Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The Russian Soyuz carrying Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon returned safely over the weekend, albeit 260 miles from the intended landing zone in what Interfax (Russian news agency) describes as a rough landing, exceeding 10g’s. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut, went to the International Space Station today on a Russian Soyuz. She is a bioengineer by training, and will be conducting various experiments during the next nine days.

In addition, there has apparently been a lot of work making Korean food ready for space travel:

The Korea Food Research Institute and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute have spent years turning traditional South Korean delicacies into a form that can be stored and eaten in zero gravity, including steamed rice, red pepper paste, doenjang fermented bean soup, green tea, red ginseng tea, instant noodles, sujeonggwa cinnamon punch and, above all, kimchi – the pungent pickled blend of cabbage, chilli and garlic that is the national dish.

Anyway, it’s pretty exciting for Koreans, although this picture from the CNN article make her look slightly wacky, vaguely reminding me of visits to my aunt’s house when I was a kid.

This is sad news - over the weekend, the Namdaemun gate at the center of Seoul was destroyed by fire. The Namdaemun gate is over 600 years old and is designated as the top item on the list of Korean National Treasures. For some perspective for non-Koreans, it’s kind of like hearing that the Statue of Liberty, London Bridge, or the Eiffel Tower burned down over the weekend.

Pictures from the BBC 

North Korea has been threatening to test a nuclear weapon recently, and may have done so a couple of hours ago.

The test is “unconfirmed” at the moment, but South Korea says it detected seismic activity measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale at 0136GMT, or 10:36AM Korea local time. The presumed test site is underground, in a coal mine in Gilju.

It’s surprising to me that, given the advance warning, there isn’t an official confirmation that there was a nuclear test or not. There’s probably no shortage of equipment set up to monitor the situation, and I would expect a different signature for a nuclear explosion than from setting off a huge pile of RDX at the bottom of a mine.

There’s no shortage of countries that could build nuclear weapons if they wanted. South Korea and Japan in particular come to mind at the moment. More problematic would be Kim Jong-Il making a deal with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or someone similar) to trade oil and hard currency for nuclear weapons technology.

This is a bottle of water I got recently while having a quick lunch at the Galleria Market (Korean grocery store) in Santa Clara. I was expecting a generic bottle of Arrowhead, Crystal Springs, or even Costco water, but this is apparently shipped in from Korea. The main selling feature is that it contains naturally occuring semiconductors.

Here’s what the label says:

Ge+Alpha is a pure natural mineral water which originates from the gold ore and sericite layers in the deep mountains. It is rich in essential minerals and contains 60ppb of organic Germanium.

The Geumgangsan Hot Springs in North Korea also features naturally occuring germanium water.

Apparently there are various claims that it’s good for your health, up to the point of curing cancer. I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not, but it’s pretty random. I tend to associate germanium with old transistors rather than drinking water.

I’ve been on flights through bumpy weather many times, but am happy to have missed this one. The nosecone (which houses the radar) came off, and there were cracks and holes in the wings and windshield.

‘’I could not see anything through the front windows because they were shattered. So I checked side windows when I tried to land the plane.'’

All 200 passengers, including 177 elementary school kids, were uninjured.
Link, with video. (Reuters)

Passing this along for friends who may have an interest in human rights in North Korea, from The Korea Liberator:

Jae Ku, Director of Freedom House’s North Korea program, sends:

Dear Friends, I am in need of a Korean speaking intern (native, read and write) for this summer. This is a paid internship, to commence immediately. If you know of anyone, please have that person send me his/her resume. I am looking for someone who is mature and responsible. It is helpful but not necessary to have a background in human rights or North Korean issues.

Thank you,

Jae

Jae H. Ku, Ph.D.
Director, Human Rights in North Korea Project
1319 18th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
O) 202-747-7048
ku@freedomhouse.org

Links:

• Freedom House Human Rights in North Korea Project
• Interview with Prof. Jae Ku, Freedom House’s New North Korea Director

Yesterday I went to see an exhibition match between the Korean and Costa Rican National Teams at the Oakland Coliseum. These are basically training games for the World Cup series starting later this year.

The Korean team did unexpectedly well in the last World Cup series in 2002, making it all the way to the semifinals, which precipitated huge street celebrations and instant celebrity status for the entire team. My wife, who generally has no interest in organized sports, was getting up at 3 in the morning to watch the games on Telemundo, which is representative of the level of interest among the general Korean community.

During trips to China, I’m always intrigued by the departure boards in the Beijing airport showing flights to places like Pyongyang, Ullan Battor, and other parts of the world that are hard to get to from here. I’ve been to the South Korean side of the DMZ but the only way to get to the North is through China, and it’s not like you can just hop over for a weekend to take a look around.

In the meantime, here’s a fascinating series of posts with photos and video from Dan Schorr (not the reporter), who recently spent several days on a tour to North Korea, where he attended the Arirang Festival.

from Google Sightseeing:

When North Korea, China and the United Nations Command (UNC) signed the 1953 armistice which effectively ended the Korean War, they did so in a village called P’anmunjŏm. After the cease-fire was signed, construction began on a site located about one kilometre east of the village, the Joint Security Area (JSA). The three blue buildings straddle the border between North and South korea, and were designed and built by the UN to allow delegates from North Korea to enter one end, and delegates from South Korea to enter through the other. All meetings between the two countries have taken place in the JSA since its completion.

photo from Wikipedia

Korea has amazingly high penetration rates for broadband and cellular service. It’s cheap, fast, and widely available, and has been for several years now. This has made Korea a lead market for trying out new wireless and online services. Streaming broadcast and video-on-demand for all national networks is the norm. Next up: building a centrally planned, wired city called New Songdo, which will implement many of the ubiquitous / pervasive computing ideas that have been floating around for a while but never attempted at this scale:

New York Times:

I’ve noticed in the server logs that many readers here are from non-English speaking countries.

