Taipei to San Francisco

I was impressed that they were able to carry our food preference onto the new flight. Usually when there's a late change of itinerary, we lose our vegie meals. This was Hindu Vegie breakfast. Very tasty.

I've never seen so many people waiting in line to pee on a plane.

The wing.

The seats were definitely too close together.

Almost in San Francisco.

Golden Fronted Leaf birds and Black Drongo Say Goodbye

The birds were out this morning as we did last minute packing. The video is not good enough to see the details of the birds, so I put up this picture of the leaf bird from our Thai bird book. But you can see the drongo chase the leafbird off its perch and hear the leafbird singing. There are two leafbirds. The one on the far right is singing.




I'll set this to go up when the Anchorage folks are just waking up and we should be waiting in the Taiwan airport to fly to San Francisco.

The Way Home - Intl. Flights Still Serve Food

We got picked up about 11:30am, including the bikes which were going to be dropped off at the office. The student interns came out to say good bye. Bon is with them too. It seems it was pink day for the women.

Here's another picture of the compound. One visitor suggested that the grounds looked more like being out in a village, and yes, that is the feel, even though we are in Chiang Mai.


Then to the airport, where despite the overnight in San Francisco, and then the journey to Salt Lake on the way to Anchorage, we were able to check our baggage in through Anchorage. We will get to briefly find stuff we might need going through customs in SF.



We picked Hindu Vegetarian from China Air's long long list of choices way back in December. It was a good choice and when you get special meals, they bring them first. That seems just to be a logistic decision, so they can find the people who ordered special and get them the right meals. The food was good, though extremely mild after eating Thai food.


The salad was very fresh. And I was surprised to see the jello. As this discussion group suggests, Jello itself is not vegetarian, but there are other ways to make a jello like dish that are vegetarian. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but we didn't eat it. Jello isn't high on my list of favorite foods anyway.


I watched the beginning of "Bedtime Stories." The sound was the best I've ever had through airline earphones, but there really wasn't anything worth listening to.




And here we are approaching Taipei, before dipping into the clouds.









And here's my floor view of the Taipei Terminal D plugged into the socket. There's free wifi in the Taipei airport. They even have free computers to use. Well, I probably should check on that. They used to. I'm on the free wifi though.

Why Travel Agents are Worth the Fee

You know that extra fee that travel agents now charge? For long, international flights, it's definitely worth it. Any number of things can go wrong and it's always nice to have someone who knows what she's doing covering you.

An email arrived just before I went to bed from my travel agent. She was on a mission, incensed that she hadn't been notified by China Air.

This morning (Thai time) when I got to the computer our new itinerary was all there. Mystery is gone. We'll fly from Taiwan to San Francisco. One night there, then to Salt Lake City (China's affiliated with Delta, not Alaska Airlines) and, Redoubt willing, on to Anchorage. We'll get back three hours after the polls close, so it will be the first time in 30 years that we miss a Municipal Election, but I'm guessing we'll get to vote in the runoff.

So, Lynda McMahon at "CWT Vacations formerly Navigant Vacations" (and about ten other names over the years,) who has saved my nether parts any number of times from the clutches of fickle airlines, you again get my travel agent of the year award. This is for reading your email after work on a weekend and then If anyone wants a great travel agent who will go head to head with the "Sorry, we aren't allowed to do that" folks on the other end of the phone, email me and I'll give you her email and phone. My email's in my profile on the right.

Last Night Before Mystery Trip as Volcano Diverts China Air Anchorage Flights

Our trip home gets more exciting each day. As I mentioned earlier, the first report from our travel agent was that China Air had diverted the Taipei-Anchorage-New York flight to Vancouver to avoid the volcanic ash around Anchorage.

Then we saw on China Air's website that flights were stopping in Seattle. Well, that's ok, we can see our daughter.

But today I checked and the first flight listed to Anchorage this week is on Friday. But our ticket on the the China Air website still lists us leaving for Anchorage on Tuesday. But the New York flight with our flight number is listed as non-stop to New York. What if they decided it was better to fly non-stop and skip the Anchorage stop altogether even after the volcano stops erupting. That would be awful for us.

