• Repairology
  
  My brother Ralph bought a car used from a dealer. It had been repaired after a collision, but the repair was not evident. He uses the car for commuting. It had a new bumper fascia put on it as part of the repair but the fascia was painted without first applying a bonding agent to the plastic.. The fascia is the soft part of the bumper. The paint is peeling off of it. For someone wanting a neat car, this car has become grungy.
  
  Last year a construction “barrel” ( I one of those orange and white stripped affairs designed to damage cars in construction zones), blew in front of the car on the highway. Ralph did not report it or file an insurance claim. It would have been a hassle and life is busy. The barrel ripped the fascia. He now thinks that maybe he should have filed a claim. So it goes.
  
  A few days ago he drilled some holes on either side of the tear in the bumper fascia and connected the two sides together with plastic cable ties. The cable ties are white. The fascia without the paint is black. According to Ralph, ” the cable ties are what I had”. This got me thinking of repairs, how they are made, and why they are made, and how they are perceived. Right now the categorization slicing instrument in my brain is slicing “repair” into five different kinds.
  
  Coverup. (also known by the name “Buyer Beware Repair” or repair by gonif גנב)
  This is the kind of repair that is not supposed to be seen. Cars are often fixed after collisions so that you cannot see the repair. The same brother had the case of repair that he did not see and he bought a different car with damage. In Thailand 30 years ago we saw cracked water jars being skillfully repaired in the city of Ratchaburi with cement and then covered with skillful trompe l’oeil painting. These repairs cover a perhaps functionally deficient product so that it looks undamaged. If you are tuned in to the idea of ” buyer beware” then this sort of covering up of defects is acceptable. If you believe that the seller should point out faults in a product then they are not acceptable repairs, unless we are first told of them.
  
  Image: Rathcaburi could be stills from Koh Kred Video Tape clip 04 on Koh Kred.
  
  Dis-appearance: In Phon Bok Thailand Stoneware mortars that have chips or surface details that are not perfect have them covered up with super glue covered with ashes. These repairs cover only cosmetic “flaws” that would lower the price because of appearances. Mortars that have functional defects are used for landfill, to make decorative walls, they are not sold. The mortars have to take a lot of abuse and are not expensive. If damaged they are not worth the hassle. Even the makers do not try to cover up functional defects. This would lower the value of their products.
  
  Image Phon Bok
  
  Just Repair: This is just a repair. No, or little consideration is made concerning the repair. It is just repaired. Nothing is covered up or concealed. This is the kind of repair that is held in high regard by Soetsu Yanagi when discussing Korean wooden bowls. It has a stance of honesty, of thusness, it is what it is. The bowls are turned from green wood. When they crack, they are repaired. This is what my brother did. He repaired his bumper with available cable ties. No cover up, no intent to do anything but make it functional.
  
  Image credit Ralph Katz
  https://louiskatz.net/w/uploads/Main/BumperCrRalphKatz.jpg
  
  
  Intentious Repair:
  This is a Just Repair specifically made with the intent of looking like a just repair. Pretentiously, rather than just making the repair, the intent is to make it look like you did not care about appearances. You not only might not care, you want others to know that you don’t. Louis does these. The picture of a bumper posted to the web by a sophisticated artist, even if the art is music, makes me wonder if Ralph’s qualifies as intentious. I have not asked. Either way it has sparked my interest. I have appreciated it. The bumper, at least in my mind is interesting. Appreciated it enriches life. Appreciation appreciates the value of an object or event. 
  I have shirts that I bought in 1989 in Thailand. In Thai the name of the shirts seems to be “humble shirts”. I wore mine every wash until they got fairly worn. Others would say “worn out”, but I prefer “broken in”. After that I wore them on non-school days. My personal feeling is that these shirts still have use with a little repair, and that long use is as functional, maybe more functional than recycling. So I have repaired these shirts. They are repaired rather funkily, wow spell check has “funkily”! The repairs are so obvious and perhaps overdone that they might go beyond intentious into the next category, The Conspicuous Elevation of Repair Repair.
  
  Image Louis Maw Hawm Shirt.
  
  Conspicuous Elevated Repair, Kintsugi.
  
  Kintsugi is a Japanese repair technique often used on ceramics using urishi lacquer, a natural resin. It is water proof and holds up to mild heat. The repair resin, made from the sap of the urishi tree, is sometimes filled with iron oxide, but the upper layers are often instead filled or surfaced with gold powder. This makes the repair, a record of the objects history and its breaking, obvious. It makes the damage obvious, making it impossible to ignore. It holds, displays, asserts that use becomes tangible part of an object. In highlighting use and wear it elevated repair seems to demand that bowls are drunk from and not just displayed that you know it and that you remember.
  