You can now read an automatically translated version of this site by clicking on one of the flags over in the sidebar. Translation into Spanish, French, German, Portugese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese is provided by Google, using Angsuman’s Automatic Machine Translation Plugin.

Machine translation can sometimes create silly output, but I’ll try this out for a while and see how people like it.

After many trips back and forth, I’ve always been struck by the prevalence of Korean products in India. There are ads for LG and Samsung appliances, Hyundai cars, and they seem to have collectively gotten the hang of building “locally appropriate” products, as opposed to attempting to go to market there with a “global standard” product.

From Newsweek on MSN (via Indian Economy Blog)

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - In one whopping megadeal, South Korea has become the largest foreign investor in Asia’s second emerging giant, India. On Aug. 31, Korean steelmaker Posco established a local subsidiary in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, paving the way for a controversial mill and mining complex that will cost the world’s fifth largest steelmaker $12 billion and employ some 40,000 workers once it’s fully operational in 2010.

Gyeonggi Korean Cultural Night, June 16, 8:00pm at Elizabeth Theater, Santa Clara Convention Center,

From the event program:

Sponsored by the Kyunggi Province Bureau of Tourism and The Korea Times, San Francisco. The performance includes traditional dance and music featuring Ansung City Farmer’s Band as well as performances by popular singer Eun Jung Oh and actor Jun Ho Chung, Kyunggi Province official P.R. Ambassador. The event will be MC’d by “Popeye” (Sangyong Lee).

Took a while to get through the celebrity introductions and Korean tourism pitch at the beginning, but I did enjoy the traditional farmer’s dance ensemble. A bit like taiko drumming crossed with marching bands and break dancing with a ribbon attached to a swiveling car antenna on your hat, with a few spinning plate tricks thrown in for good measure. Loud and exciting, my ears are still ringing.

Went out for lunch yesterday at Myung Dong Tofu Cabin in Santa Clara. For a while I had lunch there at nearly every week, but haven’t been there for a while. As the name suggests, they specialize in tofu, specifically soon du bu, which is sort of a tofu stew served in a very hot stone bowl.

Many people are only familiar with bulgogi (sliced BBQ beef) or kalbi (BBQ short ribs), plus the ubiquitous kimchi (spicy pickled cabbage), and don’t have any sense of what else might be available at a Korean restaurant.

Korean meals at restaurants normally come with a variety of small side dishes, collectively called banchan. The specific dishes will vary, but will usually include one or more sorts of kimchi, and various, mostly vegetable dishes.

Some notes from day one at KINCON 2005 at the Palo Alto Crowne Plaza. Today’s sessions were technology-focused. Although this has traditionally been a Korean IT-related conference, and mostly chips and displays at that, the biotech presentations were the most interesting.

The first session was on wireless technology, mostly aimed at services for mobile phones, such as ringtones and games. Korea is a good place to try launching these services, with 76% wireless penetration rate, and 90% of the handsets capable of running games and multimedia. My observation — it’s hard to do much in this space with the mobile operators trying to extract fees from the customers and 3rd party service providers (in order to pay back their spectrum license fees). At least two of the speakers commented that most of the fee paid by the customer is to cover the billing costs.

…or at least it may prevent the Avian Flu.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (Wednesday May 11, 2005) there is an article by Hae Won Choi reporting on research at Seoul National University on using kimchi extract to cure avian flu. (Link – unfortunately it’s only available to WSJ online subscribers)

South Korean microbiologist Kang Sa Ouk thinks he’s come up with a new weapon in the battle against the bird flu virus: kimchi.

Last December, Dr. Kang used a bacteria extracted from kimchi, Korea’s fiery national dish of fermented vegetables, to treat 39 chickens with avian influenza. Over 10 days, 22 of 26 chickens given either a diluted or concentrated culture fluid of the bacteria as a substitute for water showed signs of recovery; all 13 chickens given just water died.

This following part sounds like familiar advice from Korean friends and relatives:

During lunch yesterday, I spent a few minutes with Netstumbler to test a simple cantenna intended for use for low cost rural community networks. I will write about the cantenna separately, it’s based on this design and provides around 8dB of gain. Even more valuable for a cluttered RF environment (such as around here), the directionality of the antenna reduces the noise floor substantially. With the directional antenna, the noise floor was around -88dBm, vs around -66dBm with the built-in omni.

An informal survey from my office (sitting in my chair with the antenna and revolving through 360 degrees a few times) turned up 24 access points, 11 of which were unsecured. I expected to pick up a few networks while pointing toward the window, but I was surprised at how many popped up while pointed through the opposite side of the building. It probably helps that I’m on the 2nd floor, but this was more than I expected. A similar experiment a couple of years ago turned up only 2 SSIDs, not including mine.

came across this in December 2004 Technology Review.
http://www.fez.go.kr
There are actually 3 different development zones, one near Incheon, Busan/Jinhae, and Gwangyangman.

Still interested in coming up with something interesting to do in Korea.