2nd Post: Population Density in Bangkok

I want to continue the series of my post about the population of people in Bangkok, Thailand. Last time, I looked at the total number of people within different Khwangs (which is a finer division than districts). It was also the last post that we mentioned a possible misunderstanding from the previous plot because of the different in areas for each region which are vastly different. Therefore, we should look into the population density instead of the total number of population for each Khwang. I used the 'shape_area' that is calculated within the data file for the information about the area, but there is no obvious information about the unit of the area, so the number of population density, presented here, will not give a much insight into the actual number. However, the relationship between different region for the population density is still valid and required further discussion to make sense out of it.

Where do People Live in Bangkok?

Bangkok, the capitol of Thailand, is the center of everything that you can think of about one country. It is the location for the Grand Palace where the King lives, a large financial distinct in the center of Bangkok, several markets and shopping malls for everyone to buy something, and hundred of Buddhist temples scattering around Bangkok. The Siam Paragon (สยามพารากอน)—a massive shopping complex, movie theater and aquarium in Bangkok–often ranked the most-Instagrammed places for several years. And we also said that Bangkok is the first step to come to South-East Asia because of our enormous airport, Suvarnabhumi Airport.

But where do people actually live in Bangkok? We often saw an ordinary scene of bad traffic in the morning when people are rushing to go to work from different places, students are trying to get to school before 8 am and locals are opening up their stores for another day. Have you ever wondered where do they live? And how far they have to drive to come to work or study in the center of the city?

As a picture is worth a thousand words, I would say that a map is worth a thousand picture. But I could not find any online map showing the details of population of people who live in Bangkok, so I decided to make my own. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to find this data online. Specially, I found the data for the boundary of different khwaengs (แขวง)–an administrative subdivision used in the 50 distrincts of Bangkok and also population within each khwaeng from the Ministry of Transport of Thailand (MOT). In this map, I showed the population for different khwaengs in Bangkok. You could see where people tend to live in Bangkok. I also put in some public transportation like subway train and express ways to see whether there is a correlation between the number of available modes of transit and the population of people.

Which Region do you live in Bangkok?

If you live in Bangkok, you might have heard that Bangkok is divided into 3 main regions based on the location of each district. If you are not sure which region you actually live, here is the list of all 50 districts with its region (the data is from a Pantip forum).

1) Inner City (เขตชั้นใน - blue) including 21 districts: PHRA NAKHON (พระนคร), POM PRAP SATTRU PHAI (ป้อมปราบศัตรูพ่าย), SAMPHANTHAWONG (สัมพันธวงศ์), PATHUM WAN (ปทุมวัน), BANG RAK (บางรัก), YAN NAWA (ยานนาวา), SATHON (สาทร), BANG KHO LAEM (บางคอแหลม), DUSIT (ดุสิต), BANG SUE (บางซื่อ), PHAYA THAI (พญาไท), RATCHATHEWI (ราชเทวี), ห้วยขวาง (HUAI KHWANG), KHLONG TOEI (คลองเตย), CHATUCHAK (จตุจักร), ธนบุรี (THON BURI), KHLONG SAN (คลองสาน), BANGKOK NOI (บางกอกน้อย), BANGKOK YAI (บางกอกใหญ่), DIN DAENG (ดินแดง), WATTHANA (วัฒนา).

Summary of where I visited during my two months in Tokyo and nearby location.

Once you have a chance to live in one city for two months, you will have visited so many places around the city that you might not remember them all. I am also one of those people. However, there are at least two of my friends who asked me for the recommendations for places to stay and where to visit in Tokyo once they knew that I lived there for two months. So, I thought it is a good idea to write down a summary for places that I have visited so that other people will be able to follow some of these places that I found as well. I would say that this will easily be the longest post that I have ever written so far on this blog. Feel free to skip around and find only stuffs that you are interested in. Here is the list of places that I like about Tokyo.