  Rather than coverup, rather than mourning the inevitable, kitsugi is an affirmative joyful appreciation of the mutual arising of creation and destruction, afe, wear and tear, and eventual breaking of ceramics. The atmospheric firing of ceramics leaves a trace of its time in the kiln, the repair is just another page in the history of the work. Art is often made in a way the reveals the process of making. With tea ware in Japan there is recognition that who has drunk tea from a bowl, how it is stored, and in what manner it is handled becomes a part of the work. So does the wear and repair. Raku, a firing technique, and shino, a type of glaze both leave a surface with a fine network of cracks. This allows tea to stain the cracks and sometimes the clay body, overtime changing the appearance and making it appear worn before there really is any wear. 
  While most of the Japanese aesthetics surrounding tea ware stresses a quiet understated natural feel, Kintsugi seems almost diametrically opposed to this. . The contrast creates a sense of importance of the issues surrounding the repair .The gold, bright, valuable, associated with the aristocracy, seems wildly antithetical to the humble nature works that are repaired. On its visual soapbox, kitsugi loudly speaks, “I am a repair” . It is an unassailable statement affirming use and wear as an aspect of an object and aesthetics. If you don’t understand this, the gold slaps you in the face with the message.
  
  
  (Look up boro repair and shashiko Japanese clothing repair)
  
  But all of these repair techniques, and their associated intent are in some ways the same. Each tells a story, each leaves an impression of intent, or lack of it. Each expresses an attitude on the topic of mutual arising. Each tells of human nature. The difference is in the way we perceive and the way we appreciate them, and in our understanding of the intent of the person who repaired it. The difference, for the most part resides in the viewer. It is the viewer that appreciates, the creates the great value of the repair.
  
  Non Repair repair
  This is repair after intentionally breaking an object, or making an object specifically to look as if it is repaired. Goro Suzuki, whose work is purposefully broken is the master of the Non Repair repair. He intentionally breaks pieces to repair them, and really builds his work with kintsugi type repair techniques. For him it does not  need to be broken to repair it. Its like he is saying, “If its not broken fix it anyways.” I am not sure that there is anything as conspicuous as this kind of “repair”. The fact that it is not broken screams for its own category . The  function of the Non Repair repair is often to teach appreciation of repair.
  
  The place where repair has become more a part of the aesthetic culture than elsewhere is Japan. But modern Japan is quite a throw away society. Houses get too old, cars get too old, clothes have to look new and respectable, hair is always highly tamed.  But in this atmosphere kintsugi and the boro technique and  shashiko clothing repair seem a response to this, a cultural self criticism. Not being Japanese it is hard to know. 
  
  The appreciation of the worn, the repaired, the aged, the imperfect, while it seems far from modern Japanese day to day life, is part of the cultural aesthetic. But it also appears elsewhere. New blue jeans in the US can almost be embarassing in youth culture. This is so true that new jeans are often bleached, stone washed and intentionally distressed in other ways before being sold. Some of the coolest “hippy” clothing were blue jean skirts sewn out of multiple pairs of worn out blue jean pants. 
  
  I often think of a bunch of poles or nodes pulling at the creation of worn jeans.
• The Pragmatism Node and being a cheapskate. This is also tied to just being poor and not being able to afford or wanting to afford new cloths. Likely need and want could be separated out into separate nodes. There is overlap here with other nodes.
• Appreciation of the look, the Wabi Sabi connoisseur.
• Marketability, the Stone Washed Node
• concern for the environmental impact of cotton and consumerism, the Green Node
• the Clueless Node. This is the node of people for whom the buying of new clothes is just a distraction from the rest of their lives, they don’t notice. 

These nodes are just like little elastic straps that pull on how we deal with our jeans or other objects. My old denim-type clothing is clearly elastically attached to each of these nodes. 

Certainly I am not the first in my interest in such things. But the earliest serious interest, and just about the only significant historical cultural manifestation that I know about was the period surround what Louise Cort calls “The Teabowl Wars” and the moves in Japan from the aesthetic of  glitzy teaware to wabi sabi and move from connoisseurship of folk pottery to the purposefully making of wabi sabi imbued wares. 

Relation to teaware’s shift from being curated from folk pots to purposefully made to be “funky”

Timeline 2568 พฤศจิกายน 14
MaeowMaeow Wisan, whose nickname I will abbreviate as MM had a hospitalization this weekend. It started with them checking their Blood pressure. The new app attached to the cuff via Bluetooth® to their phone read, “irregular heartbeat”. Consequently they retook it several times. The blood pressure readings were all over them map, one low, one high, and it felt like the other times she went to the hospital for BP. This time however, they were feeling just fine. The next morning they got two more readings. Unsure what to do they went to the minor “Doc in a Box” where they have gotten good service medical advice before. The doc hooked them up to an ECG and the doc said, “You won’t like this, but you should go to the ER”. They told them that they did like it. They had come for advice on what to do. They thanked them and got a ride.

On the better machine, the more wires it has the better, it became clear that the problem was Afib. 

