blog of kaiyen

roman influences in Thailand

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is from the Summer Palace at Bang Pa-In. It’s quite a strange place. It was built to entertain visiting diplomats and emissaries, and the architecture was designed primarily to make them feel at home. So you have roman statues, a “Chinese House,” and a primarily receiving building/residence that could be out of Victorian England.

Then again, you also have the building visible behind the statue, in the middle of the pond, that is classic Thai, and is also adherent to Buddhist and Thai royal philosophies. It is separated from any other building by the pond itself, and only the king and his wife is allowed to take the small boat across to it. It is a mini-temple just for the king, separated from the “foreign” influences (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) seen around the rest of the palace.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Norway tests laptop exam scheme.

This is kind of interesting.  Many, many Law Schools use a variety of different exam software packages that do far more than what the Norway system does.  It actually reboots one’s computer into a secure state, where one cannot access the internet or any files on the computer.  After the exam is finished, the student then has to reboot again to upload the encrypted file.

BBC NEWS | Business | US factory output continues fall.

It’s a bit odd to cite a BBC news article for this but the point is the same.  The other day my international economics professor was talking about the advance GDP numbers released this week.  One of the negative but promising items was that construction was down so much.  The point is not that no construction labor is a good thing, but that we’ve probably seen that worn out as a negative factor for the overall GDP.  People likely aren’t still losing jobs in the field, but have already lost them.  There is nowhere else to go but up.  

It may be a similar case for overall factory output as well.  It’s so far down that perhaps it’s going to level off, then eventually climb.  In fact, the article mentions that the drop was not as bad as expected.