less infrastructure development, but still a fun experience for my kids, and a good value for a long weekend outing stop.  

Add in there being a beach down there (not a great beach, but a beach), and some nice kids' play areas in a local mall, comparable to anything in Bangkok, and it made for three nice weekends.

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/08/three-water-parks-in-rayong-thailand.html

Some of these responses seem to point towards something really vague that some country should do, with no possibility of actual specifics.  

The US should remove nuclear weapons from NK--how?

China and Russia should force NK to cease development of nuclear weapons--how?  Shifting from turning them from one of the poorest nations on the planet through sanctions to truly starving them instead might cause them to retaliate.

Others blame the US for interfering, but so far they've only set up defensive military infrastructure in South Korea.  That's not really an invasive, problematic, or unreasonable response, given that North Korea did try to take over South Korea awhile back.  

Trump saying crazy things probably isn't helpful but that's kind of what he does, about every topic, every time his mouth opens.  He's trying to use this for spin to make it seem like he's doing something positive but it's not as if screwing up everything else he touches is based on careful planning; it's all from the hip.

Blaming "the US" for someone making a Hollywood movie is as absurd as it gets.  Should the US eliminate free speech and have the government screen every form of entertainment and media release to support foreign country PR? 

1 minute ago, PeCeDe said:

...First strikes will take out entire cities. Welcome to the New World order. I know that's very negative, but show me an instance in history when humans haven't used everything they've got. Hence the urgency to disarm NK.

The Cold War was an example of when humans hadn't used everything they've got, wasn't it?  

It got close during the Cuban Missile Crisis but they realized that was a bad idea.

I'm not sure how they could possibly disarm NK.  Threats aren't going to force them to give up, and the sanctions are already as complete as any have ever been.  

China could essentially force their hand by shutting down all remaining trade but that would be very risky for them; Kim might just decide to go out with a bang. 

The best either side can hope for is another half a century of tense stalemate, and that's the most likely outcome, regardless of what Kim, Trump, or the Chinese say.

Kim Jong Un really is crazy enough to launch nukes and see his country turned into a parking lot if provoked enough, and it's better for all involved if it doesn't come to that.

He's crazy enough that the Chinese can't be sure what he's going to do next either.  One of the last missile tests was headed towards them as a message, related to them boycotting coal shipments there to send a message to keep it all reasonable.  

It seems certain enough that both the US and the Chinese have contingency plans for leveling North Korea in a couple of hours if it comes down to it.  If one nuke falls on LA or Shanghai it's definitely not worth it, though; killing 99% of everyone in North Korea won't undo the damage.

It's kind of a shame there is a deranged idiot in charge of the US too but Trump's blustering isn't likely to be enough to set it all off anyway.

I don't live in Chiang Mai so I wouldn't be a good reference for what is available there.  Other than Monsoon one of the plantations uses a shop in the airport as a sales outlet, and besides that I don't know of other vendors.  Online sourcing expands range to absolutely everywhere but I still don't have much for Thai white tea sources to pass on.  

I don't tend to love silver needle teas, preferring the complexity that comes with using some leaf material as well (so Bai Mu Dan style teas, or Moonlight whites, which seems to also be a reference to sourcing from Fuding area teas versus Yunnan teas).  I reviewed that one "wild" Monsoon vendor version that was nice but a bit unusual, but I've never tried another version of Thai white tea that fits that description at all.  

I'll mention sources from a number of other local countries at the end and you can look through them and see what you think, one from Laos, Indonesia, Vietnam, and both Yunnan and Wuyishan (Fujian) in China.  Really there would be good options for Fuding teas too (a main Chinese area for white teas), I've just not ran across a great source to pass on.  The one seller is a vendor that makes and sells teas in Wuyishan (Fujian, China), Wuyi Origin, someone I'm more familiar with.  I've never tried their white teas, to be honest, only their oolongs and black teas, which they are famous for, and also oolongs made in Chaozhou (Dan Cong, versus Wuyi Yancha).  I would expect their claims related to teas being grown without use of chemicals is accurate, but you would do well to take other people's opinions for what they are worth, including my own.

Green tea is my least favorite type of tea.  That makes it hard to recommend those or keep track of what seems best, being outside my typical range of preference.  I do drink Longjing, one exception, probably the main Chinese green tea type, which tends to be less grassy and vegetal due to how it is processed, tasting more nutty or like toasted rice.  The Thailand vendor Tea Village sells a decent version but it really is mid-range; for people really into that tea type it might not be the quality level they are looking for.  Again I don't have a suggestion for a better online source.  I've bought good Longjing versions in shops in the Bangkok Chinatown, and a US vendor friend passed on a competition grade version once that was better than those.