MaeowMaeow has been admitted twice before for having their blood pressure all over the place and feeling bad. They also have been to the ER once more and had a doctors visit once. Each of these times, the vastly differing readings on the BP cuff should have alerted the MDs that the problem could be Afib. Each time they missed this. They assumed hypochondriac. 

The previous times MM was getting BP readings on her cuff that were really high and really low. The readings were inaccurate because of the Afib. Those readings were typical of what you would have if you have Afib. But MM said their blood pressure was going up and down. While not true literally, the message contained the truth. Instead of being considered it was written off. 

MM and I are disgusted by this. There is an arrogance in the belief that the non-expert has nothing to say, that their observations are of no value, that if they use the wrong language what they say has no substance.This arrogance is, in our experience epidemic in the medical field. MM should have been given a monitor years ago. If asked she could have said that she has had this feeling many times without going to the hospital or doctor.  

We have read and been told that by itself A.fib is not really dangerous, but its side effects are. It increases the chance of stroke between 1 and 10 times and can also eventually lead to heart failure. It is also progressive. A.fib episodes tend to bring about more episodes although it sounds like the progression is slow. 

MM’s parents ( the Rents )had the same disease as the MDs. But rather than having low respect for the utterances of patients, the parents had low respect for the utterances of their children. Further both the Rents and the MDs often believe that something is not realy until it is proven. They believe this is true, but only about things told to them by their children and patients respectively (maybe that should be “disrespectfully”) .

MM recently had the experience of having a doctor quote a medical journal article to them. When MM mentioned another part of the same article they rolled their eyes.  

Doctors that listen well and respect what they hear are worth their weight in gold, or at least silver, and parents that do the same make the world a better place. 

~+7 LE
At our house we played games. Some were simple card games like Crazy 8’s , Gin, etc. There were some oddball games from Hoyles Book of Rules, like Russian Bank. We also played board games, Candyland, Park and Shop which was my first introduction to “hard problems”, Stratego, and others. Oddly we did not play Backgammon. Checkers and Chess might require another entry on the timeline.
We also played Monopoly. In our house playing Monopoly cheating was fair. But you could lose a turn if you got caught before the next turn. This could include underpayment, stealing from the bank, and moving to the wrong space. Like when stealing my nothings, my brothers would gang up on me. Somehow they could roll the dice and know exactly where they had to move their token to without counting. I was not a great student at this point and had not learned to add well although I was passing. At some point I started to do my addition on the Monopoly board.
The board is broken into four sides. Each has the originating corner, space 0 and the final corner, space ten. The spaces at 5 on each of the sides are the railroads.
So, lets say you are on space 8 and roll a 10. That would put you on the next space 8. Lets say you roll a 5. The first two gets you too the corner and three remains leaving you on a the 3 space. Or lets say you roll a 9. That almost puts you on the next 8 space, but one before.  I see this happen in my head. There are no words, A seven fills the space between 8 and 15. In my head addition is often visualized.
This year is +69 LE and I still sometimes add this way even though I have the table memorized.
The winter break before I married Gail I went to her house during Christmas. Her family plays games on Christmas day and they brought out the Monopoly set. I needed to know the rules. There are factional differences in how the rules are interpreted and I straightened these out. Then I asked, “Is cheating fair?” The silence is still reverberationg and the astonished stares are etched deep in memory. “Ok, I just wanted to make sure I understand the rules.”

1960-62 
My conceptual art carrier began with the setup of my factory to produce nothings. Nothings come in generally three flavors, chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Of these many more chocolate nothings were produced than the other flavors.  
Setting up the nothing factory required me to upturn my tricycle in the driveway. Making them required me to turn the wheel. If you turned it too fast it did not work. There are only so many nothings that can be produced in a day on a tricycle. Given its operation in a system of capitalism this stabilizes the price. 
My brothers, both older used to gang up on me. It was not all negative. If you want to read about that see “Timline Monopoly”. But they would gang up on me and steel my nothings. Normally I would not have noticed, but they would say, “I stole your nothings”. This would set me crying. They were mean.  It did not prevent me from making more. 
Recently I did something special for my son Ben. I said, “you owe me”. He promptly settled his debt to me by placing 5 nothings in my hand. I did not know where he got them from. He said he got them from his fiance’. 

In the evening on December 25 just after my children got in from a very rare snowfall in South Texas a Tsunami struck South East Asia killing a quarter of million people in 14 countries. It was devastating for countless communities and families. I remember the little video coverage I could bring myself to watch. I wondered if the couple we met at their beach house at Hat Takua Paa (Lead (Pb) Forest Beach) survived. I am nearly certain that the house did not. The beaches we visited on Phuket were certainly inundated. There is a little more about this below. The amount of fun we had that day from a very unusual snowfall was in such start contrast to the calamity that I had a profound, yet irrational sense of guilt that I was unable to exorcise for weeks.

