thedarren

Pushing Python Performance With Parallelization

2016-08-15T20:01:00.002-07:00

TL;DR: For certain types of programs, you can take advantage of idiosyncrasies in the Python interpreter and the host operating system to create real shared memory between processes and get some pretty good parallelization.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

As a developer, you've probably heard this before, and what it means basically is that you shouldn't waste time optimizing code unless it's already doing what you want it to do. We also live in an era of seemingly unlimited resources with AWS/Google Compute, and often the easiest way to get higher throughput in your programs or service is just to pay for more instances. But sometimes it's fun to see what sort of performance we can get on a simple laptop (and save some cash at the same time).

So anyway ... I've been working on this thing, and it took too damn long to run, and I needed to run it lots and lots of times ... so, it was time to optimize. Basic optimization has two main steps:

1) Profile, to find out where your program is slow.
2) Speed up the parts of your program that run the most.

Seems pretty obvious, but there are also a lot of different reasons programs can be slow. Are you I/O bound, meaning most of the time is spent waiting for reads/writes to and from your hard disk? Are you network bound, with most of the time waiting for network responses? Are you memory bound, meaning your program's performance is dependent on how much data you can fit in RAM? Are you CPU bound? That last one is kinda the best, since the CPU is the fastest part of your computer (not counting GPU and tasks specifically suited for GPU programming), meaning usually the CPU is underused because you can't shove data through it fast enough.

Let's talk about a simple type of program that is very common. It has a big chunk of data to process sequentially, and it spits out a result. Can you fit it all in RAM? Great. Do that, and you've just drastically improved the performance of your program. But modern CPUs have multiple cores, so technically if you could run multiple processes with the same memory, you could get better performance.

But ... Python. Python is not designed for performance. If you really want a performant program with shared memory, you should probably be coding it in C++. But I enjoy the ease and speed of development with Python, and wanted to see what sort of performance I could get out of it before rewriting in C++, so I started digging. First, there's a problem with Python parallelization called the Global Interpreter Lock, or GIL, meaning if you make a program multithreaded, only one thread is actually running at the same time (due to the GIL), so it won't take advantage of multiple CPUs/cores. The solution is the multiprocessing module, which gets around the GIL program by using full-fledged processes, each with their own instance of the interpreter, rather than threads (so you have the memory overhead of an interpreter instance for each process, but the advantage that they can run simultaneously). It's quite simple to use, but this is only really useful to us if we can create shared memory for our big data blob, and have each process read that same chunk of shared memory.

First, let's take a look at multiprocessing. Here's a simple example that creates a bunch of processes and waits for them all to finish. The nice thing is that it's all synchronized and automated - when a process finishes, the pool will start another process, until all the jobs are complete.

As you can see, it's super fast. Mainly because it's not doing anything.

For our second test, let's simulate having a big chunk of data, and passing that to our workers, since that's the type of program we're trying to optimize.

What the ... why is it suddenly so slow?? As you can see, the workers each run nearly instantly (looping over a million items and doing nothing with them is not very hard), but the total time ballooned to above seven seconds. The reason is that the one million object list is a local variable that's passed as a function parameter to the workers. What the Python interpreter will do internally is pickle the object on the calling side, then unpickle it in the worker. So not only do you get a copy of the object for each worker, you also get the expense of pickling and unpickling. No good.

(Quick side note: Python actually provides "shared" and "managed" objects for creating shared memory among processes. However, for what we're doing, they're extremely slow, since every access is proxied and made process-safe. They also take a very long time to create.)

Fortunately, it turns out we can do much better. On Unix-based operating systems (i.e., Linux, Mac OSX), we can take advantage of the operating system's "copy-on-write" forking behavior. This basically means that when the process forks, rather than making a copy of the program and its context, it will just use the same copy of memory unless values are changed, in which case it will create a copy of the changed part in each process (that's very simplified, and OS profs are probably cringing, but it's the basic idea). But how do we get our data into this "context" that's shared? Easy - use the dreaded "global variable":

As you can see, it runs fast again. Note that now our "data" object has 128 million ints rather than a million, so we can get some process time in the workers. And it's not creating a copy for the forked processes, because that would take a really really long time to pickle/unpickle (trust me). But, we introduced a new problem. Now we have a huge global variable, which is really poor form, since it will be initialized if our module gets imported. We also probably want our data to be created based on some program args, so it should be protected by a function or something. But we saw that if we pass the data to our workers after it's created in __main__, it gets copied. How can we solve this problem?

There's actually a simple solution. If we define our worker function in the same scope that we build our data object, then the worker function will have access to it, and the Python interpreter will put this in the "global" context of the process. Thus, it won't be copied like our local variable from our earlier attempt. Let's also increase the number of "jobs" from 10 to 100, because it takes a bit of time for parallelization to "warm up" (likely due to caching, which is a whole other topic for performance optimization).

As you can see, we're getting true parallelization now! With one worker, it takes about 20 seconds, and when we double to two, we get nearly twice the performance! Also note that my Macbook has a dual-core CPU, but four virtual cores ("hyperthreading"), so going from two workers to four only gets us a small increase in performance.

And that's it! Now you have a highly parallel data processor using shared memory in Python. The above examples were specifically run with Python 2.7 and PyPy on OS X 10.10.5. Note that PyPy and CPython behave somewhat differently, and will crash at different places in the automatic pickling/unpickling of objects. And also, apparently this won't work at all on Windows, because Windows will copy the entire process before forking. But if your program is constrained in the way described above, and you're running on 'Nix, you can actually get some pretty decent performance!

Happy parallelizing!

On Language and Getting from Here to There

2016-07-01T03:46:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic recently published an interesting article regarding the difference in "efficiency" between languages. The basic idea is that some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, are very efficient in conveying information and possess linguistic shortcuts such as eliminating gender and tenses and collapsing "he" and "she" into a single pronoun, whereas other languages like German are quite verbose and precise, having different articles (i.e., "the") for different gendered nouns along with plentiful verb conjugations.

They also touch very briefly on the idea of directional complements, which I've always found to be a fascinating difference between English and the Asian languages I've studied. Basically, directional complements are words attached to verbs that show the direction of movement of the actors. This sounds like an obvious thing, but it's actually a common pain point for English speakers learning Asian languages and vice versa. English also has directional complements, except we're maddeningly inconsistent with how we use them. For example, the verbs "to come" and "to go" have very clear intentions, yet we flip them around in a way that confuses the heck out of Asians. For instance, I can say, "I'll come home at 10pm", which means I'll go from where I currently am to home by 10pm, but what I really mean is "I'll go home at 10pm." Similarly, once I'm home, I can say, "I went home at 9:30", which is technically correct from the perspective of your past self (at 9:30, I began the process of "going" home from wherever I was), but from the perspective of your current self, you came home (more accurately, started coming home) at 9:30.

In Korean (and Chinese, for that matter), the verbs "to come" and "to go" are always relevant to your present location. If I'm at the office, I'm not going to "come home", I'm going to "go home". (Of course, every language has exceptions, and Korean has the strange and glaring exception of saying "거의 다 왔어요", which literally means "I've almost come all the way (there)", and is given from the perspective of your imminent future self rather than your present self. Language....) Furthermore, if you're "returning", you "(go and) return to" (돌아가다) if you returned to a place that you're no longer at (e.g., "언제 샌프란시스코에 돌아갔어?": When did you return to San Francisco? means I was originally in San Francisco, then I went somewhere else, then I went back to San Francisco, but now I'm somewhere else again), but you "return (and come back) to" (돌아오다) if you returned to a place that you're still at (e.g., "언제 한국에 돌아왔어?": When did you return to Korea? means I was in Korea, then I went somewhere else, then I came back to Korea, where I still am). It's a seemingly subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference for sounding natural. And if I started at place A, went somewhere else, and then came back to place A, there's actually a beautifully unambiguous grammatical form for just that: 갔다왔다. E.g., 일본에 갔다왔어 - I went to Japan (and then I came back). In English, I'd say, "I went to Japan", and leave it up to the listener to decide if that means I went and I'm still there (in Korean, "일본에 와 있어" - I came to Japan (and I'm still here)), or I went for a bit and then came back.

"Up" and "down" are also used along with "come" and "go" in a consistent and disambiguating way in Korean and Chinese, which is quite nice when you think about it, but again, confuses a lot of foreign learners. If I'm on the ground floor and my friend is in her apartment on the tenth floor, I'll tell her to "내려와" (Literally, "Come from a higher place down to a lower place", or "Come down"), and she'll say, "내려갈게" (Literally, "I will go from a higher place down to a lower place", or "I'm going down"). Yet the American on the tenth floor who says, "I'm coming right down" is again using the reverse of the proper direction from her present self's situation.

Anyway, the article in The Atlantic goes on to ask the question that neuroscientists and linguists have been asking for centuries - does language affect the way we perceive the world? This is the whole "Eskimos have a bazillion different words for snow [so clearly their perception of snow is fundamentally different than ours]" argument, and I'm glad that the author brushes off the differences in perception as being "true to a faint, flickering degree [that] a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions." While I do think that language and perception are intimately linked, it often feels like experimental results in this area are grossly tinged with ethnocentrism. Scientists who speak a certain language (and let's be honest, it's typically Western scientists speaking English) love to make broad generalizations about foreigners who speak languages they don't quite understand. Eskimos do have a lot of different single word adjectives for snow, but does that mean they have a fundamentally different experience perceiving snow, or is it just that they happen to live in the snow? Chinese doesn't distinguish between "he" and "she" as a spoken pronoun, but does that mean Chinese people don't perceive them differently? The answer is obviously not - in fact, while the sound of the words might be the same, the characters for "he" and "she" (and even animals or "it") are different, and thus different sets of neurons are firing for each one.