Anyway, we have no idea what's going to happen in the next couple of days. All the offices were closed on Sunday so we couldn't try to rebook through LA or San Francisco. So, adventure lies ahead. Since my mom's in LA, our son's near San Francisco, and our daughter is in Seattle, we may get to see at least one of them.

I've tried not to think about this being the last evening as we first met Rachel for sorbets at Iberry.







Then as the sun was just setting behind Doi Suthep, we all went over to Khun Churn where we had dinner with Matt and Rit.







Khun Churn is a vegetarian restaurant that serves tasty and imaginative all vegie meals.

Here's Rit after we finished off most of the dinner. We met him first at Swe's village where he works through an NGO working on education and cultural preservation.


And Songkran begins next week, so the waterguns I couldn't find anywhere when we first got here (for J to ward off menacing dogs) are now everywhere in preparation for Chiang Mai's giant water fight in a week or so. I shot this on our ride back home. We're much more comfortable now riding in the street (there's no place else to ride) and going with the flow of traffic at lights. Our bright red flashing tail lights making sure that drivers can see we're there.

Then, finally, we stopped to pick up our last sticky rice and mango to take home for a snack.

Birding - Not the Video Game

Tomorrow we move out of our fourth floor bird viewing nest. We've had some great birds this week. J definitely saw an owl (she thinks a barred Asian owlet) and I saw either a brown hawk owl or maybe it was a besra. Today we saw a pair of leafbirds - probably golden fronted leafbirds, but they weren't quite the same. One looked like the one on the bottom left. The other looked like the bottom right, but all green on the belly too. Picture from นกเมืองไทย







All these pictures have birds in them. Enlarging the picture will make them easier to see. This one is a big grey bird that flew off before we could even start to identify it.
This pictures has three drongos in it. Double click it to see it bigger.

With the leaves gone now from most of the trees, it's much easier to see the birds. Here's a picture of the same trees back in January.



This isn't to mention our regulars - all the drongos, the bulbuls, the sunbirds (harder to see and photograph as the picture of the olive backed sunbird shows, but if you double click it you can see it better), the doves, the coucal - one flew lazily right past us today, it's brown wings contrasting to the rest of its black body - and the koels, heard more than seen.

Here is this free show, this game - spot the birds, identify the birds - that is available to all. Yet somehow electronic games, using up energy, usually inside, usually costing money is far more accessible to most than watching birds. But the ability to sit and wait for birds, the ability to know the different kinds of birds by sight and by their calls is something that has to be built into our genes. It's how humans survived for all but the last 100 years on earth.


Verlyn Klinkkenborg writes today in the NY Times about the importance of watching birds,

There’s an insouciance about birds in their element that always feels to me like a comment on the human species. I see a vulture looking side to side as it slides by overhead, and it looks to me as though it’s artfully and intentionally ignoring the skill of its flight. I saw the same thing in the Chilean fjords a year ago. We sailed past dozens of black-browed albatross, and every one of them — serenely afloat — looked up at me from the waves with the self-confidence of an athlete, effortlessly drifting on the tide and wondering what element humans call their own.

Blogger Lands in Jail for Insulting the Thai Monarchy

I don't mean to belittle the problems of Alaskan bloggers, but this news story shows that others have it much worse. I don't think the governor reads this blog, so I'm not worried she might try to see if Alaska can copy this too.

April 4, 2009

New: RWB on Suwicha’s sentencing

Internet user gets ten years in jail for posting content that “defamed” monarchy (3 April 2009):

Reporters Without Borders condemns the 10-year jail sentence which a criminal court in the northeast Bangkok district of Ratchada imposed today on Suwicha Thakor for posting content online that was deemed to have insulted the monarchy. Thakor has been held in Bangkok’s Klong Prem prison since 14 January.

“The charge of lese majeste has become a major tool of repression in Thailand,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The sentence passed on Suwicha Thakor violates online free expression and is out of all proportion to what he is alleged to have done. We call for his release and we urge the government to amend this law, which is being abused in an unacceptable manner.” The rest is at Thai Political Prisoners.