About a week after the disaster we went south for something. It could have been an exhibition, or a La Leche League conference or perhaps just to visit the Brownsville Zoo. I am not sure. However while we were down there I was scanning around on the mobile ham radio that I have in the car. I picked up retransmission of relief efforts for the tsunami and listened to a ham on a military aircraft surveying and reporting on what he saw near Phuket. This radio transmission went to a land based Thai station and was sent via the internet using a ham radio chat program to the person in charge of what really can be thought of as one world-wide partly line or conference call who was located at an Emergency Operations Center in Alaska.

These hams were not the only ones operating. Fortunately, if anything about this tragedy can be called fortunate, the Indian Government had decided to allow a DX (ham radio jargon for long distance contact) Expedition to go and operate in Port Blair on the Andaman Islands. Hams collect records of contacts and Islands without permanent radio operators have operators visit every so often so that other hams can collect contacts with the Islands. The person who contacts the most places wins a piece of paper. When the tremor that caused the tsunami hit VU2RBI Mrs Bharathi Prasad was already set up and operating. She was able to yell “tremors” into the microphone before her power went out. Her station became the only contact with that Island operating with her hotels emergency generator.

VU2MYH S. Ram Mohan set up a station on Car Nicobar Island. He was also running a DX Expedition and had to resort to morse code for much of his communication. Morse code requires much less power, really the same thing as saying it is louder for the same strength signal or that it is much easier to pull out of noise conditions then voice. As an example my 0.43 watt morse code radio, a kit I built has been heard as far as Michigan, 1700 km. Radio is amazing.

“When all else fails there is still ham radio.” After the 9/11 attaacks in New York City some of the earliest communications out of the city were via ham radio. During Hurricane Katrina a ham provided reports of the conditions while the storm was happening. What ham radio can be during an emergency is a huge network of equipment and trained operators distributed across the world, in most countries and certainly all across the US. I am not particularly trained or equipped but I can be set up with a new antenna, and long distance radio gear powered by a car battery in less than an hour. My local communications gear is quicker. Red Cross and governmental emergency services makes frequent use of ham radio.

I am not particularly well trained, and not involved as I should be, but while I am typing I keep thinking about a “net” tomorrow morning. A net is an on- air meeting. It is, at its most basic level, a practice session for emergency communications via radio. You cannot all talk at once on one frequency and then be able to understand anyone. There needs to be a procedure and nets are where we practice. The person in charge is the Net Operator or Net Control. They ask for emergency traffic. Emergency traffic involving life always has priority on ham radio as it should. After that they ask for checkins. People check in, hopefully one at a time. The Net Control reads back the list of checkins and then asks if there are anymore. Then Net Control goes down the list and checks in with each checkin. They exchange information, but everyone gets to listen.

So, after the tsunami I thought that I should figure out how to talk with Thai Hams through a computer program that links radios up worldwide via the internet called Echolink. It is how the audio from the military aircraft got to Alaska. At my end I was talking through a computer and in Thailand my audio was coming out via ham radio repeaters across the country. The first time I got on I was nervous, my Thai language was shaky, but the Thai hams were gracious and thoughtful, and very happy to be able to talk with an American ham. There were hundreds of people that wanted to talk with me at first, and I always needed someone in Thailand to manage it. First, they know the customs on the air, and I still cannot always tell what a radio operator wants me to do, and second there is often a one second lag between here and there, sometimes longer and if people don’t allow for it communication could be quite difficult. This audio latency in Echolink has gotten better as “The Web” has gotten faster.

That initial checkin started about a ten year period of almost daily checking into a Thai Radio net called a “Check-Net” in Thai. This net just calls for checkins and then people exchange signal reports ( reports of how good your signal is). A report of 5 is excellent. A report of 3 means fair, two is poor. 1 is terrible. You would think that the function of a net like this is so that you can daily check your radio. I will not say that this is not true, but it is in my view more important in that it trains people to understand how to operate in a net. It also brings people together for a common activity. As mundane as a check net is, it creates a sense of community. You think that all you are communicating is a call sign and a signal report but there are more important and also more subtle things.

Signal reports are generally given on ham radio as 3 numbers in the format RST where R is the readability on a 1-5 scale , S is strength (1-9) and T is the quality of a morse code tone (1-9) . In the US there is a little signal inflation, reports come back better then they really are. Sometimes it is just easier to say 5 or 59 or 599 depending on the mode of reporting then to say 588 or some other report. Sometimes it seems as a put down. In Thailand, which only uses the R part on UHF voice radios, a signal has to be pretty bad with most operators before it will get a 4 report. This would seem to remove half the value of the net, But most communication is in the subtext, and all of the other operators hear you helping a weak signal ham feel good. Many of these hams are operating 30 year old radios, have cobbled together power supplies and are mostly limited to 10 watts. Its not much power.

