Sapere Aude
Tag: thailand
very mad max
An estimated 3000 fish, brought to the roofless, flooded building 10 years ago by nearby vendors in hopes of controlling a burgeoning mosquito population, are being removed by Bangkok Metropolitan Administration staff. Once the fish are captured, they’ll be brought to Thailand’s Department of Fisheries research and development labs before being released into various water bodies across Thailand.
The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee will unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot. On a visit to New York she noticed the sanitation inspection system in which letter grades are pasted on restaurant windows, and wondered whether Thailand could develop a similar system to shame Thai restaurants into making tastier food.
yes please. death to gloppy, sugary “thai”.
ok, this is weird
conducted improvisations
Bhumibol’s story is also that of a king who lost faith in democracy (if he ever really had it), who constantly meddled behind the scenes in politics and thus, in the twilight of his reign, risks leaving behind a country unprepared for life without “Father”, as Thais affectionately call him. Understanding why a country that was until recently a beacon of pluralism in Asia has become such a “mess”, as the king put it in 2006, is impossible without lifting the thick veil of reverence surrounding him.
can’t wait for Bhumibol’s death. all this nonsense is keeping me away from the amazing food and sights of thailand
hello kitty armbands. awesome. another design solution for a behavioral problem
it is “block youtube for countries starting with T” week
The hospital of the future is here today, but it’s not in the US; it’s not even in Europe–it’s in Thailand. Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok is an all-digital hospital, with one giant database containing everything from patients’ billing to medical history to digital images of their X-rays instead of film.
i have been to bumrungrad in 2001 when i was bitten by a stray dog in a back street in bangkok. it took them 3 minutes to get my personal data and my credit card info, and off i was to see a doctor.
when i worked in thailand, i found that most thai businesses were reluctant to use IT because their human resources were so cheap that it didn’t make sense to replace manual labor with IT. institutions like bumrungrad lead the way: what do you get if you combine cutting-edge IT with low staffing costs? lots of new innovative services, that is.
People ask me sometimes why I insist on my full name, including the middle name, in attributions. Most people do, but you have to search for both Gregor J. Rothfuss and Gregor Rothfuss to get the full picture, and that leaves out attributions like Gregor or Greg (don’t use Greg, btw). You could argue that you don’t want that level of transparency, but face it, it is here. so anyway, I did a search on friendster to find a friend of mine, and I got 8 results. which one is it? Names define our identity. In the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. Now it does. So I am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? Some considerations:
A linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. I wonder if it would be at a manageable length? Elke suggests Indian names (based on deeds) or email-style names which are based on association: someone@somewhere. Of course, for the glut of people at hotmail, that does not work, because the association is meaningless. I wonder what other naming schemes may be of interest?
2007-12-06: Thais try to have names as UUID: Any 2 families that are related will have the same last name, and usually quite complicated ones at that.
I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful. Here’s a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name. Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be.
2015-04-23: I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
2016-03-11: Changing your last name for some dude had always been in extremely bad taste. The confusion leading to it has always been puzzling to me.
We’ll each keep our last name and take the other’s name as our middle name.
2022-07-04: Names should be chosen
I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage arranged by your parents. It’s not the modern thing to do, and a sign of a very conservative traditional family.
Being assigned a name at birth will still be common place, but this name will primarily be a placeholder until the name choosing ceremony, when you get to choose your legal adult name. Perhaps this happens at 12, or 16. The bureaucratic friction in changing your name which is currently normal will be reduced to make it super easy to do. The name changes will also be tracked on the blockchains, making it both easy to monitor and hard to scam. They system would only work if there was a continuum between names, so changing a name was not a way to hide.
Once changing your name at the threshold of adulthood is easy, changing your name later during adulthood will also be easy. I’d expect people to go through life with multiple name stages. We see the hints of that now with nicknames, and trail names, and playa names, and online handles and pseudonyms. The main difference is that these new names will be legal and it will be easy to track their lineage, since the ledger of names is public. The average person might have 3 of 4 hames in their lifetime.
2022-07-19: Dolphin names
Dolphins cannot use voices as their identifying feature because it becomes distorted at different depths. They instead invent a melody – a pattern of sound frequencies held for specific lengths of time – that they use to identify themselves for the rest of their lives. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can even imitate the whistles of their friends, calling out their names if they are lost. Additional information, such as reproductive status, can be conveyed by changing the volume of different parts of the whistle, not unlike how people emphasize certain words to add nuance. Dolphins living among seagrass gave themselves a short, shrill name compared to the baritone sounds of dolphins living in muddier waters. Meanwhile, small pods displayed greater pitch variation than larger groups, which may help with identification when the probability of repeated encounters is higher. Marine researchers still don’t know why some bottlenoses base their whistles on family members and others on lesser acquaintances.
While the signature whistles of female dolphins will barely change throughout their life, male dolphins may adjust their whistle to mirror the signature whistle of their best friend. In addition to an individual signature whistle, groups of dolphins may invent a shared whistle to promote social cohesion.
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.
Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:
Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”
With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because
The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics
it will be possible to jump start the distributed power infrastructure worldwide.
2007-07-11: Ocean of Garbage
Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.
2008-01-11: Why not in the US?
Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old
2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?
2015-06-22: Recycling doesn’t work
almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.
Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot.
2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.
While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.
2019-02-07: Hydrothermal liquefaction
Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.
2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.
Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.
2020-01-10: Thai Hacks
As Plastic bag ban hits Thailand, consumers adapt with variety of household carrying items
2020-01-20: Plastic Surge
Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.
2020-03-03: Microplastics
Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week
2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further.
2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.
THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.
2021-10-14: There’s now a startup using PET breakdown technology.
The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.
2022-03-04: Meanwhile, stop it with the performative cleaning:
Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”
2023-09-29: Big if true
78% of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber
Gregor J. Rothfuss 