Place to Stay
Flaxstayinn Iidabashi: The hotel is very close to the city, and it was where I lived while I had my two-month internship in Japan. The location is good too since it’s in the middle of Tokyo and lots of subway lines went through there.

Flexstayinn Higashijujo: Here is the place where my mom live when she visited Tokyo since Flaxstayinn IIdabashi was full.

Place to go
Shinjuku: The biggest subway station in Tokyo with lots of malls and business area. Great place to get food and shopping.
      - Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building: You can go on top of this tall building for free to get the good view of Tokyo. On the nice day, you should be able to see Fuji Mountain as well.

View looking at Tokyo Tower from the top of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building which you can go for free.

      - MK buffet: Thai famous hotpot restaurant that also has a branch in Tokyo. Good place for me since I haven’t been back to Bangkok for awhile.

Books about US Politics: Network Visualization

Network of books about US politics with its frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyer.

Now, I am working on the project at the Knowledge Lab about books and its political spectrum from conservative to liberal. And I found this publicly available dataset online, so I think it would be good for me to try to visualize this network and see the relationship between books and its copurchase.

I got this dataset from Prof. Mark Newman's personal website page of Network data (If you are interested, you can check his website as well.) He is a physics professor at University of Michigan, conducting research on the structure and function of social and information networks. According to Prof. Newmann's website, this dataset contains

A network of books about US politics published around the time of the 2004 presidential election and sold by the online bookseller Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished. 

Teach For Thailand Visits Chicago

Teach for Thailand (TFT) is the project promoting Education which is inspired by Teach for America and Teach for All. Teach for Thailand itself is fairly new with only two years of official establishment. Currently, it is trying to promote the program to more motivated Thai students who are studying abroad in the United States and England. This is why they made a trip to Chicago.

The connection that I have about Teach for Thailand came from Alisa who is an undergraduate student from Brown University. I met her during my trip to Boston for spring break two years ago. She interned at Teach For Thailand last summer, and I decided to reach out to her once I know about it on the Newsfeed of Facebook. After talking with a person from TFT, I am really excited with help them while staying in the US in any way that I can. However, once I finished my interview for the Campus Leader (CL) position, I did not feel ready to add one more responsibility on top of everything that I have right now. I almost reject the offer, but then I think that no chance comes twice. If I did not take it now, I might not have the same chance again. This is a chance that I can help the Thai education which I simply only have it in my mind for the whole time while not doing anything about it. In the end, I took the chance, and my first task is to organize the TFT tour which they will come to the US to promote the program on different college campus.

Poster for the visit of Teach for Thailand in Chicago

Teach for Thailand is a two-year fellowship program for newly graduate students or motivated individuals to become a teacher in a poor neighborhood for two years while receiving educational supports and workshop for leadership to develop their personal skills. The goal is to provide schools with motivated and prepared teachers to go to the classroom and make a difference with students in that classroom while also develop their own skills, which makes this program a win-win for both the fellows who are a part of TFT and schools that these fellows go into. It is difficult to tell whether it is a successful program or not since this is only its second year, but it is good to see many people are enthusiastic about fixing the education problem and this will be a good start for more discussion about education in Thailand.

Istanbul: The Unexpected Trip from Layover

This is a kind of trip that I have never thought of until a chance comes around. Basically, I got an internship in Tokyo, Japan, so I have to buy a flight to go there from Chicago. After looking up online, I realized that two cheapest airlines at that time to fly to Tokyo is Turkish Airways and Air Canada. Of course, when I saw an opportunity to visit a new country even just for a little bit, I grab that chance immediately. I picked Turkish Airways just because I can go to Istanbul without a visa during my layover. This trip is my first layover trip to a different country where I don't know the language or anything else about it. But it was a pretty fun trip overall, and I would love to do something like this again in the future.