This Check-Net is run almost every day of the year. Net control operators seem to last a few years and then get tired of it. They either change daily or sometimes weekly. I was net control once at the HS8AD Club station for the HAM CU SIAM checknet. I saw it as a big honor. It was difficult as it was all in Thai and there are records to be kept. I did OK.

For a long time there was a woman ham running the NET a few times a week. Judging by her vocabulary she was well educated, very polite, fun to talk with. She has a very sexy voice. The first few times she was on I thought, and I think it is accurate, that some hams were a bit embarrassed or shy to talk with her. It seemed that I could hear it in their voices . This improved over time people became more comfortable. It was fun to listen to. In Thai there are different words for “you” depending on how old you are, sometimes your profession, and relative to the age of the person speaking. As a foreigner if you speak Thai they will forgive almost any mistake in this. The fact that you speak Thai is enough to cover almost any language error so long as someone does not think you intend disrespect.

Khun is you. As a foreigner this is safe way to address people in most circumstances. Thaan might go as “sir” but it usually should not be used for someone younger than you. There might be exceptions. I am not sure. These days with my white hair I get call “uncle” a lot. But when at a school I am almost always addressed as “professor”. On the radio things are split but, the Thais show their concern for my feelings by not forgetting to call me professor, not that I care, but I do hear the concern. I let them, even though I prefer Louis. They feel obligated, I don’t want them to be uncomfortable. It is not my culture to try and reform.

If you are a craftsman, a woodworker, potter, a metal worker, I am not sure of the limits of this term, then you are called craftsperson or “chang”. So if I was not a professor I might be called Chang Louie. .A friend or relative that is older is refered to as P. My elder brother is P Ralph. Since I am younger he calls me nong (younger) Louis. My name is said with a rising tone like a question in Thai. Professor Louie? Your friends mother might be called “mom” mae ( Mæ̀) . Don’t get the idea you are learning to pronounce these words OK? I will try and put something together about Thai language and learning. We brought two Thai potters to the US for a conference in Tempe Arizona. One was Chang Jork which translates as Craftsman Drinking glass, and Uncle Shot Glass. They deserve a whole ‘nother essay.

Anyhow, listening to the nets, and talking informally I learn where people live, what they do, what kind of radio they have, when they spend time with family and about their family. I learn how they treat others, I try to make sense of their jokes. Very little that is serious gets talked about on radio. While it is OK to talk about politics and religion between hams in the US, these topics are not allowed between US hams and hams from other countries. The world wide ham radio laws are written to encourage countries to allow radios and to foster friendships and technical skill as well as emergency communication. I do not know if these topics are illegal on ham radio in Thailand but I don’t hear them often.

The year after the tsunami hit I was spending three hours a night talking and listening. At the end of the year I could call myself fluent in idle chit chat. My vocabulary has increased to where I can pass vocabulary tests if the apparatus, the organizing questions are asked in English. I do OK on a list of 3rd grade vocabulary. But much of this is because I am a good test taker. I cannot even come close to reading a newspaper and a third grade schoolbook is way beyond me. But I am still improving.

In 2009 I wrote a piece about a Silent Key. This is ham radio speak for a deceased ham, in this case HS4CTT. The piece, the letter. is about subtext. His call sign comes to my thoughts whenever I talk about Thai nets, and I still hear his rich voice.

HS4CTT SK

Walking to work today connected through Echolink® via my handheld and simplex node, I found out that good friend, and a fine ham HS4CTT
became a silent key. I would never have predicted it but found myself with tears streaming down my face unable to speak with HS8PID who gave me the sad news.

I have been talking with Thai Hams daily since about one month after the tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. I use Echolink® and try to check in at least once a day.

HS4CTT was good friend. It is surprising how little I seem to know about him. I do know the important things. He was a good friend, had
a warm gracious heart,  and could be counted on. The mundane details are few and relatively unimportant. He sold radio equipment I think,
liked ballroom dancing and fishing, and seemed to like travel. When his health was good he was on the radio everyday with welcoming
conversation. I don’t even know his name, although I sent condolences to his wife.

All we ever talked about was, “How you doing”, weather, signals, what time it is. We just did it every day for years. Each greeting is connection even if small. They add up.

I speak Thai. My wife and I taught ourselves Thai from Foreign Service Institute Tapes before a research trip there in 1988-89. My Thai was sketchy in early 2005 when I started my daily chats with Thai hams. It was sufficient for long conversations about where I
lived, what grows here, the weather, and normal “idle chit-chat”. It was not sufficient to follow most communications between the Thais
themselves.

Early on I was asked to check in to the ‘Checknet’ net on the Thailand conference. The Thai checknet is a daily check-in and signal report net held in Thai Language on the Thai conference servers. It is an hour long, and handles about 60 check-ins. People check-in,
greet and thank the net control operator, give a signal report,  and ask for a signal report. Then net control returns with the same
information.