Blogging - What's Real? How Do We Know? Stevens, Kepner, Joy

It's Saturday morning in Chiang Mai. We have tickets for the Monday afternoon flight to Taipei and Tuesday afternoon to Anchorage. I've got things to do, but I got a comment today on the Let's Get Real about Mary Beth Kepner post that has my brain twisting.

How do any of us know what is real? OK, I don't want to go into a deep philosophical discussion, so let's limit this to what we see and hear in the news. Suppose you read that a prominent politician's conviction has been thrown out and that there were allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, and that there was an FBI 'whistleblower' who said his partner was violating the rules and was much too close to the witnesses. And the defense claimed this partner was having an affair with a key witness based on the whistleblower's complaint.


How do we cut through all that to find out what is true? I don't know about you, but I tend to rely on my beliefs which are based on my experiences and education. Those beliefs then inform the labels I read in the article. The interpretations are tempered by any personal experiences I have had directly with any of the people or places in the article.

I tend to 'think' more than the average person. My job was to think critically and to teach people to think critically. But I still get seduced by my stereotypes when I'm not being careful, especially if a story matches what I want to believe.

So I tend to be wary of 'politicians'. The nature of the system is that they need to raise money to get elected. And we know that people that help them get elected with big contributions are more likely to get an audience when they want one. Most people write checks to candidates they agree with, so if a candidate votes the way the contributor suggests, it isn't necessarily suspicious. But big lobbyists tend to contribute to all the likely candidates - it's not about ideology, it's about getting a foot in the door and getting what they want later on.

So 'politician' being convicted of corruption. My unthinking response is, "Yes!" If it's a Republican, then add another exclamation point. OK, I know there are honest politicians and good, decent Republicans. But if I don't stop to reflect on that, my gut reaction works through my stereotypes. But in this case, there are personal experiences too. I've met Ted Stevens on a couple of occasions. (I'm an Alaskan. Is there an Alaskan whose been around more than five years who hasn't met Ted?) He's smart, he's rabidly dedicated to doing what he thinks is right for Alaska which tends to mean getting money sent to Alaska. He also has been a Senator forever and from what I can tell, he already had an ego and temper long ago. All these years surrounded by sycophants hasn't helped his ego. And I know people who have told me they've seen the effects close up of how some of that money has spilled over into the waiting buckets of associates. Fishing and Seward for example. [Note: The ADN seems not to be giving free access to the Seward article. You may need a library password to get through on this link. The article citation is: Ben Stevens ' secret fish deal - State senator helped steer Adak pollock to a company he had financial stake in Anchorage Daily News (AK) - Sunday, September 18, 2005 Author: RICHARD MAUER Anchorage Daily News ; Staff ]

Whistleblower. That's a magic word for me. This is someone who sees a wrong and when the powers that be won't fix it, he or she risks everything to make sure the public is protected. Deep Throat. Daniel Elsberg. Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe in The Insider). Karen Silkwood. These are all heroes. So the word whistleblower tends to turn on the 'good guy' reactors in my brain.

But in this case, I have some personal contact. I've watched in court and had several conversations with the 'corrupt' FBI agent. And the 'whistleblower's' comments are at odds with my sense of Mary Beth Kepner's professionalism and judgment.

Our science based society puts lots of weight on objectivity. We're supposed to keep an arm's length. We're supposed to judge the facts using rationality, not feelings. I had a conversation just yesterday with an anthropologist who is studying farmers in a small Thai village. Anthropology has gone through these debates about studying cultures 'objectively' from the outside or 'subjectively' by being a participant. This anthropologist is living in the house of one of the villagers when staying there and has been unofficially adopted by the family. This puts some limitations on the anthropologist's movements, but on the other hand gives the opportunity to learn things that wouldn't be available to someone looking 'objectively' from outside. There is no one best way.

