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.

Pictures from the BBC 

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.

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 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)

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.

It’s fascinating to me to see that many Koreans in one place. As you can see in the pictures, the Korean fans mostly wore red (the team is called the “Red Devils”). Many people also had those red plastic things which seem to be mostly for the clapping part of the cheer “Dae Han Min Kook – clapclap clapclapclap”. It’s extremely loud when it gets going, and very impressive. I enjoyed the fact that everyone from young kids to elderly halmonis and harobogis were there and having an enthusiastic time together. Judging from the vehicles in the parking lot yesterday, some of the Korean churches in the area organized carpools for their members to the game in church vans.

There was a much smaller section of Costa Rican fans. Costa Rica won the match, 1-0, which gave them something to cheer about too, but the Korean side appeared to play better overall, with about 10 attempts on goal (of which two bounced off the post) vs 1 for the Costa Ricans, and seemed to have the ball most of the time.

Next week the Korean team is playing the Mexican National Team in Los Angeles. I suspect there will be a larger turnout on behalf of the Mexican team down there, although there are also many more Koreans in L.A. than here in the Bay Area. The good news is, the match is being carried live on Telemundo, so we get to watch it up here.

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.

…we went to an event unlike anything I’ve ever seen: Mass Games. A tremendous, socialist mass art form in which thousands and thousands of people move in ultra-choreographed performances – gymnasts, soldiers, schoolkids, acrobats, and dancers with lights and music, with thousands more holding large cards that are flipped from color to color to create words and images as a backdrop. The last Mass Games was in 2002 – the next is supposed to be in 2008. They are planned to celebrate major events – in this case, the 60th anniversary of the liberation from Japan.

He also makes a trip to Panmunjon from the North Korean side, visits Kim Jong Il’s mausoleum, and checks out the casino for foreign tourists:

Definitely a weird place – chips were only in U.S. dollars, which I purchased with Chinese RMB. The dealers spoke Mandarin, and since casinos are illegal on Mainland China it was the first time I heard a casino dealer running a game in Chinese – and I had to come to North Korea for it. The playing cards said “Pyongyang” on them and I really wanted to buy a deck – perfect for my home game – but unfortunately they wouldn’t sell them. However, I was able to walk out with a few chips that say “PY” on them.

Dan’s lengthy posts also include many observations on the North Korean version of history and current politics, and on the members of his tour group:

Our guide also commented on George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” statement – she wasn’t too fond of it. But she did say that “normal American people are friendly.”

She also said that “North Korean people hate Bush,” to which one woman in our American tour group quickly replied, “We do too.”

As I mentioned earlier, in general I have no problem with people hating the President and saying so. Furthermore, showing the North Koreans that we can dislike our own leaders and freely talk about them in a negative way can be healthy because it is a stark contrast to their world in which their leadership must be revered and can not be questioned.
…
I had heard other similar statements on the trip, but this comment stood out and infuriated me even more because of the use of the word “we” – she was appearing to represent the whole group, including me. I didn’t want to get into an argument, but I had to speak up.

“Not all of us,” I said, and left it at that.

• Inside North Korea
• North Korea: Day One (Saturday)
• North Korea: Day Two (Sunday)
• North Korea: Day Three (Monday)
• North Korea: Day Four (Tuesday)
• North Korea photo album
• North Korea video collection

via BoingBoing
previous BoingBoing article on North Korea vacation promo (flash movie)

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

New York Times:

A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.
…
In the West, ubiquitous computing is a controversial idea that raises privacy concerns and the specter of a surveillance society. (They’ll know whether I recycled my Coke bottle?!) But in Asia the concept is viewed as an opportunity to show off technological prowess and attract foreign investment.
…
“New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology,” said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

If so, it is an experiment much easier to do in Asia than in the West.

“Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend, who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. “There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.”

I think projects like these are going to need something like the AttentionTrust Recorder, or at least an OFF button, to let people see what’s being monitored about themselves and to manage how the information is made available. Without it, this might be a really cool place to visit but not somewhere you’d want to live.

(via TechDirt)

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.

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.

South Korean firms like Hyundai, LG and SK Group have carved out a notable presence in the country—the world’s second largest and a potentially huge market for products like refrigerators, washing machines and television sets.

The Posco deal in Orissa, though, is a completely different sort of project. This is a big natural resources project, to line up access to iron and steel to meet increasing manufacturing demand in-country within India. In addition to a dire need for basic infrastructure improvements (roads, highways, and airports), more people are moving to separate homes, or larger homes, and filling them with more white goods and electronics.

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.

Here’s a better explaination of what’s going on here (poongmul). (Alternate formatting here.)

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.

Soon du bu is usually served in a boiling hot pot from the oven, and you typically crack an egg into it and mix it up before eating. You can get it in permutations of beef, pork, seafood, vegetarian, spicy, and other varieties. In contrast, nang myun is Korean buckwheat noodles in cold broth with a boiled egg and thin slices of beef, radish, and other vegetables. The server will often carry a pair of cooking scissors to cut up the noodles if you’d like. Most people also add vinegar and mustard.