I listen to this net daily and it would seem boring, but it is not. Actors speak about ‘subtext’; the information carried in the tone
used, and in the speed and inflection. In a theatre this ‘subtext’ is more important than the script. It is the heart and soul the true
interpersonal dialogue. In real life this is true as well. It is no less true during the Checknet than other conversations. During the
Checknet I learn all sorts of things about people. I learn whether or not they are shy with women (the Checknet control operators tend to be women)
how they react to stress from difficult signals, whether or not they like a good joke, and a myriad of things too subtle for me to
verbalize. You learn their balance between politeness and functionality.

In 2007 I went to a conference on development in Siem Riap, Cambodia and on the way back to the US stopped in Thailand. The Thai hams were
very gracious. The word most similar to gracious in Thai is Nam Jai or literally water from the heart. In Thai it seems to be an open welcoming with arms wide and a smile, although do not expect hugs. The visitor is made special. It is Nam Jai, among other things, that makes Thailand a delightful tourist destination.

In Phuket I was lent a handheld [ radio] to use. Within 10 minutes of using it there was someone at the hotel where I was staying wanting to take me to breakfast. At breakfast there were 5 hams who had come together to meet me. That afternoon I had coffee and snacks at a beachside
restaurant with another group of hams. At this location, all the hams had handhelds, all the radios were on. One [thing] I found annoying as the
squelch was too low and static was breaking the squelch frequently. I think someone read my face. Rather than explaining why the radio was
on he showed me the high water mark from the tsunami. If I had a radio, I might have had my squelch low too. [They were being careful and listening for evacuation signals.]

However delightful being in Thailand as a tourist has nothing on  the joy of being a Thai-speaking ham from the US. It was hard to sleep as
people wanted to do so much with me. HS9BA drove me from Chumphon to Phuket to keep me from needing to take a bus. HS9DEK came up from the
south to Bangkok ( a full day’s drive)  to meet me. HS0NRL drove me around Bangkok. HS4CTT drove a full day for an eyeball with me. I
will miss the delight he expressed when speaking with others and his infectious graciousness. I will always remember our friendship
through radio.

Louis Katz
W0IT / HS0ZGJ (expired Thai callsign is HS0ZGJ)

I grew up in a family where protein was the most important nutrient. And while I want a certain historical sequence to this short essay, it seems smart to start after I turned 18 and leave discussions of my father’s heart disease and my thoughts about generational taste buds either to the ending portions of this or to another essay.

In school  a friend taught me to bake bread and make tofu. The same friend also introduced me to a series of books including, Diet for a Small Planet, The Book of Tofu, and The Book of Miso. Another friend had me read The Limits to Growth. Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Lappé was about how to sustain humans with limited resources and how it coul be done using less land, and less energy by emphasizing plant protein.  The book of Tofu and to some extent  The Book of Miso just restated the arguments in Diet for a Small Planet (DSP) to promote particular products normally made from soybeans.

Proteins are made up of Amino Acids. There are nine amino acids that people need that the human body cannot make itself. They must be consumed .  Meats are considered “complete”
proteins because meat constains all of these amino acids and that you can consider a diet with sufficient protein from meat to have sufficient supplies of each of these amino acids. Plant sources are not complete or less complete. They do not have the balance of amino acids needed. Much of DSP was involved in discussion how to mix vegetable sources to get a balanced amount of amino acids. My take away was that a small amount of beans with a large amount of traditional grains was a good easy mix that met these requirements. A generation of people were inspired by this book to get more protein from vegetable sources. Only a few of my friends became vegetarians. 

The amount of protein needed by an adult male is aobut 50 grams minimum. If you are big, you need more. If you are working hard you need more. It is not a firm line.There is also a maximum amount. If you exceed it you start to have kidney and other problems. 

If you eat a varied diet that is not based on certain protein poor sources you likely are getting enough protein.  In 1981, ten years after the books initial publication, she said,
“

In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.

With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.

“

By 1981 I was having blood sugar problems and my diet rich in wheat flour needed changing. Having consumed way too much sugar as a child my blood sugar was out of control and I started having large mood swings, fitful naps in the middle of the afternoon that left me feeling worse rather than better, and headaches. I started to wean myself of large amounts of grain, with the exception of oats. They seem to digest slow enough to not cause a spike in my blood sugar. I should note that almost all of my consumption was whole grain, brown rice and whole wheat flour.

The advice from my doctor was to increase my protein intake.  This worked OK but only for a week. What took long for me to understand was that what needed doing was not only reducing my high glycemic index foods (simple carbs and sugars) but increase my fiber. It is the increase in fiber that made the difference.  Ten years later I started a 15 year period where I could eat a more normal diet, that is without my allergens of milk and potatoes.

