Specialist

It would never get the green light. Too obviously politically incorrect, not to mention containing too much real scientific content.

What KS said. LOTS of fun was had! I had to beg off early, pleading exhaustion catching up with me - which it was. There are some SERIOUSLY good and great people in this crazy crew.

Somehow, you knew that was coming. Suthep has been pitching that particular solution for quite a while now. Who do you suppose Mr Abhisit thinks should run the interim government? Mr Abhisit or Mr Suthep? Or maybe a third round draft choice with absolutely impeccable Party credentials?

That's the day Suthep and the People's Democratic Revolutionary Committee are doing their final push. This could get interesting. I think I will stay well away from everyplace on the direct line between the two groups that day.

Dean, a good doctor can tell a LOT from just blood chemistry. A lot of things show up first in blood changes. I don't blame him for doing the EKG, since you have no baseline data at all, but it was probably not strictly necessary. He probably did the UA because he already suspected you were borderline diabetic. For a full-up colonoscopy, you should ask questions. The only time I've ever had a doctor do even a partial colonoscopy on me was when we were checking on some bleeding. (They found hemorrhoids. Big Fat Hairy Deal.)

6 CO2+ 6 H2O + energy + biochemistry --> C6H12O6 + 3 O2 C6H12O6 is simple sugar. Carbohydrate. FOOD. You probably want to keep the CO2 in circulation, rather than locking it away and not letting Mother Nature recycle it into food.

I've been wearing one for too many decades to stop now. Besides, it is easier to look at my wrist than to whip out my thing and flop it open.

I'm landing at Swampy a little after midnight Sunday. I *SHOULD* be lucid in time to make this one, if I can find the place.

PERFECT timing! I land at Swampy just after midnight May 4 (Sunday morning). I'm going to HAVE to go see this!

No radar watch on the tanker? Or was the guy on the radar watch paid not to sound the alarm?

They let your friend keep the goods so he/she can continue selling the stuff and then they can bust him/her again. At 6K baht/arrest, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

You'll notice that they started getting pinger reports as soon as they started dropping sonobuoys and dragging sonar fish through the correct part of the Indian Ocean. If the data that put the airplane in that area had come out sooner, the searchers would have started getting data sooner. As it is, they're now racing against the pinger batteries going dead.

OK, now I have two question. Where was the cellphone base station that received the call? Were there any previous calls from that cellphone that day? Where did they apparently originate? The previous calls would give an indication as to whether the pilot had the cellphone on his person at the time. The location of the base station gives you an idea of where the cellphone could have been at the time of the call. And why the BLEEP didn't this come out right after the airplane went missing??? I understand the old rule, "Never ascribe to malice that which is explained by incompetence", but there's only so much incompetence I'm willing to postulate for the purposes of ascribing things to it. At some point, a variation of Goldfinger's Rule ("Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.") has to come into play.

Cav, did the bank specifically say they couldn't accept cash, or they couldn't accept ANY financial instrument for deposit from an American? If they specifically said "cash", you ask them "OK, how do I transfer funds from SCB to you guys, so you CAN accept it?"

Flash, if any of the people who know what happened to that airplane are still alive, they are not talking.

An electrical fire in the cockpit would be one thing. The problem is that Boeing and the airlines understand, in detail, just how bad that would be, and put a LOT of engineering and maintenance into making sure that (1) it doesn't happen and (2) the fire can be fought, effectively. A nosewheel fire raises an obvious question. The Boeing 777 is pressurized. The nosewheel, having to make contact with the runway in order to do its job, is OUTSIDE of the pressure hull. How does the smoke get from OUTSIDE the pressure hull to INSIDE the pressure hull? Also note that a nosewheel fire would start during or immediately after takeoff, and be detected immediately as low tire pressure and/or hot brake, BOTH of which are reported on the cockpit EICAS display. Instead, he postulates that the nosewheel fire doesn't get going until the airplane is at cruising altitude, where the air is dam' thin, instead of down close to the ground where there's lots more oxygen per cubic centimeter to support combustion. Dezinformatsiya, anyone?

In a situation like this, you check EVERYTHING. I'd REALLY like to know who gave the order to sit on the military radar tracking data for days, while everyone searched the wrong piece of ocean.

What is conspicuously absent from ALL of that talk about the cellphones is a statement along the lines of "Yes, we know about those cellphone reports. We have all of the phone numbers in question. We've run each one back through the wireless service providers to the cellphone electronic ID numbers, and we've queried every wireless base station in that part of the world. None of those cellphones have checked in since the airplane took off." It isn't that hard to do that. The critical thing is this: If any of those phones HAS checked in with a cellphone base station, it tells you that the phone landed safely on dry land, and it tells you, within a few square klicks, where the phone is. If the phone is safely on dry land, odds are that the phone's owner is, too, which means the AIRPLANE is as well. Meaning that running down those phone numbers, while UNLIKELY to help, MIGHT gve some very important information.

There have been a couple of reports that passenger smartphones are "still active". Without more data, that could be that the networks in question haven't noticed that the phones are no longer talking to the network. Or it could be that the phones are in fact intact, in range of a cell tower, and their batteries are still up. Which has some serious implications.

Recall that "Dr Strangelove" pointed out the WORST thing you can do when you have a Doomsday Retribution System is KEEP IT A SECRET FROM YOUR ENEMIES. Why would you keep your terrorist acts a secret from the people you are trying to influence through your terrorist acts?

Actually, with a little effort, you can treat the period and hyphen keys ALMOST like an iambic paddle... Hm. That's HORRIBLE thought: Use an Arduino to do paddle-to-text. Many years ago, while in ICU, intubated, no ability to talk. Friends almost had to go get a straight key and code practice oscillator, before we could track down a pad and a pen. When they finally let me out of ICU, I had a stack of many pages of "conversation", in my handwriting, almost all of it perfectly lucid, most of it I have NO memory WHATSOEVER of writing.

Ditto on meeting good friends. I do wonder where Hugh Hoy went. He and I are plank-holders in the Bangkok chapter of one of the most exclusive clubs on the planet. "DVT/PE Survivors League": There are no meetings, there is no newsletter, there are no T-shirts, and we've already paid our dues.

Taking inflation into account, that 280 to 300 is about the same as 130 to 150 ten to twelve years ago. I don't think that's the issue. What I saw happening, over a period of about a year, a few years ago, was some VERY unpleasant treatment of those guys you talk about, to the point that they said "Posting on Thai360 isn't sanuk anymore, and life is too short to do things that aren't sanuk." Take a look at the responses to some of the last Trip Reports.

Election Day is scheduled for about 2 weeks from now. Depending on the quantity and quality of the brown matter that impacts the rotary air impeller between now and then, and afterwards, I *MIGHT* be back in town ca. late March-early April, or late April-early May. I have to schedule around work, and I am not even remotely crazy enough to be in town during Songkran.

I can't help but think that Tucker Max would take that last one as a personal challenge...