When I first started blogging the trials in 2007, it didn't occur to me to talk to any of the participants. I was somewhat surprised to see some of the reporters chatting with the defense attorneys, the prosecutors, even the witnesses. Well, of course, Steve, that's what reporters do. But to me it seemed like that would taint what I wrote. If I actually know someone, if they had the courtesy to talk to me, wouldn't I owe them something, some sort of restraint perhaps on what I wrote?

Eventually, I did one day ask an FBI technician a question about a missing exhibit and learned from the answer that they had been reading my blog and trying to figure out who in the courtroom was writing it. OK, so that's what I wanted, people reading my blog. But to what extent do I then become a participant? But every reporter has to deal with the fact that their subjects read their articles and in many cases their behavior is affected by what they read. There is no complete objectivity. That led me to invite Mary Beth Kepner to talk to a class. And there were, as I've said in other posts, other conversations when we accidentally met somewhere in Anchorage.

So, when I read her name in the newspaper along with the 'whistleblower's' allegations, I had to think carefully about whether those personal conversations gave me important information (like the anthropologist gets from the adoptive family) or whether those conversations bias me against the 'whistleblower' and make me miss 'the truth.' [I know that putting things in quotation marks can be annoying, but it's the cleanest way I know how to point out that I'm using these words with some skepticism.]

So I read the complaint carefully. While I acknowledge I couldn't totally erase my impressions from my mind, the complaint on its own just seemed peculiar. I've written at length about it. First the redacted version. Then the less redacted version. (I even blew my own horn a bit when there were news reports that Joy hadn't been granted whistleblower status, but that turned out to be another lesson in why you shouldn't blow your own horn. Whistleblower status turned out to not be so clear cut in the Justice Department.)

Law enforcement officers have a lot of pressure to not rat on their own - even when their own commit serious crimes. Why would this agent rat on his colleague for things like being too close to an undercover source? It's an anomaly at the very least, if not bizarre.

I've written quite of few posts on this topic. The one that comes closest to tying things all together with links to all the others is Checkered Swan at the Stevens' Trial? post.

But in this post I want to focus on the difficulty of really knowing and how each of us has stories buried in our heads which give meaning to the words we read, whether that meaning is really in those words or not. Even if we don't have an immediate personal stake and won't be affected in any way, we judge where the truth lies not so much on the facts (in this situation there are still enough missing facts that we have to use circumstantial evidence) but on our beliefs, our prior experiences with the labels in the story, and our own emotional needs.

Perhaps Mary Beth Kepner did some voodoo on me that has kept me disbelieving Joy's allegations. Perhaps my ego is now invested in this and I want things to fall a certain way so that I will be vindicated as being right from the beginning. I work hard to make calls based on as much factual information as possible and with as much self-examination of my own hidden biases and motives as I can. Most of the time I don't write conclusions because there's still too many missing pieces. I just stack up the evidence as I see it and let readers draw their own conclusions. But, of course, which things I choose to list and which I omit, and how I tie them together will affect where the uncritical reader takes it. And the ideologically motivated reader will not be persuaded at all if my stacks of evidence don't point to the conclusion he wants to believe.

So, as someone who has followed this story closer than most people and still is not sure what it all means, I'd call on others who value the quest, if not the certainty, of truth, to be cautious in their conclusions. And to be skeptical of those who use any of this story to declare certainty about anything but the absolute facts - such as the fact that the Attorney General has written:

In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial.

And even here I'm taking the Anchorage Daily News' word for it, but there were many other similar reports so I feel reasonably confident this is accurate.



So, about that comment on the blog today. How do I know that the writer has something solid? Part of me wants to say, "Yes!' just because it would mean I was on the right track. But how much does he really know? It sounds like he's had a closer look than most, but that doesn't mean that his filters, his stories didn't lead him to unwarranted conclusions.

Ambiguity is not one of humankind's favorite places to be. We like to know. And even if we don't have enough evidence, we tend to jump to conclusions anyway. We like closure. I think that's why sports are so popular. At the end of the game we know who is the winner and who is the loser. Some may still dispute which is the best team, but they can't dispute who won the game.