So, is there any way to know what it's like to think and perceive the world in a foreign language? Well, actually there is, and it's pretty simple: just go ahead and learn that language, and then examine your own thoughts and perceptions while speaking it. Come on, waiting on you. ;)

AlphaGo and the AI Revolution: Is Natural Language Understanding Next?

2016-03-15T17:54:00.003-07:00

Here's a guest post I wrote for a talented friend's linguistics blog, about AlphaGo and natural language understanding. Does the rise of AlphaGo mean that human-level machine translation is just around the corner? Or is language another beast altogether?

Enjoy!

http://saramariahasbun.com/2016/03/15/alphago-and-the-ai-revolution-is-natural-language-understanding-next/

Dumb AI Will Kill Us Before Superintelligent AI Has A Chance

2016-02-24T18:44:00.000-08:00

Humans have been fascinated with the idea of a robot revolution since we first conceived of robots. Long before Skynet and the Terminator were imagined in the early 80's (?!?), Asimov wrote of the Three Laws of Robotics, warning us of the potential for intelligent robots to do us harm. Recently, with the rapid expanse of deep learning neural nets in the last few years, we hear more and more about how an artificial "superintelligence" (i.e., beyond human intelligence level) could wipe us out with as much difficulty as a human stepping on an ant. While I do think that superintelligence could potentially be an apocalyptic threat to humanity if it were ever to be created without proper safety built in, I am actually way more concerned about what I like to call "dumb AI". Which honestly can kill us right now if we're not careful.

What's "dumb AI"? Well, artificial intelligence, or AI, is a buzzword that spans many different technologies. The media tends to call any technology that does anything sufficiently complicated "artificial intelligence". In computer science circles, it means something different, but for our purposes, let's go with the popular view of "technology that does something complicated that probably used to be done by a human" (I am aware that this is incredibly broad). General human level AI would be a system that is as intelligent as an average human being. Superintelligent AI would be a system that is more intelligent than a human, perhaps by orders of magnitude. So "dumb AI" is what we have now - systems that are good at isolated tasks, potentially even better than humans, but that have no general intelligence.

Autonomous cars are an example of "dumb AI" - they're good at the single task of driving, which they handle by combining data from different sensors such as lidar and cameras, building a model of their environment, and using that model to follow the road and avoid obstacles. A difficult task, for sure, but your Model S is never going to become "self-aware", because the only thing it knows is how to drive. It has no opinions on current events, it can't make you a coffee (but one day it will probably drive itself to Starbucks to pick up a coffee for you), and it wouldn't hold up very well in a Turing test. It seems really "smart" that it can drive, but it is designed specifically for this one task, and has no general intelligence.

Teslas are amazing machines, but let's return for a moment to the fictional world of Terminator. In the first Terminator, a super strong, intelligent cyborg takes a hop in a time machine back to 1984 and starts kicking ass and taking names. This scenario is unlikely in the near future, obviously because of the time machine, but also because we're pretty far away in both robotics* and artificial intelligence. It would be cool if text-to-speech systems could do an Ahnold accent, though.

Terminator 2 was even more unbelievable - liquid metal time traveling robots, somehow with enough distributed intelligence in the molecules of metal that you could blow the thing to pieces and it would magically come back together. We're nowhere close with nanotech, sorry.

Which brings us to Terminator 3. A quaint little movie from 2003. Check out the start of the war:

An engineer reports Skynet "processing at 60 teraflops a second". Well, that was actually surpassed by a single supercomputer in the 2004 timeframe (http://www.top500.org/), and distributed systems have way more combined processing power, although processing power by itself isn't enough to incept intelligence. More important than the depiction of Skynet's self-awareness, check out a scene from a few minutes later showing a killer drone called a "hunter killer":

In 2003, this was pretty fantastic to see. A drone with heavy firepower and automatic targeting! Holy shit!

Well, guess what. All the technology needed to build that exists right now. It might have been Hollywood effects then, but we have it now. Quad copter drones with precise maneuvering capabilities? Check. Automatic targeting systems? Check. Slap some guns on a beefed up quad copter and give it a relatively dumb computer vision system, and you basically have the hunter killer from Terminator 3. The main difference is that there's no superintelligent Skynet behind it.

But actually, that's precisely my point. The technologies needed to accidentally start global world-ending conflicts are here, not tomorrow, not today, but yesterday. Check out this "automated turret" system from 2010, which South Korea wanted to put on the DMZ (not sure if they ended up installing it). http://www.gizmag.com/korea-dodamm-super-aegis-autonomos-robot-gun-turret/17198/ Here's the breathless videogame-like description from the article:

"The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets.

Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade, or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it, including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct both the video system's aim and the direction of the guns after recoil pushes them off-target."

The BBC covered this company again last summer: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150715-killer-robots-the-soldiers-that-never-sleep. Supposedly, the autonomous firing mode has been turned off, but that doesn't make this tech any less terrifying. First, it can simply be turned back on if requested by the client (apparently, mostly friendly Middle Eastern countries...). Second, the things have a friggin' network connection, and Korean companies are not very well-known for their internet security (sorry, every Korean bank). Can you imagine an automated turret with a .50 caliber machine gun being hacked?? Additionally, the tech for this is honestly not very advanced. It's an infrared motion sensor combined with a turret. It has no way to distinguish friend from foe - it just shoots at humans. You know, like in Terminator. The "senior research engineer" doesn't inspire much confidence, either, stating,

“Within a decade I think we will be able to computationally identify the type of enemy based on their uniform.”

First of all, talk about lowering expectations! I could build a very accurate classifier today using open-source technology and my four year old laptop that would be able to accurately distinguish between South and North Korean soldiers based on uniform. Which is fine and dandy, but if slipping past an automated turret is as simple as stealing some South Korean army uniforms, then you can see why this is "dumb AI". What if this thing accidentally fires a bunch of RPGs over the DMZ due to a false positive in its vision system and starts WWIII?

Actually, buggy vision systems have nearly killed us already, many decades ago. Here's just one declassified incident from the Cold War that we know about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov. The tl;dr version is that the Soviet nuclear missile early warning system erroneously detected a launch of ICBMs from the US, and Petrov decided that it was probably a mistake, and thus arguably prevented a "retaliatory" nuclear volley from the Soviets which would have turned the early 80's into a Mad Max apocalypse. The problem? The Soviet early warning system got confused by the clouds and some Soviet satellites and pegged them as incoming American ICBMs. Whoops.

So, while most people are worrying about their IoT coffee makers becoming self-aware and inciting grey goo scenarios, I'm worried about the tech we already have. Drones are getting better and better, cheaper and cheaper. Right now a motivated individual could build a Terminator 3 style hunter-killer with a modified quad copter, some light guns, and off-the-shelf vision systems. On the other end of the spectrum, "real" drones such as the Predator can run autonomously without too much difficulty, and those pack serious firepower. Auto-targeting turrets on the DMZ and other high tension areas. Increasing autonomy built into other parts of the military and supply chain. Autonomous systems acting on the basis of requests from autonomous satellites. Intelligence based on imperfect vision systems. We're putting way too much power in the hands of systems that are extremely precarious. And the consequences of a mistake could be devastating.

Artificial intelligence is going to change the world in fundamental ways. We can't even imagine how transformative some of these changes are going to be, and the next few decades are going to bring scientific and technological advances that were considered science fiction not long ago. I just hope dumb AI doesn't accidentally kill us before we have a chance to see it.

--------

* Of course while I was writing this, Boston Dynamics released a new video of their humanoid robot.

Slap some guns on it, along with today's best facial recognition system, and you basically have the T1. Give them a network connection and some goals (i.e., kill humans), and maybe we're not so far away from the Terminator vision after all.

Canterbury Tales Neural Network

2015-07-20T02:24:00.001-07:00

I trained another RNN (multi-layer recurrent neural network), this time to generate poems in Middle English in the style of Canterbury Tales. It started generating interesting stuff after just a few minutes of training, but I let it finish anyway. I noticed in one of the samples that it had generated a title, so I seeded it with that title, and sure enough, it closed the poem eventually and started a new one. Kinda cool. The numbers are line numbers (you can see they're obviously not accurate), and it generates footnotes, too, since they were in the source text. The indentation and spacing is all generated by the neural net, too.

AUCCIATES TALE,

This walmeth have,' quod Melibee, 'by see 760

For it was grave, and of my voys I may,

To hir, with-outen fond to wedden she 285

How that a man unto pituk than; 1160

Til that were I his messaille aboghnis.

For, in the sovereyntes ful marchant

To me, night · ordeyned his peyne.

This no-mune answerde, as in the mille!

Ther ny spak, with many a special massthe.

His body frelet mot I telle as fan?