The first thing that I encountered during the trip to Istanbul is turkish dessert. I have no idea what it is or what it tastes like. Just because I saw lots of people were eating it, I decided to try it as well. I later learned that it is call 'Churro' which is a sweet crispy donut-like dessert. I love it from the first bite. I still wish that I have a chance to eat it again some day. Sounds like it will be a good start for my journey here in Istanbul. I forget to tell that I have to struggle at the train station for a while to figure out the best way to come to the city. It is fairly easy just to take a train to the center of the city, but the token system got me confused. Basically, you need a new token for each train that you take. No free-transfer.

Turkish sweet Churros: Great Dessert

UTRIP: How I spent my last summer of college

During the summer of 2014, I had a chance to participate in University of Tokyo Research Internship Program (UTRIP) with the financial support from Friends of UTokyo, Inc. UTRIP is an undergraduate summer research internship program with top professors for those who want to pursuing Ph.D. degree in science in the future.

Prof.Tamura's seminar on the topic of Exoplanets

I participated in the Exoplanet Lab in the Astronomy Department hosted by Prof. Motohide Tamura. The main focus of the lab is about direct imaging technique to observe several types of objects such as exoplanets and protoplanetary disks. The data mostly comes from Subaru Telescope which is the 8.2 meter telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), located at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. My research background is astrophysics, mainly exoplanet using transiting technique. Thus, I was really excited once I knew that I would learn this new technique, direct Imaging, to detect planets. Direct imaging planets are extraordinary because we can actually see a planet itself instead of an indirectly observed planet from technique such as transiting and radial velocity. By being able to see a planet, we can confidently say that we found an extrasolar planet and a planet does exist outside our solar system.

Firework Festival in Tokyo during Summer

This post will simply be mostly photos on two (maybe three if you count the one that I didn't wait to see the actual firework) firework festivals in Tokyo that I attended during my internship in Tokyo with the UTRIP program. There are festivals basically every weekend for the whole month of July and maybe couple more in August. I recommended everyone who has a chance to visit Tokyo during this time to attend one of the festivals. The enormous size of the events will surprise you even though they hold the events every weekend.

Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival 2014, near Tokyo Skytree

Big Reunion After Ten Years for SG in Tokyo

This is the first post from Tokyo, Japan. But it is not an usual post from the new city since this post is not about what new things I found in the city, but what old things I have forgotten during the last ten years when I left Saint Gabriel's College. 

Tanabata Festival on the 7/7, near Asakusa

It was a quick notice but four of us meet together at Asakusa for the Tanabata festival which is a festival about the story of two young people who can meet each other once a year during the 7th of the 7th month because of the separation from the Milky Way. The festival itself is interesting with all strange stuffs scattering around the festival such as Tamagoyaki (Japanese Sweet Egg Omelet) for 100 yen which was surprisingly good and people dressing in Yukata. But the main point of this post is not the festival, but about the reunion after ten years and thousands of miles away from where we met each other before.

A Common History for Nationalism and Role of Public Education

How can we unite people with different races, languages and values to create a unified and harmonious nation? 

Imagine bringing in people from different nations to live together in one place and say that from now on you all are a part of this new country. Chaos is what comes to my mind from this situation. However, this is exactly what happened many centuries ago when people try to create a nation. So, how could they do it? 

One possible answer is "Nationalism." They created a strong centralized administration to create a common history for all people in the country to share. Similarly, when you have a high school reunion, what bring people together is their common experience in high school that they want to share with others. By inventing a common history, the government basically makes us feel like we have a reunion all the time.

Champ De Mars from the top of the Eiffel tower.

Last post for Paris: Why do I love Paris?

I thought 10 weeks in Paris will be a long time, but in fact it was not that long for me. I feel like I just got to know the city. I just started to know what the city is like, what the people are like, what the language sounds like and where to go when one has free time. I experienced this feeling for the first time yesterday after my last final exam here in Paris, but it was also the last day that I can experience it. 

But time never stopped running, and now another chapter of my life is slowly coming to an end while the next chapter is coming soon.