It's a tough question related to the amount of chemicals in Royal Project tea.  I'd only be passing on hearsay, little better than a guess.  From what I've heard Thai teas in general are grown using more chemicals than is typical for other types, and that may or may not be true of those sold through Royal Project outlets.  It's hard to know who to trust related to claims about that.  Organic certifications mean something, they do testing related to that, but from what I've heard "local" certifications and testing processes outside those defined and enforced by European and US agencies may not mean as much.  

Just because there isn't a claim based around a certification there may not necessarily be chemicals used.  At a guess in all these sources mentioned at the end far less chemicals would be used than for most Thai tea sources, but the claims that each is completely organic I'm not so sure about.  Toba Wangi grows teas in a conventional farm set-up, giving them good control over the inputs, and they sell directly, but others growing in more "natural" environments may be better set up to grow tea effectively without using chemicals.  Only Wuyi Origin of the others is the actual farmer, the one growing and picking tea, and a lot of that within the natural park area in Wuyishan, where chemicals cannot be brought in (to some extent they monitor that).  The others may understand that their teas are grown without use of any chemical pesticides but they may or may not know.  It's really hard to place what "organic" even means since a naturally derived chemical can also be unhealthy, and the "organic" restriction would still allow that use.  I research random topics related to tea but haven't went far with reviewing organic farming or contaminant issues yet.

Those other vendors (I can talk more about these, if you have questions, and I've reviewed white teas by all of them, except from Wuyi Origin):

https://www.facebook.com/kinnaritea/  (Laos tea, reseller and processing consultant)

http://www.tobawangi.com/products/speciality-tea/  (Indonesian tea, plantation owner and processor) 

https://www.farmer-leaf.com/  (Yunnan tea producer and reseller; their involvement depends on product type)

http://drinksbeansandleaves.com/  (Indonesia vendor background page:  http://hatvala.com/hatvalacoffe/teas-vietnam)

http://www.wuyiorigin.com/  (Wuyishan, Fujian tea grower and producer)

I wrote a guide on tea options in Bangkok (to a lesser extent throughout Thailand), covering types made and cafe and shop options.  The post mentions a couple of online sources but mostly skips that part, sticking to physical shop outlets.

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/tea-in-thailand-thai-tea-types-and.html

I reviewed a Royal Project Jin Xuan (#12) not long ago, a good example of a basic, reasonable quality, inexpensive Thai tea.  I bought 100 grams of that version for 100 baht, enough dry loose tea to make dozens of cups nice light oolong tea for roughly the cost of a cup of coffee (or maybe three bubble tea drinks).  I usually drink higher end teas, rarer, more costly and more unusual versions but as far as buying good tea for good value goes this type can't be beat:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/thai-royal-project-jin-xuan-oolong-12.html

In that post on fluoride I linked to a longer National Research Council (US agency study) about a review of all the risks related to fluoride, citing most of the main studies conducted and most of the main issues for concern.  

It's a long read, nearly 400 pages, but it tells the whole story, or at least the best current understanding of it:

http://www.actionpa.org/fluoride/nrc/NRC-2006.pdf

The short version is that there is evidence too much fluoride poses a health risk, but then no one is really contesting that, it's accepted understanding.  The part that gets interpreted differently is how much is too much, and people tend to get confused related to variables.  Naturally occurring fluoride throws off review of risks of added levels of fluoride because people drinking well or stream water with naturally higher levels throws off statistics related to risk (effects) of added levels.  

In the US there is a real issue if reducing municipal water levels to 4 mg / liter (ppm) is really safe (when a source contains fluoride at higher levels than that), if that shouldn't be lower, but the standard EPA advice is that 4 mg / liter is a mandated limit, a requirement, and it really should be treated to lower, down to 2 mg / liter or less, with in the range of 1 mg / liter more ideal.

I don't really have a final personal conclusion related to all this.  The conspiracy theory / "it's government mind control" take seems clearly wrong but I don't know if the benefits outweigh any possible risks.

Fluoride really would help improve teeth but eating foods high in sugar could offset that.

I just researched the subject of fluoride related to writing a blog about tea, since fluoride occurs naturally in tea (and in some natural water sources; it's a mineral, contained in different forms of salts).