Ther was the bus he dide him in share;

Lest is goddesse and his mulligat

But he ne ben a fete wolde cosindyse, 1890

This fro the wrokes and his cours, and drinke, 3820

For men tolde love--bit he was of anhto 1555

Than scal, unto the north, wys '-bounder doute,

Whan thoughte gon me in the bixardes,

That to hem don to take now heer burde,

And I remel for to mete for us,

Out of my proverbe, 'as they, lokkes as,

Of avento to your octileince

Of whiche may the hawe of avoutry,'

184. Hl. for; _rest_ thus. 140, 4. Cm. mak; Cp. Pt. Ln. Hl. maner.

Lold carus, eft he mighte nat to yow hir lawe. 1710

Er he may wedded by his messes weyle!

For later, she was fete · stinten it usave

Reed right to him as fond in his care.

And hydeth, was thy streng · turneth a claye aferve,

That owne praye bounseth wery awey.'

3684. Cm. Hl. Thansh.

This Palamon he bitide, here up I woot?

With whot his name turned to stroke,

God wake and from obeyes also a best;

Up werketh under burel in his tonge. 610

Ne made scondre for an eketh al

And bad a marchal worthy and sent at daye

Which never sinne, this is te biforn to ben

With dwilkketh wel; Meclege answerde. 10

I yeve me yow to vysed and pleyn,

That his gite is hadde an half, no violed ende.

And forth wol I, than ther hanneth in a clere,

And of Mavounses hadde a stoond fempcethe, (720)

Me verraunt on his hors, the Irw and shirke

As, by the fleisons of a dignitee, 140

She wel ful of nature, and sone can,

God save hom al that ech man y-comen noon,

And sprikketh and therfore of place of bedde;

The peple is in drank for to be my three!'

3588. E. is; _rest_ lyf. 475. E.

of; _rest_ Sumbiald (-now _is an est godesse 615

No brother him unturs he hath colessoun, 165

My ricersable, if ye had espyed me, 95

Up-on hory grete floor, wher was on yow preye;

And I comth by biholde a litel wit.

Ful ofte tyme, thurk he comen of hem be mighte, (390)

Of silknesse my lord first caste throwe.

Allas! the kin he bar to other wente, 800

Be comuned but ful often save, o writ

That, if yow puccheth thus, his host at me.

And leyne of his deeth, hir Boundes shape,

Hir lady speke mete, and my turned al,

Sow that, with-outen same the worthy finde;

Therforthe why? faste yow y-woke, : 2950

This lak may may be doun · of shewing bifore (311)

That thilke, and smyle that I igive I; 310

This hand, ther is no croyn, if that my cave!

In hering rancour wasship of twenty yong,

The laste tokinge wonder yow yow wel,

That him encheseth us a tecen or bath; (410)

That I sin Penitence is so greet mercy.'

For Nothewe menelly the book seith,

'By procest'ded, 'is," quod this povreteon,'

Somme be your wyf, bothe as wel lemed--

Nat who-no coude castle youre foule;

And in this siker Countel on his might

The mighty siker, as it be desyre;

Al were I here woot thus, he nolde secree!

3. Ln, heer; E. on wompath, wink, un-toon, namidye.

[ OUDun

Biforn that ben weren knightes Cristsaryd, 1150

'Biforen on him-self, her lyf was bindinge, 1145

And vertuous and bisogeth him ful man,

And hadded he so muche, or of my smoot!

But with his song though he sat doun wisnesse; 195

Eut of the carage and of his dampnacioun.

Dan him the eres on the livete or love,

Another dyeth she on hir wille served.

The Iange wyf, made also wolde hem;

Yit in my cors of Attenaces

Of feet at Almachius lerned by,

His wyf hadde hong, on heven, by fleer lewe.

Now wel enqueringe, by it, and for to fron,

That he loked hid no mone his preyere,

Ne feete, on his parfit up or mayde.

445. E. Pt. barment; E. Ln. camully. 386. Cm. capede; _rest_

allone.

[424: T. 9095-90x7.]

And al his sterës dyed, he made uttinge.

1901. E. _omits_ a.

1167. Cp. Pt. Pt; Hl. nought.

'Thing we knowe it axe a parcour, 1275

That thus of lord I shal bigentes here. 1680

For which he hath no wight han I shal falle! 735

Under the goddes hous, and artow for no wymes,

Werre is we demen hangoghtes to be.

It never sette up-on the tendrely terke, 3605

Gan-coven his maistrie, with-outen crye,

And elles by any corrymed to tweye

Of an apgoterus of our lede, 1430

For elles is ful ofte of peyne of noon,

That they doon his gonsel and a belia blarde,

Of good have fortuth, and leef and freends, 830

The hous wyse world, or wroght, out ofte, is swour. 160

[60: T. 3043-4394.]

Both bything is best in this matere. 1240

Daunce, and thanke he iman with Gellige,

Him thoughte his aventure he hadded it his shap,

And whan men was as ever he put right wel;

This litel of my wyf, it sholde breke bifil; 1060

Ne goode and only for swich a grace.

O, Reder was y-presed, for the booghte, 1525

Reed giltly, and pouce, was on hir hewe.

133, 1. Cm. goode.

'Now, fyr a blake is vers muche hir governarnce;

A mour, by this word of may reverich

But-if that under troithe men also,

Shul no maner mannes now in Cristet softe. 1315

This is a cartimwest, by-ooven save.

For as your owene lord yet knowe he, OUT"" HERE ENDAT. AUCCIATES TALE.

* * * * *

THE SEIPES THE MEMELIUM OF PISB.

HERE UDORES PERCUIS TIS ThiT BKERE.

NEiBIGIEES TALE.

By god, to daunge other in heven gentris.' 4265

And that they cart but o wol nat suffreth hone

Withwomth an ydel purposour

and have this castel do. 1550

Ther shal me al my declared al this: 1365

[480: T. 9548-9753.]

How we povre and al his aventure,

If that oon on a mayde shewe aspecioun

To slone in clot or to doon in vryde.

And Whan they wolde y gebstable and blisdes,

Whan that he bigilde me nat othing swate!

Hir heigh but thou sholde have a knight

[389: T. 1307-11200.]

Lat thing, ne in your-self, far waries in the sinne.,

Lenk in a partee in foryefelleden;

Til he carled som · if they he loked me.

God seile, umbarie, quod he, 'and fals so streng, 2315

Madler deer, gan vertu and of [Sa],

And semblonwes and in he restenbed,

Ne nat, now whan he neysed is me soot; (630)

This Gamelyn is the ciftiesse of sonne,

That stirme feendes weren as deed in bondes. 1165

With-outen hewed here meyne y-nough bityde,

[88: T. 2904-2522.]

Than litel hert be mawed alwey bigonne;

I mighte men mene, as Envitatee 595

And seyde, 'it shal never falsly also; 235

...

And so on.

Here's another, with no seed text:

Of Caunterboures deboname, and cloth,

That hath hir housbond in the walles tale,

His fruit I seye, his liste, lay, laughed 4090

Of his stories wroothly for to we;

Which that hir mokle in this tresor foon,

They looke y-nat usente I, foo dide or enfore

Thou art to haven ful many a yere hond. (810)

And up answakned and in his thoght!

But natheler swete of this manere,

Who, I luve me whul be mighte nat teille; (470)

[404: T. 3148-9454.]

To telle hir herm; me in his muncen save.

For muche after any good of gyle, 75

Wol can, wrastthe thus, and my good rekne,

And lyk to the game a that can paleme.

With prively servaunt the sire, [T. 153.

Leurne in this prove 'another coste,

With wounes maken him herte any reve.

O doketh frend His same swoken rorie,

That half that he toweling of thilke lyf

Purstaunce, came, thus no wight so geste him bothe? 120

Ful often man was fully of hye a knee, (625)

An al be in, 'fer right anon atto,

And that my daf to stille in sideraynesse. (890)

And al a fille aboute hir herte I quikke,

For yeven maken herke, bothe gay the to see. 1310

And if thou me that gerle sone quat he; 1155

[201: T. 11211-12202.]

Thy minstry, out of honour · trewely unlost,'

'Who sente be faire, of his cherl no bere. 435

This syde-ward she trusteth over he wente, (10)

For in this curture riche; and the firste knight

She schul I lyke gay be thoght and ay.

And Auchaus han devaunce buk minde,

That I was lye, and warisshe for to preite.

This walken as the cladres wilcow attenly

As he wentweth er, they tendren bisinesse

Witnesse, avyseth to the hevenes sighte,

Til colandre al this carpenteres fade,

Yit nored_, as he was a greet dayes--

'Adam,' quod she, 'E. manying in the rook was rede;

As Plutage mayntaccioun heend pais.

But this this cocauntilitee of Diendrye,

And hoom was three, as repetse as hir therfonge, 1250

But soth the cherl-pirgrew wel he lay

Bireveth man; and after his weddes say;

With-inne his come a geyn with preching is,

Dien in so fair, as laughed lecherye

The dissembre it nosperie flasoun that malence

Another beste, I saystom blessed and roune;

In whiche they mo broon arrogeth you blak.'

...

A neural network that writes Scalia dissents

2015-07-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

I trained a recursive neural network (https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn) on a bunch of Justice Scalia's dissents from the past few years. It spits out some amusing stuff, depending on the starter text and how "adventurous" you want the output. Since it's character-based and not word-based, it makes a bunch of spelling errors (unlike Justice Scalia), but is also able to create new words (just like Justice Scalia!). Here are some samples.

***

Starter text: "Justice SCALIA", random level: 0.8. Never would have expected this from a strict constructionist (check the first sentence). This one brings in same-sex marriage, constitutional interpretation, and the typical contempt-ridden air quotes.

