Exploration | Casey Knapp

5/24/14

1. A water bottle that reads your saliva to tell you how hydrated you are or aren’t
2. When you read a book on kindle, and highlight, those highlights go right to twitter – I think this is already an idea
3. Google Glass thermal imaging to see when cows on a dairy are sick, or getting sick, and things like that
4. A wearable tech for dating that measures how your heartbeat, body temp, and whatever else react when you meet someone
5. A robot that can weed fields for you. It has cameras, it knows what plants are good, it can see little weeds growing and maybe even with a laser or something make it so that the genetics of the weed die. How can a weed possibly live after that? Or think of it this way, you can laser up a plot of land and get the soil type, climate. And then a robot would be able to tell you the best layout for a permaculture setup.
6. Eye drops that make your eyes fluorescent for 2 hours
7. Electronic passport that you can never lose. And somehow make it in no ones interest to steal. How could you make it in no one’s interest to steal things. You would have to make it so that no one would need anything, everyone has everything. You could do this by raising kids a certain way, but that’s controlling. You have to let people do their own thing. Some people like to get crazy, fucked up, right?
8. You could buy a movie, the kindle book, documentaries, all associated with a topic, the civil war for example. It would be called an info package, an entertainment package, something, so you could get all the best resources on that topic
9. A notebook that when you write on the paper it transcribes to evernote
10. Universal recycle karma – instead of getting a slip when you recycle to turn in to the grocery store, you can scan something and get ctypro deposited.
11. At a protest, order 100000 flowers and have them delivered to the front lines

How any people can say they’ve lived under a military government? Well, now I can.

Requisite Solider Selfie

Despite what’s happening in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, located in the jungles of north western Thailand, is perfectly safe. I’ve been here for less than a month so I can’t speak with authority on the history and current events of Thailand, but after talking with Thais and other people who have lived in Thailand for 25+ years, I have sparknotes understanding of what’s happening.

Chiang Mai and the surrounding provinces are populated by the Reds/lower class party. The Yellows are the Royalists, who are mostly in Bangkok and southern Thailand. The Yellows work with the military. Their presence in Chiang Mai is small and seems to be mostly symbolic. They march around some the central areas of Chiang Mai and occasionally drive around, but don’t do much else, from what I can tell. Since the Yellows are not popular, they don’t want to cause trouble because they are outnumbered.

This is not Thailand’s first coup and seems to be different from than ones that have taken place before. The military is taking more extreme measures against protesters in Bangkok, detaining people, etc. Since the last coup in 2006, the country has changed a lot. There’s more technology, social media, etc, so the people are more progressive, diverse, and less tolerant of conservative and traditional rules. The clash of traditional and a new liberal Thailand will be interesting to watch.

One example of how much things have changed is how a fake official statement changed the rules of the curfew. When the military first took control, they set a 10p curfew that was by and large adhered to. There no patrols or anything, people just didn’t go out. Then, there was a statement released that the coup was relaxed to 12p. I originally saw it on twitter but I’m not sure who exactly released it. A few hours later, the military released a statement that the curfew was not changed. This caused a lot of confusion but few hours later, the military put out another statement confirming the curfew would be relaxed to 12p. From what I can tell, someone sent a fake news story, the story spread and became a fact.

I haven’t been keeping up too much with what’s going on since most of the action is in Bangkok. From my perspective, things are relaxed and safe in Chiang Mai even though everything closes at 12p.

Casey Knapp

Category Archives: Exploration

10 Ideas – May 24 2014