One of the more interesting things that came up was that the normal meat and grease heavy breakfast, really did not work for me. Eating Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns worked for an hour or two but by 10 am I was always hungry again. Eventually I found oatmeal. Once I started eating that breakfast was easy, cheap, and kept me feeling fed until lunch.  I started using it as a night time snack and I stopped waking up with a headache and desparately needing food.

At some point I bought a used copy of a cookbook, “The No Fad Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook. For a 9 month school year I kept track . $3.27 a week for food. Using the cookbook’s guidance I met my adult daily requirements for everything according to the US government. I exceeded the minimum requirements for protein, and roughly got over 100grams per day. I was not thriving, but this was partly due to eating too much dairy and potatoes, things I am allergic to. The other part is that flour, whole wheat or not, has a pretty high glycemic index.  The advice “whole grains” is too general, although invariably the whole grain is better than the related refined version.  The other part is that I was using grain syrups on the bread, and eating a lot of bananas. 

My father had started his anti-vegetarian schtick which was entirely unhelpful, ” you can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I was expected to accept this verbatim because after all, he had a degree in biology and was therefore a “Scientist”.  Therefore, this harassment (3 or 4 times a year) had the tacit endorsement of my mother too. Since by this point I knew ten or twenty vegetarians that seemed to be surviving just fine, and I was not a vegetarian, by any stretch of the imagination,  it was irritating. Vengeance  did come. After his bypass and then valve replacement his cardiologist told him “it won’t likely lengthen your life, but will improve the quailty of it if you become a vegetarian”. He decided to give it a try. I started to introduce him, “This my father, he is a vegetarian”.

I was in rather desparate shape physically and monitarily and I was at a meat market for Art Professors, a conference “The College Art Association Conference” in NYC. I was asked by the interviewer, “What books have you read recently?”. 40 years ago now, I do not remember the  name of the book, but when asked what I learned from it I said, “Prior to the great potato famine in Ireland, the average Irish male ate more than 7.5 pounds of potatoes a day. Interested in survival, I looked it up,  7.5 pounds of potatoes have almost enough protein from a small male to survive. It is not particularly balanced protein, so it is not a good sole source of protein. Beans and squash seeds are good sources of these amino acids.

When I was working teaching and I had both a morning and early afternoon class I had only 40 minutes for lunch. Sanwiches did not work well. They left me hungry after only a few hours. During these semesters I was very good about bringing in food. I made up packs that could be microwaved.

To make the packs I would cook al dente about a pound of noodles. I would take two cans of rinsed beans, one can of diced tomatoes and then mix them with about 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables. I would mix it up, but not homogeneous, I wanted variation. Then I would add to different sections of the mixed veges, some Thai curry paste in coconut milk, some chili powder with peanut sauce, and then a section of soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic and sesame oil and pack it into bags, one bag per day. In general I would end up with 30 bags.  I would microwave them for lunch.  These meals were very low in protein, but would last through an afternoon. It was an eye opener for me. I had thought it would just get me through class. I did not need protein as much as a lot of fiber, and only a small amount of carbohydrate. The food was good. I shared packs with hungry students.

There are a bunch of protein based glues. One is casein. It is the protein from milk. The easy way to make it is to rinse cottage cheese until the curds are left without gooey stuff. Then cover them just barely with hot water and add a tablespoon of borax per 10 ounce container. In a few days you will have a gooey gluey substance that can be used as a glue or as a paint pigment binder, a medium.
Fish Glue, Hide Glue, are collagen protein glues used in furniture, and still used in musical instrument making. They are nicely reversable and stick to themselves making them valuable in repair.
Egg tempera is a paint medium using egg yolks, but the whites are also used as a binder.