All that doesn't translate much into advice for here, but I'll add a little on what I've read.  I ran across reference to people in Europe using salts as an additive for fluoride intake but one would need to be very careful about dosage, especially related to what children consume.  I would spend a day reading up first if I was going to put my kids on fluoride (which might not be a bad idea).  I cited guidelines for fluoride exposure for children from Web MD in that post but I wouldn't just go with what a source like that says:

In the US water is treated within the range of .7 to 1.2 ppm (or mg / liter; it works out to be the same).  I was just reading an interesting study on the same practices applied in Ireland in 2001, on results, risks, etc., resulting in a move to dropping the target level from .08-.1 ppm to .6-.8 ppm, related to some cases of dental fluorosis, of getting too much of it:

https://www.fluoridesandhealth.ie/download/documents/fluoridation_forum_summary.pdf

For an adult either 3 or 4 mg / day is one earlier recommended dose, but then some later versions cite that as a daily limit instead (with a more conventional limit cited as 10 mg / day).  This is the part that gets tricky; sources like the EPA or CDC (US Environmental Protection Agency or Center for Disease Control) might be citing dated references, although this fact sheet released in 2015 by the EPA shouldn't be too dated:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/2011_fluoride_questionsanswers.pdf

I ran through a lot of that background in more detail in my own article but the second half was on how much is present in tea.  That would seem strange to add tea to your kids' diets though, since caffeine intake isn't recommended for children:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/fluoride-in-tea-good-or-bad-how-much-is.html

I thought Thai was based on Pali, a Sanskrit derivative, an older form of Chinese language (the Tai part), and also on an earlier Khmer language.  I'm not sure the extent of any of those as inputs, or what parts of the language were from original, local sources (some word use must be).  Per my understanding (not worth all that much) the versions of the language reserved for royal references are based more on Khmer, another higher level of formality, so they wouldn't come up so much in ordinary use.

That first part about Pali could be completely wrong, and in a sense it doesn't matter, since Sanskrit and Pali are closely related anyway.  I studied Sanskrit for four semester in grad school so I can pass on a little about it.  In a lot of ways it's the exact opposite of Thai language, related to structure and how it is used, but of course that has nothing to do with whether word roots are taken from it or not.

Sanskrit is not a tonal language (so Pali wouldn't be either, or Hindi, the modern, later derivative of that language); that part must come from the Chinese language roots.  In Sanskrit nouns being used in different grammatical roles are modified to change forms, as verbs are conjugated in many languages.  Of course in Thai no words are adjusted in form related to different uses, not nouns or verbs.  It makes Sanskrit nearly impossible to learn in a complete form and to use properly for speaking, since as with memorizing multiple forms of verbs in other languages one has to memorize lots of forms of every noun too, all the words used for objects.  There would be patterns to that, forms that would repeat, but it's still an enormous task.  It makes it a very precise language since those forms aren't just indicating if a noun is functioning as a subject or object, they also contain information about how they are being used.

All of that becomes very difficult to track related to conventions for use.  With multiple forms of words serving the same role word order does in English and Thai in a sense it wouldn't matter what order you would arrange Sanskrit in, although conventions would still apply to that.  I wondered if the language hadn't evolved to a form that wasn't really so functional later in use, as only an academic language, as Latin might have hundreds of years after people stopped speaking it.  Or maybe Latin was being studied in the same form it had been spoken in long before; I wouldn't know.

It's odd that no one mentioned that bitcoin value is about to crash again.  Notice any repeating trends in this value graph?:

http://www.coindesk.com/price/

On 5/26/2017 at 2:34 PM, eve55 said:

I love tea

cool, that's more like it.  which types?

I ran across an interesting reference related to elephants in general and in different countries, here:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/ac774e/ac774e0c.htm#bm12

It's a bit dated, from 1998, but it put the number of wild elephants in Laos at a few hundred then with domestic count a good bit higher (although those weren't hard numbers, and they mentioned different estimates in that).  This citation about prices for elephants highlights the problems in protecting elephants in Laos:

Gullmark (1986) says that at the time elephants sold for between US$2,000-5,000 but “the seller sometimes prefers to be paid in gold, silver or hard currency.” Present day prices are unknown but are surely determined by prices in neighboring Thailand - at least for those classes of animals desired in the Thai market. Lao owners, most of whom live reasonably near the Thai border, will often succumb to the temptation of hard currency. The average price for an adult elephant in Thailand is about US$6,000 (150,000 baht), which is 18 times the average annual per capita income in the Lao PDR (US$325).

That Discovery Garden has strawberry guava, doesn't it?  It's not exactly a berry but it's pretty close in general character.  I used to pick those walking on the ridgelines in Hawaii, where they grew wild.

There was a bird that took up residence at our house that made really loud noises at night for a period of a few months.  I had terrible insomnia from that bird waking me up.  It was louder than any other bird I've ever heard.

I finally got in the habit of going outside and throwing something at it when it woke me in the night, since it wasn't going to stop anytime soon and I wasn't sleeping with that noise going on.  Eventually it probably felt unwelcome and moved on.

I'm not on Thaivisa all that often, but it's not as if I book tickets through that site so I've got it all figured out, I just passed on some ideas from looking around.  The one did have a book a ticket button, but I'm not sure about limitations, or the process details.

Another site I didn't mention said you can only book tickets originating from Bangkok or Chiang Mai, as I recall, but then since they've been adjusting the website functions and process that may not be right, or might never have been correct.