When I got here, I don't think I will ever say this, but I do want to say it now. "I love Paris." There are more than just touristy places that everyone seems to post online to share when they come to Paris. Here are things I like about this city and the time that I am here.

Public transportation
It seems like everyone love this fact about how efficient public transportation is in Paris, how little time they have to wait at the metro station to catch a train home, how fast it is to get from one place to the other and how easy it is to find metro stations since there are everywhere. If you walked in the city and started to feel that you got lost, the next metro station will be right in front of you and you can just catch the next train home without much thinking to do. And I really like public transportation here for these same reasons as well and it just makes it is much easier to get to know the city like I could not have done anywhere else.

Musée des Arts et Métiers Metro stop

Also, there are many little details in the metro station that are worth looking at. And perhaps because of this, that I never hesitate to get the next train and go to different places that I have never been before. 

Being a Thai Person in 2014

I have not been home for almost a year now since my last time visiting home in 2013 and did not plan to go home for another year.  But because of our current technology, I have received lots and lots of news about Thailand while I am abroad especially from Facebook when my friends shared articles online. Being removed from the country made me looking at the current event with a different perspective. This is not because I want to, but because I do not have the same context and information as a person who live in Thailand has. My foreign friends often ask for my comment about the situation in Thailand, but the answer that I always gave is simply 'I don't know much about a situation.' I wish I could give a better answer, but I simply can't. Here I would like to share my feeling about the situation.

Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall I visited last time I went home (Summer 2013)

Disneyland Paris: Time Machine and Consumerism

This is my first time visiting any Disneyland. At first, I thought I will be too old for this type of amusement park when you get excited by seeing Mickey Mouse walking around the park, but my friends kept saying that no one is too old for such a thing. So, I decided to give a Disneyland a try.

Disneyland Paris: the entrance

Four surprising things I found in Florence

Even though I consider Florence as the least well-known city that we visited in Italy when you compare it with Rome and Venice, I found many more interesting things about Florence than other places. It may also be that I did not know much about the city, so everything is surprising to me. And I would recommend anyone to visit Florence if you have a chance to come to Italy. 
1. Lots of places about Galileo 

Museo Galileo, Florence, Italy

Henri Cartier-Bresson Exhibition in Centre Pompidou

Henri Cartier-Bresson Exhibition at Centre Pompidou 12 February - 9 June 2014

One day, I had a chance to visit the exhibition about Henri Cartier-Bresson at Centre Pompidou in Paris. I have to admit that I do not know or even heard his name before coming to the exhibition that day. Our tour guide told us how important he was as a 'father of photojournalism. Wikipedia also states in his article that

'he was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the street photography or life reportage style that was coined The Decisive Moment that has influenced generations of photographers who followed.'

Art around Paris: Everything is Everywhere

A guy painting Notre Dame Cathedral n Pont Saint-Michel on a sunny Sunday

 I started this post because I saw quite a number of people around different cities, especially Paris with their paints or their sketchbooks. So, I would like to gather them together and show how an artistic atmosphere are around Paris and Europe in general. And this becomes the first in my series of "Everything is Everywhere."

One Afternoon in Paris: Musée d'OrsayMusée d'Orsay

Right after class one day, I realized that the weather that afternoon was super nice. So, I went to had lunch near the river instead of at the student lounge like I normally do. However, once I got to the river, I saw Musée d'Orsay so I decided to visit for the first time after finishing my lunch. without much preparation of this place. This is one of the things that I like about Paris. Because there are many museums and touristy places for you to visit during the study abroad program, you do not really have to plan to do certain things since you will stumble across something interesting anyway. 

Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Catacombs of Paris

Catacomb in general

During the course of my life (as of 2014) that I have been traveling to many places around–mostly in few countries, I have seen many strange things that I could not believe they could be attractions for tourism such as a wreckage from a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima (not that I found this site boring, rather it left me a powerful image of how devastating nuclear bombs could be) or empty desert in Iran. But I would say the Catacombs of Paris is the weirdest places that I have ever visited so far. And I'm not sure whether I mean it in the positive sense or the negative one.