[UPDATE March 17, 2012:  Cliff Groh pursues the question of why the Bush Administration pursued the Ted Stevens  indictment using the Schuelke Report for more information.]

Thai Elephant Conservation Center Hospital in Lampang and the Nursery (Part 2)

For anyone who wanted to see more of JP's research on elephant self recognition in mirrors, here's a link to the published article with videos . And here's another link to his interview on National Public Radio.



Can you see the Thai word for elephant hospital in both signs? I ask that only because most people just see seemingly impossible script, but if you look closely, you can see the letters. The last three letters of the top line of both pictures is 'elephant' - ช้าง. "Chang" The little ้ up above means it's high tone. Note also that letters look a little different in different fonts. The letters in front of ช้าง spell hospital.

Below is a list of the names of the elephants in the hospital when we were there on Wednesday. I would have photoshopped the three pictures together, but the final picture would have been way too small to read anything.

As it is you may want to double click to enlarge the pictures.

Owner indicates how the elephant got here. Anyone can send their sick elephant here for treatment. Confiscated seems to include Burmese elephants that somehow got into Thailand.

You probably have to enlarge this one, but it's the list of reasons
why each elephant is in the hospital.

This one was the most obviously injured. Probably this was a logging accident.

So this isn't the last picture you see here, here are some pictures from the elephant nursery.

This baby was four months old if I recall correctly.

And this one was eight months old.

Mom.

Here's a link to the first post on this.

March 2009 Google and Other Search Terms

I put up these posts to highlight the power of internet searches, how they sometimes go poorly astray, some of the more unexpected things people search for, the satisfaction I get when someone appears to have found just what they want, and the frustration when they get close, but don't know how to get the rest of the way. I learn about how people get here and maybe someone reading this will figure out something useful here too.

• what can i do to be more interesting? A reasonable question, but I don't think this person found the answer here. The person got to the November google search page.
  
  
• do federal judges fly on sundays with us marshals I'm sure I didn't have the answer for this, but there was something about Federal Marshals flying with Vic Kohring on Monday.
  
  
• pomegranate phone release india - sadly the pomegranate phone is not a real phone, but I was surprised at the number of people who thought it was. The spot is very well done which is why I posted it originally. This query was from someone in Bombay
  
  
• does the fbi pay for house hunting for new employees - this person got to the post on the FBI complaint by Chad Joy which did not answer the question, but maybe raised a lot of questions the seeker hadn't even considered.
  
  
• what is the thai version of lol - Bingo! Here's someone who got exactly what was sought: lol in Thai.
  
  
• does a yellow shirt go with red shorts - Absolutely, but they didn't get that answer. Instead they got a post on the political implications of redshirts and yellowshirts in Thailand.
  
  
• do americans even know where wales is? This UK browser didn't get the answer either, but at least now knows that the US has a place called Wales too. To Live in Die in Wales Alaska was probably a lot more than the person was expecting.
  
  
• famous people born in pennsylvania with their last name beggining with u (1909) - If this browser, who got to Famous People Born in 1909, searched the page for Pennsylvania, he would have found that David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz were both born in Pennsylvania, but obviously neither had a U in their last name. The closest we got were a V(elez) and two W's (Welty and Weil) There was also U. Thant. But not from Pennsylvania.
  
  
• how many people are famous for knowing more than one languages - Think about this for a bit. I guess if someone spoke 25 languages fluently, that might be the reason they are famous. I can think of famous people whose knowledge of a second language was much appreciated - such as Jackie Kennedy who could speak French. Anyway, this person got to famous people born in 1909 too.
  
  
• did lady natasha spender home in france burn down - Also got to the same place where there was something on Stephen Spender, Lady Natasha's husband.
  
  
• who is the famous person successful in studying at university more than 1 - This came from a computer using US English in Cambodia. Also got to famous people.
  
  
• elvi gray-jackson's values seems to be affecting policy decisions - Is that surprising? Don't most politician's values affect how they vote on policies? This searcher at least knew how to search the blog for 'elvi-gray-jackson' when she got an archive page full of posts. But what she got was about the election between Traini and Gray-Jackson.
  