The food here is pretty good at a reasonable price, most items are currently around $7 to $9 (including banchan and rice). If you’ve never had Korean food other than bulgogi or kalbi, you might give this a try.

Update 2005-06-23 06:46:50: A lot of people seem to be finding this post around lunch and dinner time, so here’s the address and phone number:

Myung Dong Tofu Cabin
1484 Halford Avenue (at El Camino near Lawrence Expressway)
Santa Clara, California 95051
(408) 246-1484 (map)

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.

The second session was on consumer semiconductors. Everyone in this session is a fabless design house. The Xceive presentation on their fully digital TV tuner chipset is interesting. This is a completely silicon RF-to-baseband system, which apparently doesn’t require any external filters or shielding. They didn’t mention how much their first products were going to cost, but getting everything onto silicon means the cost is likely to trend downwards, rather than staying put as the existing analog tuner cards have. It also means that the physical packaging is much smaller, so it could go in a PDA or phone or be used to add a video input feature to an existing digital device. There are already a number of cheap video player widgets starting to turn up, sort of like video MP3 players, and having a silicon-only solution for RF TV-in is going to enable a lot of interesting combinations.

The third session, on biotech, was the most interesting. Fan Hsu from the UC Santa Cruz Genome project gave a general overview of proteinomics and functional genetics. Lewis Williams from Five Prime spoke about their process for screening thousands of candidate secreted proteins against specific cell functions, vs the old method of testing a single protein at a time. Stuart Kim from Stanford spoke about the need for a systemic view of protein function and the possibility of applying a broader engineering approach to modelling clusters of related gene expression. His project uses Affymetrix GeneChips or something very similar to test aging-related gene expression. I got the impression that it was something like the work being done at Perlegen a few years ago when they were doing their sequencing project, in that they were generating huge quantities of data, without a good method for organizing and modelling the results. Each test chip returns something like 5000 columns x 20,000 rows of results. The last talk was by Christopher Ko at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, who hopes to take GeneChip-like technology from a research environment down to something more user friendly, perhaps even to the point where an individual could run a test at home, sort of like a home glucose monitor.

I noticed that a lot of people left before the biotech session started, perhaps because the usual audience for this conference was interested in “InfoTech” and not so much “Bio”. My observation here — the genomic and proteinomic fields are just reaching the point recently where the information technology and systems engineering can become really useful. Another observation, though — pharma and health care product development are massively capital intensive and yet have very high risk per investment. The size of individual investments makes it difficult to place a lot of bets and plan on the portfolio paying off. On the other hand, it looks like there should be many opportunities to make a contribution toward advancing the state of the art, since the availability of data and computational tools is relatively new.

This evening I saw the announcement for Maxtor’s latest generation of desktop hard disk drives, which will be 500GB per 3.5″ unit; similar units from Seagate and Hitachi are expected in a similar time frame. The entire human genome database apparently requires something like 3GB, and the annotations from various research projects bring the total up to 8-9GB at the moment. So the current and future generations of desktop (and notebook) computers will have more than enough raw storage to handle the data sets. Doing something useful with the data is another problem altogether, but the size of the genetic/proteinomic database is relatively finite — it isn’t going to get exponentially bigger — and the computational resources continue to get exponentially larger/cheaper/faster. Something good has got to pop out of this somewhere…

See also: Korea’s plans for Ubicomp City, Korea becomes the largest foreign investor in India

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:

Kimchi is credited with helping digestion, fighting cancer and delaying aging. When severe acute respiratory syndrome hit Asia, many Koreans believed kimchi protected them. South Korea had no confirmed cases of the disease, unlike neighboring China and Japan.

Here’s an earlier article from the BBC back in March 2005, available without subscription:

Scientists at Seoul National University say they fed an extract of kimchi to 13 infected chickens – and a week later 11 of them had started recovering.

The researchers said the results were far from scientifically proven and if kimchi did have the effects they observed, it was unclear why.

Obviously, there are some differences between chickens and humans, but this is a great excuse to eat more kimchi at home and with your friends…

Update 02-16-2006 21:44 PST: LG Electronics is introducing an air conditioner with a kimchi-extract-coated filter, presumably to help protect from avian flu. Assorted links and comments at BoingBoing.

Update 05-21-2006 13:10. PDT: Too much kimchi might be bad for you. (LA Times, via Boing Boing).

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.

SSIDs picked up:

143Rinconada, 2WIRE517, 2WIRE626, 2WIRE778, Alma Zone,
Andrew's Network, bmillin, dolev, Home, Home,
hughes-wi-fi, hughes-wi-fi, linksys, linksys, Linksys,
linksys-g / Palo Alto, Linksys-PA, LR, NETGEAR, NETGEAR,
settlers, spyfox, TASAR-HOME, zephyr

Perhaps I should see if anyone’s interested in setting up a bandwidth co-op, since Palo Alto Fiber-to-the-Home seems to be stalled. It’s sometimes frustrating to see how slow and expensive internet service is here by comparison with Korea, among other places.

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