Château de Chambord & Château de Blois

Chateau de Chambord, Chambord, France

My first impression of Château de Chambord wasn't really a good one. When we talk about castle, I tend to think about those huge castle from the Disney Land and in all the Disney movies. But this one is different. I once learned afterward that this is not exactly a castle, but instead a courthouse. It was built by King François I in 1519 as a hunting lodge and not a permanent residence for any royal families. The structure itself was built by limestone because it is lighter than other materials like marble, but it also absorbs moisture making the itself cold and humid.

First Story in Paris: Eiffel Tower

Eiffel Tower–one of the most iconic structures in the world

I want to start my story about Paris with one of the most iconic structures in the world, the Eiffel Tower. Once I have some free time after settling down, I decided to walk to the Eiffel tower to be able to see the tower from different views. Some people might think that it is just a tower that happened to be famous but, personally, I always think that I want to see the Eiffel Tower from different angles and took great photos of it. Even though I still have no little knowledge about the tower itself, it still made me excited every time I came to see it. One of the reasons for this might be from a story when I was in middle school.

Comment on Primordial Gravitational Waves by Prof. Daniel Holz

Primordial gravitational waves may have been detected in this swirly pattern of light from the early universe. Image: BICEP2 Collaboration

I took a class called Spacetime and Black Holes during the fall quarter of my third year and the professor for that class was Prof. Daniel Holz. Some of his work also relates to gravitational wave and general relativity. After the announcement of the discovery, he gave us a comment about this latest and most excited finding so far this year about the first direct detection of gravitational waves and how it becomes an evidence for the inflation theory of the early universe. I thought I would like to share this here since we are all in a moment of history where most physics might start to change from this point on.

Ryerson Astronomical Society (RAS) in 1950s

As a science major student, I always learned about history of science, specifically physics and astrophysics. For example, Galileo created the first telescope, or Newton invented Newton's three laws of motion, then Einstein found Relativity that contradicted with almost everything Newton said. "Why do we have to learn Newton's three laws then?" I often asked myself why they have to teach about the history of science since it will never help me solve Schrödinger equation equations or any physics equations.

It is not until I learned that these discoveries did not happen far away from where my classes are that I realized how amazing it felt to be a part of the big community of science. Milikan's oil drop experiment occurred in the basement of where I took my first-year Calculus, or Enrico Fermi engineered the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction happened at the library where I often cramped my final exam studies until the last minute. 

Prof. Vandervoort gave a talk on the history of RAS on 1/27/2014

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space - Carl Saga

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spaceprobe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

Unexpected Trip Back to the US

I was meant to write this blog since I arrived Chicago during the summer. But because of my sickness and other stuffs that are coming during school year, I have not had a chance to write this until today. This is my little journey back from Bangkok to Chicago during the end of the 2013 summer.

 The first thing that happened for this trip is that I thought my flight was one day later than it supposed to be. I checked email that morning and got a message saying that I should check in 24-hour before the flight, and that when I realized that I got the date of my flight wrong. Fortunately, I packed all my stuffs before (Thanks to mom), so I am basically ready to go to the airport.

After saying goodbye to my family, I got on a plane as it supposed to be. However they said that there was some technical problem at the engine,  so we have to wait in the airplane for two hours. While waiting, I watched "The Internship" and almost forgot that we were still on the ground and haven't moved an inch for two hours. Then, they said that we had to catch the next flight next morning (10 am), and that was about 2 am. We took a bus to Novotel near the airport. Here is the view from my hotel suit.

View from my hotel near the airport

Winter Break in San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge: one of the most recognizable bridge in the world

Finally, I got a chance to visit one of the most famous landmark in the United States; The Golden Gate Bridge. There are many films and TV shows that often shoots near the bridge. Even though I didn't have a chance to visit the exact place, it still looks really cool. However, San Francisco has much more to often than just one big red bridge.