My first time flying Air China, via Beijing. It was quite full since it was so cheap. This time I opted for a budget airline instead of using the subsidy. I was worried about whether I could make the transfer in Beijing without a hitch.
The meals were decent. Considering it was a round-trip ticket in the 40,000 yen range, it was quite good.
Which airline was this before Pejing? I had a beer called Snow Flower. I was scrambling at Beijing Airport, but since my connecting flight was delayed by 30 minutes, it worked out well in the end.
This is the in-flight meal from Beijing to Chiang Mai. When I tried to order beer again, they said they didn't have any. So it became orange juice. After all, I had no layover time and couldn't even grab a meal at the lounge.
It was past 10 PM when I arrived in Chiang Mai, so after buying a SIM card, I headed straight to the hotel via GrabTaxi. Somehow the driver navigated through very narrow streets to get me to this hotel. It must have been past 11 PM already.
今回はいずれもAgodaで予約しました．
The room is spacious, at least. This was also a fairly cheap hotel.
The next day, having arrived a day earlier than planned, I did a little sightseeing in the old town. It's partially surrounded by walls like this. The English word “fort” fits this scenery better than “wall.” Actually, I've been to Chiang Mai quite a few times before, but I'd mostly just gone back and forth between the university and the hotel, never really sightseeing properly. It certainly lives up to its reputation as a popular tourist city. There are truly a lot of foreigners here.
Tired from walking, I took a break at a cafe overlooking the city walls. The cappuccino was incredibly delicious and a bargain at 40 baht.
I had a pretty good cappuccino. It's a tourist spot, but not overly expensive. A young woman made it for me.
This is MAYA, the largest shopping mall in Chiang Mai, right next to the hotel where I'm staying. The winter decorations for Christmas are already up and very beautiful. I always come here to buy dinner and such. But this traffic light has a complicated system, and sometimes you have to wait about five minutes to cross. It's really troublesome
Biology Teacher Mind and I at the entrance of the affiliated high school, who kindly came to pick me up. The dry season here brings refreshingly pleasant temperatures and clear skies that feel wonderful.
The view outside the physics classroom where I teach. The sky is blue all the way to the horizon, likely because it's still early in the dry season and the effects of PM2.5 aren't as pronounced yet. When I visited in early February last year, it was slightly hazy with smog.
Special class at Chiang Mai University High School. As mentioned, in the physics lab. Various items for ongoing physics experiments are laid out on the desks. This department head's physics experiments seem truly substantial.
Well then, —this is the newly created practical exercise on determining the epicenter of the Myanmar earthquake, conducted with 30 second-year high school students. The science teacher has come to observe. Since the readings are quite difficult to interpret, we pre-specified the P and S wave phases beforehand.
Measuring PS time (S-P time in English) with a ruler and adjusting for time. For this material, I've included my measured S-P time values for now, but students are also verifying them themselves.
Since this was a distant earthquake, the Omori coefficient was set to 10. This pinpoints the epicenter almost perfectly. This seems to give them quite a sense of accomplishment. Records from the homemade seismometer also include data from two locations. The video shown beforehand of the moment the shaking arrived at M School was quite powerful and captured the students' interest.
The familiar Go game model and sand pile model. Though only briefly, I had them play with them. Indeed, such games are perfect for livening up boring statistical discussions.
As always, the physics lab equipment at this school feels exceptionally well-maintained.
Other supplies might even outshine those found in Japanese high schools.
I packed it very securely, but as is often the case with airmail shipments, some parts appear to have been damaged. I'll show photos later.
The three units in the back are the old installed seismometers. The one in front is the newly built one. The older design was an early 3D-printed model, so it had issues throughout. Also, from the moment it was installed, the east-west motion signal was weak. We couldn't figure out why, so during our previous visit, we left it as is and returned home. This time, we also rebuilt the amplifier board and brought it along. The seismometer in the foreground doesn't have its weights attached because shipping them would have made it too heavy. We plan to remove the weights from the old one and attach them later (though this turned out to be quite a hassle and took a lot of time).
Unpacking the shipment and preparing for assembly. Several students are already helping with the assembly.
Despite taking great care to pad the items and shipping them by air, some parts were damaged as you can see. Mr. T from the school here sent photos, so we are currently filing an insurance claim with the post office.
Since it's a student dormitory, over 20 students who didn't have classes that day gathered in the dorm cafeteria. Afterwards, I had them form a GroupLine to handle seismometer observations and maintenance. One girl participated.
This is the assembly of the vertical motion component. It's quite a tedious task, but everyone seems fascinated. A large laser cutter would make this assembly much easier, but oh well. Someday we'll find a patron for one at a high school somewhere in Thailand.
I think they were attaching the wiring from the coil to the output terminal. My USB-powered mobile soldering iron came in handy here. By the way, a regular low-capacity USB power supply won't work for this; you need a PD-compatible device. I learned that for the first time this time.
Another broken part was found, and this teacher here devised a solution: cutting a plastic ruler to make a reinforcement plate, which he fixed in place with adhesive. This was a great help. However, there were almost no tools available in this dormitory, so I continued the repair work using only the tools I brought with me and this iron blade.
The HP PC using observations had become extremely slow, so I decided to reset it to factory settings. This seems to have significantly sped up processing. This was also done with the help of a M6 high school student nicknamed Atom-kun and Mr. T, the physics teacher.
The size of the parts I brought didn't quite match, causing delays in replacing the weights. Work that started in the morning stretched until around 3 PM. Still, the effort paid off, and we managed to get it into an observable state. Here, a dedicated student is adjusting the screw behind the horizontal movement to center the pendulum. Standing on the right is Mr. T, the physics teacher who managed my entire visit this time. Once again, I am truly grateful for all their help. We also replaced all the programs on the screen. These are all new programs created collaboratively by Claude AI and myself. The purple stripes are modeled after Chiang Mai University's school colors. You can see Mr. T wearing them too. We plan to change this color section for each school so that just by looking at the screen, you can immediately tell which high school it is.
The seismometer I worked hard to replace and install, complete with weights. The vertical movement on the left required additional stones to balance it, as the shipped weights alone were slightly insufficient. I plan to have GL students handle these adjustment tasks going forward.
The meeting room next to the dormitory cafeteria, the final installation site for the seismometer. Being at ground level, it offers an excellent environment for seismic observation. The
current noise is caused by air movement, and they say they will make a
cover for it soon. Atom-kun is very capable; he registered the
seismometer observation program in the Windows startup software so it
can automatically resume operation after a power outage. Now, all that's
left is to wait for earthquakes to be observed. Chiang Mai experiences
quite a few localized earthquakes, and since it's an area with active
seismic activity within Thailand, we expect to get good recordings.