"Justice SCALIA, dissenting.

The Constitution is an opinion, and so views that "[t]he Court tait the structure relations (interneline) rejectly and weands is not categorical, while all this one inference to do be not applying a nample between the fairest regulation in the entire Regulate Called to his regulations." Ante, at 2-92. The own sittingt-assume industries are strigges not. See United States v. New Yorbo, Manyal, 508 U.S. 208, 368, 106 S.Ct. 2508, 41 L.Ed.2d 669 (1999)) (SCALIA, J. The Jouncis Col.Reverson (quoted Nationary 7, 49-585 (Mouns)). But the state exception that its pollutants so whatever his inoper affected by the United States does not avoid a bullenaby AEDPS?) the time of two applicable, however, such as the object of how question of its own interpretations must was "provided to achieve a federal strict system is the section was the Act's state reading of Fremed Read Iractal consequence of the statute in the regulations with the consequence was the present completed by the officials were reasonably every question—think if that attribution of the one would have dead the truth for an industrial rewilting records if it is arrested that the Federal Exchanges whom the speech at all strethed by the time-of-tax 1970, while so what the new same-sex marriage terms (whenevel is an internal assistabliness based on the State." The Act what the occusion said that he can considered to the offered foreign Congresss about predicted nor conturment like "scheme."

"Justice SCALIA", 0.85. Talking about all sorts of stuff, including "pregnancy discrimination".

"Justice SCALIA, with whom THE Loore, would have into its retail to contain a significant constitutional jurisprudence. That is not maintenance of pregnancy discrimination to take insurance confessionary basis:

"We simply compels.

How disablich that the Federal Government's approach a plafication was not only the pre many cases when they more than a statute at tax creates that "[t]he word "substantially unwilling" facts in the contents of the approach reductions.

On the opinion has official before them. We have had standing. But that Congress might "grant on the [tore] later insurance basing plainness phrase." Ante, at 2506. But that is about a but used to timed with, for empless believe that "the amicisprisably rights in state law's detention with my, most. In Redels v. United States, 494 U.S. 479, 455, 96 S.Ct. 2767, 97 L.Ed.2d 837 (1996) (countench, the Court's business did not require relationship to may be same-free immunial procedural reality of the Commission that the release is impossible to the program based on the statement." Beaws that the tipster only another persuasions of evidence of Administrative United States v. Parrentes, 51 Can. Thie, Art. 607, 30, 102-11 (1896). I would all sense.

The Court itself not a substantial to the contrary interpreting the requirements, identifying our precedents to be not soual into the society was unconstitutional for the deal services on the neighbout's interpretivens in their conclusion. Acrost-intitule to mentior informations is about establishment here. Does until Rule v. State Likeing § 6 believes that their liberty is not an effect to apply the number of each anyone it mottitung of "required).""

"Pretentious", random level: 0.95. I love how the second paragraph starts with such a forceful statement.

"Pretentious permits newly judges that the law constitutional holdings of national today. It is incriphic was so houselied herehplace. The conclusion that Maxwell's laffic between the common leow police the plaint's States as its highly holding see would have threatening substitute an assumate trade, see 22 U.S.C. § 931(b)(3).

But that it is unquestionably. A New York has forenes present, the is not stend what prosecute results of hore, the issue at interpretation can be saying eyting "`arress botill to make matters" retain that, and funding or justification by 1986 that Congress extens its avoid participated billion, in view materely "subporablith" Medicaps to litigate influsts of nothing mandated to most compel else. Ante, at 11. So the Attorney General's claims questionable "based" in the Court's bearer warrantles objective and permit in the naturt is produced by reason on the trial court claim that rescre the statute state discussion of they asks not necesses 10 offer of Scwho Reaster, Felibe Haurt v. Zasking on their constitutional functions in the Antitory's defect the judiciary reading recorded by a new distinguisless laws in this theory to think the linef "Act] and it," for the data passpose.

The Court of Appeals courts two bring the great registrues, error in a way to ensure the Syet or received or appropriate rule. That its respect to the Court does not just establishes constitutional: "colticial legal treat's powers to be relevant about settled regime to what matters would discorments and promotive with the Act's invalidative amserting an entry."

"What a parody", random level: 0.8:

"What a parody of an initient fact that Arizona affirmatively regulated: The Act be expressed that matter of according to say that he says no penalty discharges were meaning of the attorney error was related to far as a complaint that the Ninth Circuit, the Court underpresent a vigwated criteria state area, it was reflexted to no law that the context of a separate law benefit of loso shouse before uncondition upon those precisely the entire of all cosest as the correct according affected billiple because the Court had unintw what Congress was made by the Court's decisions of among the trial courts or tepporable terms of the Court declaring where "advised entirely tax removing the health production judicial state" requirement that a false of the unconstitutional facts of the context in power to reason to be uncorpective of a court may be unconstitutional." Consistence of People v. Weleso, 3 Cranch 23, 278, 488-131 (1998)(7) (SIV). As Congress of these vermison accepting in the law authorially does not entirely with the prohibition only to make of citizens than whether it meaning for the trial court of its action of context of a second of the substitution were standing a provisions that it means that when a way is an insurer that these whole testimony makes a has for other claims by Congress has validity, in the presumably justify the EPA, on the industrial hardly concluded the Court's) federal issues, and whereas many rule and debate. The failure search new theory is may well injury, who seek did not demonstrate whether the Act at at our certificate of an interpation was described the entire 1998."

"You would think", random level: 0.95. The first sentence up until the quote kinda makes sense.

"You would think the legitimacy thing prohibited in the distinction is simply criminal inquiry, "which this Court's acts a "persons whose pre-existing, and the election which retrostened with the DNA has alver: a contracts criminal criminal criminal courts, which excluder implication wasd delay anytorney federal gur to be saude that is own, it takes who leave the precedent of an initial provisions that equal-riscretion. Since forbidable to pre-enact work to the legislative powers against Grabe-special v. Palusheent, 184 U. S. 413, 96 (1968). The provisions of this case, never be marketur judiciary justify the purpose of a matter of U.S. Sovily representative with Magna Cartz, 3 Dyanchests)."

"Pure applesauce", random level: 0.85. My favorite new word in this is "decoking".

"Pure applesauces and other whole must be an bendailing the prohibition my say allowing responsible for the entire of the concept or continue to cannot be cherd, nuble of a precedent or recognized it even any failure in a criminal statute that establishing for records the State courts a habeas called the property of the Supreme Court may is the decoking the same-treatment proceded such appointed by the enactment] affecting the his constitutional oright, whenever the entire Circuit's detention interest out of the courts or provision anything was referently, because it as textual regulatory justice avoid of the higcies jurisdiction remanding taxes in its percentage. It is not the thousate those whole employment-mates of ability to relevant the jurisdictional conduct and other factor of a meaning of a dignity claims activities (inexplicable criminal viltely." Ante, at 14-51, in v. Nownnephshor, 287 U. S. ___, ___ ("SC. . .).
II: This case that describes Congress had advire foreign all who eqhevel undermine the statute to the attention to pre-enactment of the opinion the decision scheme to do so."

"The overriding principle", random level: 0.85. Apparently the "overriding principle of democracy" is the substantial cost of a firearm. "Assing" the prescribed, eh? Clever verbiage.

"The overriding principle of democracy action this substantial cost of a firearm. Application would have extraordinary from a fireard health-insurance considerations in respectively undermined to include Assing the "prescribed" in the Court conceded against sovereign powers") (2012) and Storch "a man private parts of state law based on asquictions — and can adjudge deal was no State's reading operates."

"Who ever thought", random level: 0.5. At this level of randomness, sentences sorta make more sense, but go on forever. Not that dissimilar from actual court opinions.

"Who ever thought the Court's employees would have destroyed in the entire of a prevailing the majority-minority districts. And that is an incremental proceeding is an industrial review counsel that the proceeding is not the exclusive assistance of the pre-emption and industrial country and powers that the prosecution that the Court's opinion requires the action when the Arizona should not have the federal musus credit and standing to enforce the Fourth Amendment stands it that a state control of securated coverage in the decision to the concurrence of the First Amendment is because the decision mandatory minimums through the provision and that we have no purport to have the Framers were asserting about the time areas wholesale relevant to foreign criminals in the context of the Fourteenth Amendment is a contrary restraint."

"Perhaps", random level: 0.85. States' rights, baby.

"Perhaps the law infringed by the Alabama Acts and rights from coverage in a State suggesting its cases like this case is other powers or achieved by the guarantee correctness to the States — the normal law as a complaint that the Ninth Circuit, the Court v. Norkes, each cause of the California driving search power is the electoral interest."

"I suggest", random level: 0.88. You can just feel the contempt dripping from this one, especially due to the mistakes of the "personders of contrary" and the "delicitations" of the Ninth Circuit.

"I suggested changes to reject the cases of change holding) none of the capering the other personders of contrary, nor "delicitation" of the Ninth Circuit siteed held that the Federal Department precedent that rather than the relevant is equally "trup estor through the precese when "[t]o accept the property of the Transport Rule 18(b) which documents to the DOA disclose schools, "nonjudicination of Floridaps "convicted contract regarding about all when the law injudicial soupce, when the purpose of interpretation on the Appehedated Dectivenes of Jo.s 26 U. S. C. §209*20A in this criminal v. §37 espord or "manafestorize that a holding would "involve other warrantless" enacted comes to dismiss gives relief.
A claim relationship as ever the upheal possible that the prohibiting "[I]f which is acceptly choices (intenting governmental conflict would not] held that even pick form."

