Pongskorn (Ko) Saipetch's Homepage

Welcome to my homepage. This is where I share some of my writings and programs with the public. It exists mostly for my friends who live outside Thailand who might want to check what I'm up to. If you have any suggestion, please email me.

Current Interests

• Evolution: Both real and simulated. This is a superset of artificial life. Ain't it cool that we can be this complex from so simple a beginning?
• Complex Adaptive System (How interactions between lots of simple parts lead to complex global behaviors.) How do ants make an ant colony? How do cells make a human? How do neurons make a brain think? I hope there are some general principles here :-)
• Thai Character Recognition: At my work, we are doing researches about how to recognize both printed and real-time handwritten Thai text.
• Programming Mathematica. Mathematica is certainly one of the most powerful programs for small computers. I love doing mathematics using Mathematica. Its internal logical consistency pleases my soul tremendously (Oh, another most powerful program is Word. Not as bug-free as Mathematica and a lot more prone to crash, but powerful nonetheless. Don't laugh yet, did you look at its programming language? All that in a word processor? It gets my job done. :-)
• Programming Borland Delphi. I love Visual Basic and C. I've been programming quite a lot using C for the past 10 years. However, C++ is too complex for me. I think it gives me too many ways to shoot myself in the foot. I find Object Pascal in Delphi to be a powerful language that is also safe for me. Besides, Delphi is very good for my general programming purposes on Win95/NT. Java is too slow for my generic programming needs. Maybe in a year or two, maybe never.
• Programming Borland C++ Builder . Yes, I know that I said C++ is too complex for me in the previous paragraph. However, the new (1998) ANSI/ISO Standard C++ is getting a lot easier for me to use because it contains so many good things in its standard library. Basically, I never have to do any basic data structure programming again--I just use the Standard Template Library. That feature alone makes me a convert :-) Since I use Windows NT on my desktop computer, and I want to use Standard C++, C++ Builder is the my choice on that platform because it (mostly) conforms to the standard. Visual C++ 6 is not even close.
• Programming Perl. Perl makes my life much, much easier. In the beginning, I was perplexed by strange symbols and regular expressions but after a while it saves me a lot of time when I have to glue all my programs and computation on all my computer platforms together. Its pattern matching is very good for my line of work. Also, most of the things I want done are already written by other people already on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.
• Programming Python. Python is a very simple and elegant programming language the I use the most these days (2004 A.D.) It has a very clear syntax and is easily learned by anybody who might want to program. It also comes with a very rich standard library. A programmer can pick it up in an afternoon. A complete novice might take a few days. Once you start using it, programming any other way is just too much work.

Science Advocacy

Science is the our best bet to understand how Nature works. It has a relatively robust built-in error correction system. Wrong ideas will be weeded out eventually while the right ideas are kept. How do we know which ideas are right? We check the answers with Nature herself. Very straightforward philosophy, yes? So, if you claim there is other better ways to fathom how Nature works, please ask yourself how you know your answers are right. If your way is not at least as good and as self-critical as scientific enquiry, don't even start arguing. I get mightily annoyed at a person coming up to me and try to "explain" the universe using his mumbo jumbo "transcendental" knowledge. Sorry, I got this too often in Thailand :-)

Be a skeptic, it's intellectually fulfilling :-) Check out the Skeptics Society or the Committee For The Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) for more brain food. You can also read A Skeptical Manifesto by Michael Shermer for a taste of what it means to be skeptical.

Happy Doubting! :-)

About Me

I live in Bangkok, Thailand. I am a physicist by training (B.S. from Caltech in 1991, Ph.D. from UCLA in 1995) and now the Managing Director of Atrium Technology, Co., Ltd. One day a week, I would go to the Physics Department at Mahidol University to teach mostly computational physics or programming to mostly physics students. My interests include Thai text processing, programming, complex adaptive systems, and Science in general. You can contact me via email here.

Here are some photos and info that might amuse you.

If you have some free time, don't forget to visit our old friends Calvin and Hobbes at the link below :-)