  
• know your cranes t shirt - Here's one of those google hits that doesn't work. I had a post on Chiang Mai T shirts (which the browser got to) as well other posts on Sandhill and other kinds of cranes. The browser clicked on a picture from that page Chiang Mai T-shirts. But that got me curious - was there a T-shirt that showed you the different kinds of cranes? So I looked at the google page they got to. Well, the "know your cranes" t-shirt wasn't quite what I was expecting. Nor was the other T-shirt google found.
  
  
• "abie baby" production - A number of people searched for variations of this. I'm not totally sure what they were looking for, but they got to a Lincoln's Birthday post I did with an excerpt from the Anchorage Hair cast singing "happy birthday abie babie".
  
  
• ted the dog hunting for rabbis vidios - I first thought this was some sort of sick anti-semitic joke. But eventually I realized that the searcher had left out the 't' at the end of rabbi. The post he got was definitely not what he was looking for. It was about Ted Stevens and the Seward Sea-Life Center.
  
  
• how do you increase morale in a deli - The wonderful serendipity of googling. In a post called doing what's possible I, by chance, gave some examples, two of which included the magic words

  "If she told you to pick up some bagels in a New York deli for lunch (and you were both in Los Angeles,) you'd laugh."
  "improve the morale and increase production"
  
  

• furniture that hangs from the roof inside - I really wanted to see what this looks like, but couldn't find it. The person did get to see some furniture in Hang Dong.
  
  
• chanot deed - Another bingo, almost. This was not something I expected anyone to be looking up. The search came from Denmark. I had just posted on this Thai form of property deed. So who was looking it up? An NGO worker? A corporation? Or maybe a Dane married to a Thai trying to figure out what happens when they buy property together in Thailand? Or maybe his attorney? Actually the post - on Chanot Chumchon - they got to probably wasn't as useful as a later post on the types of documentation for Thai property.
  
  
• how does the gut in death row work harder - Not sure what this person was looking for, but he got a post on why I think the death penalty shouldn't be reinstated in Alaska.
  
  
• kuala lumpur bird park owl take picture - This is a real bingo (I think, I'm never sure I really understand what people are looking for.) There's a spot in the KL bird park where you can have your picture taken with birds, including two owls. This googler got to that post which included this picture of people getting their picture taken with the owls in the background.
  
  
• steve keudell.blogspot.com - This one disturbs me. Actually, I got quite a few like this. Steve is a farmer in Oregon who got electrocuted when a tree branch fell on a power line. I started getting hits with his name one day and it didn't make sense, so I looked what else they got on google. I found an article about the accident. I've got Steve in my url so sometimes I get people looking for other Steves. So I put up a post about it, with some information about the accident and asked people to let me know if there was a better link for people to get info. They let me know about stevekuedell.blogspot.com. I posted it. But as a new blog (I assume) it wasn't as high up on google's radar as my blog so I kept getting more and more people. So this is someone who had the right url. If they had put it into the url window they'd have gotten directly to the right site. But they googled it instead and got to my site. Which now had a link at the beginning that sent them to the right site where they could get the latest update. And according the sitemeter information, they didn't go to that link. There were a number of hits like this. And others that did go to the better link. It's partly about knowing how to read and paying attention, it's partly internet literacy. And maybe some people didn't want to know more than I had up, even if it was a week old. Here's the most current information on Steve's condition.
  
  
• information on boyfriends cheeting on their girlfriends and the girlfriends pay the price - no comment. Not sure why this blog came up. Here's what their google search showed:
  

What Do I know?: March 2009
... charge less, hurting shops who pay the price of legally and safely disposing of waste. ... schools and a health clinic as well as information on various ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html - 451k - Cached

I can't believe this was the best google could do.

• a day i will never forget in chiang mai zoo with my family - I'm guessing this is of the genre of "Googling to find stuff for the paper I have to write for school". It was US Pacific Standard Time, from a Thai language computer. And they got my post on a day at the Chiang Mai zoo.

Click here for all the other posts on interesting google searches.