"Same-sex marriage", random level: 0.4.

"Same-sex marriage of the proceeding has not shown that the criterion of the Court's opinion spending and the Act did not establish which the caption of religious accidenty of the new same-sex marriage in factor principle that the Court says that the Federal Government can be relevant to the constitutional provisions of the natural relationships because the Court change the new district court's decision to the problems on the Court does not present an unconstitutional proceeding that the Court decides the United States v. Manyna, 537 U.S. 373, 513-534, 114 S.Ct. 2748, 129 L.Ed.2d 1305 (2010) (slip op., at 3) (internal quotation marks omitted). It is not the statute and compels a straight of the Act. The Court has no constitutional proceeding the court below the pre-emption circumstantly was an interest. Ante, at 1352. The Court standing what the Court may reasonably a pre-encorment is that the Act and of the present case is a contrary is an opinion relief in the entire of a mere respection of the present case for the Act when it intended."

"Same-sex marriage", random level: 0.6. It's all about the Fourth Amendment.

"Same-sex marriage in the order to companies precedent. The Fourth Amendment is not a single the Act that the Act does not effect through other crimes by control of "case"); (emphasis added). The Court has no reason to what is why a destrict court mistaken would be inappellant majority was a defendant's opinion concurring in the Agency and the tax credits to give Federal program with the constitutional expenditure was prohibited from a question by the trial procedural default of the Federal Government cases a tax any department of the latter resolved the problem is so and set of the provision requiring the present context in Such a State context of the constitutional conductes between the three court."

"Same-sex marriage", random level: 0.8. An "injustice relationship".

"Same-sex marriage is eagible television would comply with the tax driver's required extens preemptive evidence on the court already related dependence of preferable cost-emimst scull injustice relationship, "month" provision is the election sakee seeking decision in the logicial justice a matter, regard to the government of the Freingly reasonable Commerce Clauses was not wholenature that is not docuper to draw only of [a] law meaning in the prosecutor in the fairnes" of the judges did not mean in a followings applicable to enact criminal action and retreoting state Patition does not disparance of a provision of the statute." Id., at 54."

"Same-sex marriage', random level: 0.85. This actually made me laugh.

"Same-sex marriage is eaple the ACA's evintory cannot present an erroneous collaterations plainness — whereas criminal stance in our canon case. Or the statute is not the market spot that the Court fources "toor "justify" the Court conduct that according decision in candod requires in 14 millooloyly, Floring engals that the Demott v. Relo, 308 U.S. 332, 410, 111 S.Ct. 9300, 160 S.Ct. 1409, 131 S.Ct. 1545. Crowing it be applied to do warred the majority may be correcion, which canon a proceeding by entire regulation, and so health insurance complaint from the First Amendment here is not the court penalty and inference to the hinds of the Act's my view, it must anticill from a wantonering any defendant that as the statute exercise of this case regulates."

"Same-sex marriage", 0.9.

"Same-sex marriage is earlarn to buy intrusion held." Robest anlike Report Addines 39 (in). The Ninton Creeching upon a state context, declaration of the remanded role worked with this is,nind States foreign "remotable to say that the citizen'n or neither can be included to be reason," L.J, the Stonk v. Renavated State, 3 W. Wallawoop, 547 U.S. 393, 242, 84 S.Ct. 909 (quoting Commstanit and Ingensures. Killian zothers Magharca Code And. 476 (1986) (know Milloan, individuals provides enactment of the Court creates principle than authorize points would have meant there.
The Court leaves the Court insists that a preemption of the court directly and it can every substantial role at an agency" precedent under in which the rule same-sex marriage as to reny us for correct after the States to the present district-specific proceedings."

Stuttering in Korea

2015-06-05T03:21:00.003-07:00

I had given up on English. It's my native language, but I figured after 30 some-odd years of disfluent speech, it was time to try something else. So I signed up for language classes in Korean, rationalizing that if I was going to try to teach myself how to speak, I might as well learn a new language along the way.

This might seem completely insane, but when the prevailing theme of your conscious thoughts for multiple decades is some variant of "Why can't I say what I want to say?", you come up with lots of crazy ideas.

For background, I've been a person who stutters for my entire life. I wrote about it on this blog a few years ago, so I think it's time for a followup. I've learned a lot since then, about myself and about stuttering, but in this post I simply want to give some insight into what it's actually like to stutter, and how my speech has changed over time.

After the last stuttering post, the predominant reaction I got from friends was either "I never noticed", or more assuredly, "You don't stutter". I'm what's known as a "covert stutterer", which means I'm pretty good at hiding my stutter via word choices or other tricks, but at the core, it's basically the same as the sound-repetition s-s-s-stuttering that most people are familiar with. So when people tell me definitively "You don't stutter", it's actually kinda maddening! Yes, thank you for so obviously knowing me better than me!

Now, for the 99% of you who have never stuttered, you might be curious what it actually feels like. Well, the best that I can explain it is the following: Have you ever had a nightmare where you were being chased, or there was some other impending danger, and no matter how hard you tried to scream, no sound came out? Stuttering is exactly like that, except in real life, and potentially hundreds of times per day. It's not simply "not being able to say what you want to say", it's closer to "having a mini panic attack that prevents you from saying what you want to say, hundreds of times per day". A lot of people will try to empathize with stutterers with statements like, "Oh yeah, when I'm nervous, I stutter, too", but fundamentally they're completely different experiences: when a "normal" person stumbles over some words due to nerves, it's a one-off event, and when the stressor dissipates, so does the disfluency. But when a person who stutters experiences a disfluency, it's a complicated, systemic symptom of a chronic problem.

So, there's something wrong with the connection between your speech center and your vocal cords, right? Just fix the connection and the problem disappears, right? So simple. Except no, it's not nearly that easy. Stuttering (and conversely, fluency) comes and goes in waves, both minor and major, and is also situational. Stutterers usually have no problem talking to themselves, but often trip up when asked their name. Some stutterers do fine in one-on-one conversations but can barely get a word out if forced to speak in front of a group. Others, like me, actually speak more fluently in a leadership role (presenter, coach, etc), but trip up in small conversations. I used to dread group dinners at college (where you randomly sit at a table with 6-8 of your dorm mates), because I could barely say what I wanted to say, yet I loved giving lectures as a teaching assistant. And curiously, nearly all stutterers can sing and even rap with complete fluency. But it's not merely a situational occurrence, either - there are always certain sounds that are notoriously difficult for each individual stutterer, sometimes regardless of situation.

Anyway, back to the present day. Just the other day, nearly immediately after replying to an email about an upcoming lecture I'm giving, I got hit by an unusually common moment of disfluency. I hit "Send" on the mail, then went up to the barista at Starbucks to ask for more hot water for my tea: "뜨거운 물 더 주세요" (More hot water, please). This is a phrase I've spoken countless times, yet it's always a difficult one for me, because I tend to trip up on the starting "D" sound. Yet I felt pretty good about this one since I've gotten it out fluently the last couple dozen times. But the barista caught me off guard by saying "안녕하세요" (Hello) rather than the expected "필요한 게 있으세요?" (Is there something you need?). Something broke in the chain of fluency, and the response turned into, "Um um um um um ... 뜨거운 물 주세요". The classic "um loop". In terms of what's going through your mind, though, it's something like, "Um (shit I said um) um (uh oh, why am I saying um) um (damn it, you had this) um (the barista looks worried) um (getting super embarrassed, feels like entire world is focussed on you) 뜨거운 물 주세요 (finally. thank god. man, that sucked. i totally had that!! what happened? argh. just take the water). The barista's expression briefly changed to the "foreigners suck at Korean" expression, and then she gave me my water and that was that.

Imagine knowing exactly what you want to say, yet not being able to say it. Imagine how frustrating that would be. Now imagine that frustration repeated many times per day, day after day, year after year, all the while feeling like the person that you're showing the world is not who you truly are. The thought consumes your waking hours, as literally every time you speak, you have meta thoughts about your speech (which of course makes your speech worse). You celebrate the victories, reveling in that time you had your friend in stitches with the bad date story you relayed as deftly as the best standup comic, yet you beat yourself up over the defeats, like that time you couldn't ask for water in Japanese despite knowing exactly how to say it. You wince when your friend teases, "Remember that time when you were so drunk you forgot your name?", knowing that 1) Obviously no one ever gets that drunk, and 2) Of course I remember the time, because it was incredibly embarrassing having a guy you just met make fun of you in front of a dozen people for "not knowing your own name". You build up this thing inside you, this intangible yet all-too-real foe, which sometimes disappears for months at a time, yet always finds a way to make an unwelcome return at the most inopportune of times. And you understand completely that moment in The King's Speech where King George VI and his wife are elated over his success in giving a radio speech, despite the fact that the speech was literally to lead Britain into war against the Nazis. Imagine that! You've just led your nation into war against Nazi Germany, but your overriding emotion is, "Thank god I didn't stutter"!

That is what it's like to stutter. That's how important it is to people, and how heartbreaking and frustrating it is to not be able to say what you want.