By the end of my first year of ceramics classes in high school I was taken enough with the medium to want to work at home over the summer. I bought a wheel, a Pacifica Kit, and started to build a kiln in my back yard. I had no knowledge of propane, natural gas would have required copious plumbing and inspections. I built a wood fired raku kiln.
The softbrick were purchased about 7 miles from my house. I borrowed some red brick that was not in a returnable state when I was done, and found a sewer tile for the top of the chimney. Even with this I did not have enough brick for a firebox. Fortunately our soil where I lived was a pebbly glacial clay. It was full of lime, but for this purpose it did not matter. I dug a firebox. I was worried about it collapsing so I lined it with 3″ logs, and roofed the back of it near the kiln with more wood, covered on top with soil. I figured the wood would take a long time to burn and I could replace it. This worked out to be at least 4 hours of firing. My first few firings were started with small two inch cuttings picked up on the street, and finished with piano keys that I had salvaged ebony and ivory off of for my father’s harpsichords that he built as a hobby.
For a high schooler I was not poor. I had a two night a week dishwashing job at Oriental City restuarant, and I sang in a professional choir for a local synagogue. In three hours singing I earned about 1.5 times as much as an 8 hour shift washing dishes. But still I preferred spending money on other things and buying ceramics supplies was about 2 hours of driving during the week when time was often scarce.  Wanting glaze, and having already read perhaps 25 books on ceramics I decided that I could make my own with 20 Muleteam ® Borax and ground bottle glass. It worked! Later I started adding Colemanite to the mix. For raku, not kitchenware this was fine. I needed colorants. Blue bottle glass did not have enough blue in it to see over my clay, so I made some colorants. I got iron oxide by burning steel wool that I got from my father and copper oxide was gotten by heating copper wire up and then bending it to get the oxide off.  I had taken Chemistry in 10th grade. Knowledge is power!
Lots of other things happened in that kiln, most things were mundane except that the pots and surfaces added to my thoughts, and the process was educational. But at some point I began wondering how three dimensional I could get glaze to be, and then it dawned on me that I could add grog to my glaze. I gave it a go. I was not great at recording images of my work back then. I did not have my own camera, and using a roll of film for one or two objects did not make sense but I did get an image of one of these raku pieces. Its not much of an image. I never did much with these glazes but it was interesting. A
After the Wood buring Raku kiln I made other kilns, several at the summer camp I worked at. The first used charcoal and a blower. and about seven bricks. It fired one teabowl at a time. Another, a few years later visiting a friend was inside a hollow piece of tree trunk. Like the raku kiln firebox, the kiln provided some of the fuel. Years later I built a small kiln out of used phone books. Phone books were how we found phone numbers. You would get updated versions each year and in generall they covered the city you were in and nearby ones too.



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Why common sense is not.

When we think of common sense we think about things that intuitively make sense. They are necessarily based on what we have seen, thought or been taught before. The effects of gravity on earth make sense. The historical context of this is interesting as a force it was discovered. Before gravity common sense said that a released ball fell because there was nothing holding it up. Gravity, at least as it is seen to affect us on the planet earth is the force the pulls the ball down. We have lived as a species with the concept for so long that it is common and makes intuitive sense.  Lots of other things make sense. That heat flows from one object to another, that when you mix two vessels of air at different temperatures you get air that is the average temperature.
But there are lots of other things in our common everyday environment that are not known via sense that is common. One I learned as a child, What are the chances that in a class of 23 students some two students will have the same birthday?  It would seem that the chance me having the same birthday as you is 1/365 so with 23 students that would be 23/365. But that is not it.
Not counting the fact that there are more people born on weekends and during some seasons of the year, when you have 23 people I could have the same birthday as 22 of them. So really the number now seems like it should be 22X23/365 . This works out to a probability of over 1, more than always true. It makes no sense. The problem is more complicated than that, and I told myself I would keep math simple, intuitive for this essay. It works out to just over a 50% probability for 23 students. There is a nice wikipedia page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Einstein’s E=MC**2 is another example. Without an understanding of speed and satelites none of our modern navigation would work.
But for me  thermodynamic problems are both simple and counterintutive. They do not make common sense, although the sense that they do make is not so hard to understand. The basic law of thermodynamics, the first law is conservation of energy. Its been around long enough that it makes common sense. You cannot create or destroy energy. This that run contrary to this or seem to run contrary do not make common sense.
A heat exchanger is something that transfers heat from one medium to another. I like to think of these and explain them as devices that exchange air in your house with outside air. I live in Texas so I think more about airconditioning than heaters and will use a cold house for an example. Lets say that you have a kitchen exhaust fan and you cool your house to 80 degrees F and outside it is 100˚F .If you just exhaust the smokey air from your kitchen the air that sneaks into the house to replace it is 100˚F and your air conditioner will cool that down.  Its not cheap if it runs often.
So, lets say you develop a device, a metal tube with fan pushing air  outside maybe 6″  in diameter and another maybe 4″  tube placed inside it arranged with a fan to push air from outside to the inside. Just for simplicity lets say that you recover half the cooling, that the air released into the house has passed half the difference to the air going outside and they are both at 90˚F. This seems like the best you can do, it makes common sense.

But if you now place another identical device feeding air outside, and inside and place it on the inside end of your first device, coming from the outside you now have air at 90˚ and on the inside air at 80˚ so this device should do a similar thing and cool the outside air that is coming to only 85˚F . If you keep adding devices, sooner or later you get air coming in at the inside temperature and leaving at the outside temperature. If you ignore condensation you can recover nearly 100% of the coolness or if you prefer the heat. 90% efficiency is not hard to achieve for heat exchangers for the home. To really understand how these work you need calculus. But they work. Common sense would limit you  to 50%,, recovering half the heat.

Air conditioners and heat pumps are even harder to make sense of with common sense. It just is not common. These do not create heat or cool, they just move it from one place to another.

If we just used some common sense, almost no modern technology would work. If we went back to before people figured out the world was a globe we would not be able to go from Europe to Japan via New York without going back over Europe. Common sense evades sense.