Conventional wisdom says that if you stutter into adulthood, you will be a lifelong stutterer. It's supposedly binary, and if you fix your speech as a kid, you're fixed for good, but if you don't, you're supposed to just give up hope and accept your fate. Conventional wisdom says you can learn to "control" your stutter, but not to "cure" it (I think this is one of the fundamental problems with modern stuttering therapy, but that's a different topic altogether). When I left high school, I was pretty resigned to this fate. In college, I think my speech actually got worse, and interviewing for jobs as a grad student was incredibly terrifying for me. So I was confused and delighted when, a few years after college, my speech suddenly started getting better. At one point, I actually thought I was miraculously "cured", and even volunteered myself as a research subject for an audio-linguistics lab (they told me over the phone I wasn't a stutterer so couldn't participate - ironic!). I started to speak up at work meetings, started to do better at group dinners, and just started talking more in general. I felt like I was on top of the world, and more importantly on top of my stuttering, and with just a little more effort, I would be the "normal" fluent speaker I always aspired to be. But life doesn't work like that, and although my speech had gotten remarkably better, I never actually "grew out" of my stutter. It was tamed, but it was still very clearly there, always right under the surface.

So with that as background, a few years ago I signed up for my first language class in Korea, and I was scared shitless, mainly because I knew I would be forced to speak out loud in class. Somehow I made it through high school and college speaking as little as possible in class and dreading the times when I didn't have a choice and couldn't get out of speaking. I still remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the day a kid came up to me after English class senior year of high school and asked me, with a sneer, "Why do you talk like that, with so many pauses? Can't you talk normal?" Moments like that leave an indelible wound on your psyche, as real as ending up on the losing side of a schoolyard fight. And as you grow older, you realize that most of the world never actually left high school - assholes from high school grow up into older assholes, bullies tend to stay bullies, and nervous, shameful, wounded kids grow up into nervous, shameful, wounded adults. And that wounded kid had grown so frustrated with his inability to speak his native language fluently that he decided he would re-learn how to speak in Korean.

Well, was I able to leave my stutter behind in a new language? Obviously not :). In a completely unsurprising turn of events, I stutter way worse in Korean than English. Korea also seems to be what I like to call a "hyperfluent" country - the incidence of stuttering seems to be way, way lower in Korea than most other countries (it's typically between 0.5%-1%, but anecdotally feels much lower in Korea). A potential side effect of this is that Koreans tend to give you approximately 20ms in which to initiate a response, and any delay is taken to mean that you must not know how to speak Korean (time pressure makes most stutterers stutter worse). So Korean is tough, but as I've learned more of the language, I've gotten better at putting together longer and longer phrases and sentences, sometimes even surprising myself. In fact, every language I speak has its own distinct stutter, which fits nicely with neuroscientific theories about language compartmentalization and clearly hints towards complex system-wide root causes of stuttering. Korean intonation is particularly difficult for me due to unwanted pauses I make (i.e., stuttering) during sentences, whereas my Chinese vocabulary is awful, yet since the tonal sounds are unaffected by stuttering, I've been told my Chinese is better than my Korean (it's not). My Japanese pronunciation is supposedly good, yet I don't even know enough words to effectively stutter. And compared to them all, now I feel basically fluent in English. At least until I "forget" my name or have ESL speakers feed me English words (Thanks, random guy I just met! Without your help, I may have never known the proper English word to finish that sentence.)

If you don't stutter, and especially if you know me and how I like to tell long, sometimes rambling stories, you still are probably thinking, "It's really not that big a deal". The point is that for people who stutter, it is the biggest deal. Not merely because you have a lot of "oh that's embarrassing" moments, but more broadly, for me it's because I feel like when I stutter, I'm giving people a false impression of who I am. The guy who speaks fluently and passionately about whatever - that is the "real" me, and in those moments when the "real" me disappears, I feel like a fraud to the world. Don't misunderstand, though: this post is not about wanting sympathy or pity or anything like that, because I definitely don't. It's just a brief explanation of a fascinating psycholinguistic phenomenon that I happen to be a primary observer of. It's about starting a conversation (har har), and hopefully shedding some light on a condition that affects around 70 million people across the world. And it's a reminder that the mind is a fascinating thing that we're not even close to understanding.

Learn Korean via Indie Music

2015-03-31T01:24:00.000-07:00

Korea might sometimes seem to be a ginormous, wildly successful pop music factory, but unbeknownst to most foreigners, it actually has an amazing indie music scene as well. A couple days ago, while sipping coffee and working at a nearby cafe, I heard an indie song that I used to like a couple years ago. It's also an amusing example of blatant product placement-based advertising - the entire music video is about this new phone and how it brings this couple together. My favorite is part is when the iPhone falls on the floor and breaks, so she needs to replace it with the Korean phone. Have a watch:

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to use the lyrics for a quick Korean lesson, so here goes!

Verse 1:

나 그대가 너무 좋은데 말하고 싶은데
용기가 안나
나도 그대가 너무 좋은데 말하고 싶은데
용기가 안나

Let's take a look at the first sentence, which is "나 그대가 너무 좋은데 말하고 싶은데 용기가 안나". Man, we can learn so much from this. First, the meaning:

Literal: "I want to say that you're too good, but courage does not come up." (I want to tell you that I really like you, but I can't find the courage.)

Let's break it down!

First, we can see that it's casual speech, since it starts with 나. Technically, completely proper Korean would use the topic particle (나는, or 난 for short), but in colloquial speech, particles are dropped all over the place. How do you know when to drop a particle? Basically, if the particle that you would have used is obvious and non-ambiguous, then you can drop the particle. Particles that cannot be dropped are 도 (also), 한테/에게 (to), 한테서/에게서 (from), 이/가 (identifier particle). That basically leaves the topic particle 는/은 and the direct object particle 를/을. And since sentences are often started with a topic, and "나를 그대가 너무 좋은데 말하고 싶은데" doesn't make sense, the only good choice for a missing particle here is 는.

Moving on, we have the phrase "그대가 너무 좋은데". First of all, 그대 is a poetic meaning of "you", and it's found all over poems and song lyrics. People don't really talk like this in real life, but it's important to know what it means, since you see it everywhere. Now we have the identifier particle "가". A good way to read this is "you are the one that ...", or "it's you that ...". "가" is identifying "you" as the person, out of all the choices. The person that what? The person that is "너무 좋다"!

너무 is an often misunderstood word for foreign learners of Korean. It often means "too" or "too much", but colloquially it is often used to mean "so", as in "너무 맛있어", or "it's so delicious". How do you know which meaning it is? Based on context.

The expression N이/가 좋다 literally means "N is good", but colloquially is often used to mean "(Someone) likes N". For example, "나는 삼겹살을 좋아해" is literally "I like samgyeopsal", but it's more common to hear something like, "나 삼겹살이 너무 좋아!", or "I really like samgyeopsal!". The main difference is that 좋아하다 puts a bit more emphasis on the action of "liking". It also sounds a bit stiffer than the latter example.

But, it doesn't say "나 그대가 너무 좋다", it says, "나 그대가 너무 좋은데". This construction, "-는데/-은데" (-는데 after verbs, -은데 after adjectives or verbs that act like adjectives like 싶다), is one of the most commonly used constructions in Korean grammar. It has a ton of different meanings. One common meaning is as a "softener" for the end of a sentence, and especially a sentence that is hoping for a response from the other person. Another common meaning is to link two sentences together, using the first sentence as the background for the second sentence. Luckily, in just this song's first line, we get to see both of these usages! Let's move forward just a little in order to see this.

말하다 = to say, to speak, and v.st.-고 싶다 means "want to do ", so 말하고 싶다 means "want to say". The verb stem is formed simply by chopping the "다" off the dictionary form of the verb. Other examples:

가고 싶다: want to go
먹고 싶다: want to eat
자고 싶다: want to sleep
일하고 싶다: want to work

What does he "want to say"? Well, everything previous to it in the sentence, i.e., "나 그대가 너무 좋은데". Technically, in formal Korean, he would use quoted speech, which I described in an earlier post. "나 그대가 너무 좋다고 말하고 싶은데", or something like that, but here it's completely unambiguous what he wants to say (나 그대가 너무 좋은데), and it sounds smoother and less forced this way.

Back to what I said earlier about -는데/-은데 having a lot of meanings, and there being two in this sentence alone. We have:

1) 나 그대가 너무 좋은데: Using -은데 as a softener, and hoping for a response. "I really like you ... "
2) 말하고 싶은데: Using -ㄴ데 to connect two sentences, the first being the background or setup for the second. The first sentence is, "나 그대가 너무 좋은데 말하고 싶다" (I want to tell you that I really like you), and the second sentence is, "용기가 안나" (I can't find the courage). Connecting them with -는데/-은데, it means, "I want to tell you that I really like you, but I can't find the courage." It's no exaggeration that -는데/-은데 is one of the most common ways of connecting sentences in Korean. Even if you don't quite know what it means, it's still often the right way to connect sentences, so you'll instantly start sounding more natural in your Korean. Learn it. Use it.

Finally, we're at the last part of the sentence, "용기가 안나". 나다 has many meanings, many of them along the lines of "to come up", "to come out", "to grow", "to sprout", "to arise", etc. In this case, the thing that is not arising is courage. I lifted the lyrics directly from the YouTube video and didn't edit them, but in formal Korean, the spacing is probably wrong here, and it should probably be "안 나", with a space between them. In colloquial Korean, spaces are dropped so often that it's not uncommon to see them dropped in formal Korean such as dictionaries and newspapers. It's something to be aware of, because it often trips up newbies ("What does '안나다' mean? I can't find it in the dictionary...."). Anyway, 나다 is a cool verb that's often used for both physical and emotional states, such as:

열이 나다: have a fever
화가 나다: get angry
피가 나다: to bleed
겁이 나다: be frightened

Alright, first sentence done! Luckily, the second sentence is exactly the same, except instead of starting with 나(는), it starts with 나도, so it means, "I also want to tell you that I really like you, but I can't find the courage." In real life, she could have just said, "나도" (Me too) and left it at that, and the entire context would have been implied. But this is a song, after all.

Well, that was longer than I expected. Let's see what we learned:

- Detecting the type of speech (formal vs casual)
- Knowing when to drop particles, and which particle was dropped
- Poetic terms (그대)
- Colloquial meaning of 너무 versus literal meaning
- How to say you like something (N이가 좋다)
- How to say you want to do something (v.st.-고 싶다)
- How to soften the end of a sentence, and indicate you're expecting a response (-는데/은데)
- How to connect two sentences, with the first being the background for the second (S1 -는데/은데 S2)
- Various uses of the prolific verb 나다

So, we only got through the first verse, but we learned a ton of Korean. If this was useful, next time I'll do the second verse. Until then, enjoy some Korean indie music!

A Moment of Serenity

2015-03-20T23:24:00.001-07:00

I've dabbled on and off with meditation for years. I've never gotten good at it, and I haven't put a solid effort into learning, but I find it interesting and enjoyable nonetheless. My first exposure came at a gymnastics camp during middle school, when we were led through relaxation/visualization exercises as part of the camp activities. It wasn't called meditation, probably because meditation is a loaded word that turns a lot of people off, but that's what it was.

Meditation just means being present. It means slowing down the relentless stream of thoughts that pass through the mind's eye. If you can slow down your racing mind enough to engineer a pause in the stream and a realization that you're watching your own thoughts, then you're meditating. Congratulations. There's nothing magical or mystical or religious about meditation. It's simply an awareness of your own mind and a break from the constant bombardment of conscious and subconscious thoughts.

Since I've read all about the benefits of meditation (proven by science; not just based on my personal beliefs), for a long time I've wanted to get a more regular practice going, but the easiest thing for me was to just meditate when I already had a brief period of time where I was isolated and had to sit still. Specifically, the sauna after the gym. I figured since I'm already gonna be there for ten minutes, and sauna is a good way to get into a relaxed state, I might as well make it even better and try some meditation.

Last week, I had a truly amazing meditative experience that I wanted to share. I had meditated in the sauna for about ten minutes, just concentrating on my breathing and relaxing, and it was just normal, nothing special. As I usually do, in true Scandinavian style I followed the sauna immediately with the cold tub. So I'm sitting there in the cold tub, and it was particularly cold that day, probably around 45-50F (7-10C), and all of a sudden, I noticed something interesting about the ripples in the water. I let myself explore it, and immediately all my senses heightened and I was completely enthralled by the patterns on the water. The best way I can describe it is it felt like I was high (or so I hear...). The "resolution" of the water increased dramatically, as did my other senses, and I felt supremely calm. Now, some might think this was a survival reaction to the cold water, but it wasn't. I still felt the cold. After seven minutes or so, I went back to the sauna, and immediately started exploring this meditative state. I looked around, noticing details in the wood I had never previously seen. I turned my attention to the auditory landscape, and took delight in teasing out all the myriad sounds that are always there but never really heard: the mechanical clicks and clinks of the heater, splashes from the hot tub, the sound of flowing water, fragments of conversation. I turned my attention to my skin, which was alive with feeling as the blood rushed back to the surface to heat it up after the cold tub. I listened to my heart, hearing it echo in my chest, and feeling the slight sway of my body with each beat. I felt calm, I felt happy, and I didn't want to leave.

Eventually, I showered and got on with the rest of my day, but that feeling of peace and calmness stayed through the day. I tried to replicate it the next day, and the following one, but wasn't able to. Perhaps because I was striving. Perhaps it was just a fluke.

But something stuck. The simple act of focusing your attention is something that is so easy to "forget" to do, because the mind is perfectly happy to just keep on generating thoughts during every waking moment. But this ability to stop and focus is incredibly liberating and powerful. Just the other day, I passed an abstract sculpture in front of my otherwise nondescript apartment building and realized that I had never really looked at it. For nearly a year I had passed it every day, but if asked to describe it, I would have had to dig into the recesses of my peripheral memory to remember what it truly looked like. So I just stopped and stood there for a minute simply looking at this sculpture and taking in the details. Again, I felt calm. You might laugh, but I felt like I had done something meaningful.

Look, everyone's busy. Everyone's always got somewhere to be, something to do, something on their mind. We feel like meditation is a "waste of time" because we're not doing something. But at a deeper level, I think we're afraid of stopping for a moment because we might find something inside our minds that we don't particularly like. It's so much easier to just run on autopilot and let our thoughts direct us, and many people spend their whole lives doing just that. But that sense of "being", of just non-judgmentally observing, is a truly transcendental experience that has the power to change lives.

Even if only for a second.

The Problem With "Everyone Should Learn How To Code"

2015-02-26T05:17:00.000-08:00

Every week another article comes out frantically telling us that everyone should learn to code, that coding is an irreplaceable skill in the 21st century skill set, that you can supercharge your career if you just spent 20 minutes a day for 21 days to learn how to code, or some similar nonsense. Even Obama has joined in, stating on a number of occasions that "Everybody's gotta learn how to code." While the intent is often good, I think these sentiments are dangerous for a number of reasons, but mostly because they cheapen coding and show a complete lack of understanding about what it is.

The problem with "everyone should learn how to code, just like everyone should learn how to read and learn how to do arithmetic" is that fundamentally, coding is not arithmetic. It's not even like arithmetic. It's not like reading. And by comparing coding to the fundamental skills that form the lowest possible foundational step of intellectual pursuits (e.g., you can't study comparative literature if you've never learned to read, and you can't be a mathematician if you don't understand numbers), we perpetuate the incorrect vision of coding that most non-coders have. Which is, to put it bluntly, that it's a specialized form of typing.

Nobody in their right mind thinks that taking a semester of calculus makes you a mathematician. Nobody would ever say that 20 hours of violin lessons makes you a violinist. Yet we continue to perpetuate the belief that coding is just "something that you gotta learn", and something that just a little bit of work will allow you to learn and become proficient in.

No. Not everyone needs to learn how to code. Nor is coding something that you can learn just by spending a scant bit of time.

Do I think everyone should learn what coding is about? Yeah, absolutely. Learning about coding changes the way you think in a positive way. It changes how you approach problems and how you see the world. It changes your mental patterns. Learning about algorithms and complexity theory makes you a more rigorous thinker, and this extends into all aspects of your life. Learning about the way that software engineers approach problems can help you approach problems in any sphere of life in a more logical and productive way.

But "coding" is not the same as "syntax", and this is where the disconnect often occurs.

For instance, in Korea, the general view of programming is that it's slightly above data entry, but management doesn't quite understand (nor care) why. That is, the managers decide the requirements, and they throw it over the wall to the programmers, who, having been relieved of the difficult part (i.e., determining the requirements), simply have to type it in. This is one of the reasons why there is so little respect for engineers in Korea.

The reality could not be more different. Coding is more akin to art. If I were to tell you I wanted to see a painting of a sunset behind a mountainscape, there is no one set path to follow in order to produce the end result. Similarly, given a set of requirements for the features that you desire in a product, coding is the art and science of turning those requirements into reality. There are literally an infinite number of ways that one could do so, and computer science (it's called "science" for a reason) is the field of study devoted (in part) to how to achieve this in the best way.

When Obama participated in the Hour of Code recently (which is awesome, don't get me wrong), he apparently actually spent about an hour to produce one measly line of code. That code?

moveForward(100);

Not very impressive. Does Obama "know how to code" now? Um, no. But he claims it's "not complicated"!, explaining it as follows:

"The basic concept behind coding is that you take zeros and ones, you take two numbers, yes or no, and those can be translated into electrical messages that then run through the computer…. So all it’s doing is it’s saying yes or no over and over again, and the computer’s powerful enough that it can read a really long set of instructions really quickly."

Yeah ... um ... that was a good college try. So now that you know how to code, Mr. President, can you explain to the class what actually happens when a user inputs her personal info and presses enter on healthcare.gov?

Look, coding is fundamental to the future. There is no modern hardware without software, and there is no shortage of stuff for software engineers to do. The world runs on software. But the danger of "everyone needs to learn to code" is in trivializing and misunderstanding what coding actually is. Becoming a competent software engineer is difficult work. Becoming an amazing software engineer is rare enough that there's an extreme shortage of them.

If "everyone needs to learn how to code" gets more people to try coding who would not otherwise, then that's great. But I'd rather see the initial focus be on getting people who wouldn't otherwise try coding to give it a shot, specifically women and minorities, because many of them can be amazing engineers but never even think to try.

Coding is hard. It's difficult, it's painful, and it's often frustrating. But it's rewarding, it's artistic, and it's a fundamentally creative endeavor. It is not akin to mandatory primary subjects such as reading and arithmetic.

The world needs more coders, and it needs them now. But let's give coders the credit they deserve, and let's treat software engineering like the art and science that it truly is.

English Lesson: "한국에 오신지 얼마나 됐어요?"라고 영어로?

2015-02-23T05:55:00.002-08:00

I've lost count of how many times Koreans have asked me the question, "How long do you stay in Korea?" in those words or something very similar. Clearly this question is taught in every English class in Korea, because I hear it over and over again, so I just wanted to be very clear about something here:

DO NOT USE THIS EXPRESSION. IT IS INCORRECT.

This phrase is incorrect for a few reasons, but primarily because it sounds ambiguous to native English speakers. Specifically, there are probably two different questions that you really want to ask:

1) How long have you been in Korea? (한국에 오신지 얼마나 됐어요?)
2) How long will you stay in Korea? (한국에 얼마나 있을 거예요?/한국에 얼마동안 있을 계획이에요?)

Nearly always the intended question is number 1, "How long have you been in Korea?", followed afterwards by number 2, "How long will you stay in Korea?". But the incorrectly stated question ambiguously sounds somewhere in between number 1 and number 2. So, don't ever use it again. This concludes the important part of the lesson.

---

For those who are curious, the original question sounds funny to native English speakers because of the use of the present tense "do you stay", since the intended question requires some sort of past tense. Trust me when I say that as written, this usage is incorrect. There are possible ways to make proper sentences with "do you stay", for example:

- When you come to Korea, how long do you usually stay? (한국에 오면 보통 얼마나 있다가세요?)

Until next time, happy language!

How to Gossip in Korean

2015-02-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

If I had to choose an aspect of Korean grammar that is absolutely essential yet is misunderstood or often misused by most foreign learners of Korean, it would be quoted/reported text. In other words, talking about what other people said. "She said she'd arrive by eight, but she's still not here yet." "They say it's going to be really cold tomorrow." "You asking me if I know what I'm doing?" "The teacher says to shut up and start doing your homework." Stuff like that. We use these expressions in nearly every single conversation we have, yet the way this grammar is formed in Korean is so different than English that I see many foreign learners of Korean simply give up and never learn it properly.

Lucky for you, today I'm going to teach you this grammar, and you'll find that it's really not so hard after all!

First off, forget the way this works in whatever language you speak. Because Korean is not English, it's not Spanish, it's not Chinese, etc. Those languages tend to work pretty simply:

First person: I'm going to the store at 3PM.
Direct reported quote: He says, "I'm going to the store at 3PM."
Indirect reported quote: He says he's going to the store at 3PM.

So, so easy. The only thing that changed between the direct and indirect quotes is the pronoun and the conjugation of "to be" to match the pronoun ("I am" => "he is"). Who said English is hard? ;)

Korean is a bit more complicated. In Korean, rather than simply changing pronouns, we need to affix a special ending to the verb stem in order to signify that we're reporting speech. This should come as no surprise, because the entirety of Korean grammar is built around verbs and the special endings they get. It's an agglutinative language, after all.

First person: 3시에 가게에 가요. I'm going to the store at 3.
Direct reported quote: "3시에 가게에 가요."라고 (말해)요. He says, "I'm going to the store at 3."
Indirect reported quote: 3시에 가게에 간다고 (말해)요. He says he's going to the store at 3.

Let's take a look at what's going on here. I wrote these in a way that sounds a little bit awkward, but is instructive.

Direct reported quote:

The direct reported quote is easy, and is very similar to English (which is why many English speakers use this form all the time, even when the indirect is more appropriate). It's used for reporting exactly verbatim what somebody else said. We put quotes around what the person said, and then we affix "라고" to the quote, and then add "he says", "she says", etc to finish off the sentence. Note that I put parentheses around 말해. The reason is that one or both are often left out. Just -라고 하다 literally means "does say so-and-so", so something like "3시에 가게에 가요"라고 해요 means "He says, 'I'm going to the store at 3.'" But Koreans like shortening things if they can, and since the -라고 is the important part in the construction, it's perfectly legitimate to leave off the "saying" verb completely:

Polite: "3시에 가게에 가요"라고요. He says, "I'm going to the store at 3."
Casual: "3시에 가게에 가요"라고. He says, "I'm going to the store at 3."

Indirect reported speech:

The direct quote was simple, but not nearly as useful as indirect reported speech. We almost never quote people directly unless we're acting out something that happened. We're often just naturally saying something like, "He said he's gonna be late." So, how do we form the indirect reported speech? Simply find the verb stem, add -ㄴ다고/-는다고 for verbs (no 받침: -ㄴ다고, 받침: -는다고), -다고 for adjectives (and 있다/없다, which often behave like adjectives), and -라고/-이라고 for nouns. Some examples will make this more apparent.

친구가 오후에 도서관에 간다고 해요. My friend says in the afternoon he's going to the library. Since the verb is 가다, the stem is 가, so we add -ㄴ다고 to get 간다고, and we're good to go.

Quick note on Korean grammar versus English grammar: While "says going" is totally not a valid sentence in English, "간다고" is a completely proper sentence in Korean. The only thing a Korean sentence needs to be complete is a verb. And the ending of the verb tells you how the verb is behaving. So:

간다고. I said I'm going.
간다고. He says he's going.
간다고? Did you say you're going?
간다고? Did you say he's going?
간다고? Did he say he's going?

OMG, how do I know who said what? Well, obviously we need context to understand which meaning is correct, but this is the beauty of Korean - you can express a complete, meaningful statement in one word!

Here's one with an adjective:

선생님이 숙제는 진짜 중요하다고 하셨어요. Teacher said as for homework, it's really important. (i.e., "Teacher said that homework is really important.")

Since 중요하다 is an adjective, when we strip off the -다 to get the stem, we simply add -다고 to make it into reported speech. Also, note that for the actual "speech" verb, we match the tense with the speaker. Since 선생님 is an honorific, we use "하셨어요". Note that we do not have to match the other verb with the subject, i.e., ~~선생님이 숙제는 진짜 중요하시다고 하셨어요~~.

And again, we can remove everything but the verb to form a totally valid sentence:

중요하다고! He says it's important!

And now one with a noun:

학생이라고 해요. She says she's a student.

As for the final verb, so far we've been using 말하다 (says), 하다 as an abbreviation for 말하다, or leaving it out completely since the reported speech is clear from the 다고/라고 part. But if you like flourish, you can change the final verb to any speech-related action, like "shouts", "yells", "whispers", etc.

그 여자를 많이 사랑한다고 고백했다. He confessed that he really loves that girl.

In this example, we also show how the final speech verb can indicate the tense of the actual speech that has taken place. That is, 고백했다 is in the past tense, emphasizing that he "confessed" rather than "confesses". The tense of the final speech verb can be whatever you want, e.g., "사랑한다고 고백해야겠다" (I really need to confess that I love her), "사랑한다고 고백하면 ..." (If I confess that I love her ...), "사랑한다고 고백할게" (I will confess that I love her), "사랑한다고 고백했을 때 ..." (When I confessed that I love her ...), etc. The possibilities are endless.

The reported speech verb can also take on a tense:

늦게 온다고. He says he's coming late.
늦게 올 거라고. He says he will come late.
늦게 왔다고. He says he came late.

Combining, both the reported speech verb and the final speech verb can take on tenses:

늦게 온다고 했어. He said he's coming late.
늦게 온다고 (해). He says he's coming late.
늦게 왔다고 (해). He says he came late.
늦게 왔다고 했어. He said he came late.

All slightly different nuances, but constructions we use in English all the time.

So, why is this so useful? Well, as a learner of a foreign language, unless you've got magical powers, you probably are not always 100% sure of what people are saying to you. With the indirect reported speech form, you can now confirm what people are saying by asking, "Are you saying X"?

가: 이게 뭐냐? 진짜 맛없다. WTF is this? It tastes really nasty.
나: 뭐라고? 맛없다고? What'd you say? Are you saying it doesn't taste good?

How incredibly useful is this?? First off, "뭐라고?" is now possibly your most useful Korean phrase. It literally means "What is/was said?", so if you say it to someone who just said something to you, it means "What did you say?". It's casual, of course, so be careful, but you can make it more polite by adding a 요: 뭐라고요? Or with the honorific, 뭐라고 하셨어요? So useful. But be careful with tone of voice, because it can easily be misconstrued as argumentative, as in, "What'd you say??"

The second sentence of the reply, 맛없다고?, is asking if the first person said what you think they said. Note that this is more natural than just asking directly "맛없어?", which means, "Is it not delicious?", which is a weird thing to ask when that's what they just told you.

And of course, other than simply confirming what you think people said to you, you can now begin to talk about what other people said. Time to gossip away!

Next time: Reporting on questions, commands, and suggestions. Plus more abbreviations. In the meantime, the best way to practice this amazingly useful verb form is to start confirming what Korean people say to you. And, you know, gossip about what people said, if that's your thing. :)

Triangles to Projectile Cheeseburgers

2015-01-16T20:31:00.002-08:00

Cross-posted from Medium: https://medium.com/@darrenlew/triangles-to-projectile-cheeseburgers-dfeeb9395f6

(embeds used to work in Blogger, but apparently no more. click the above link to see the post)

Race Report: We Run Seoul 10K and Season End Marathon (10K)

2014-12-12T00:18:00.000-08:00

Been awhile since I wrote a race report, so I figured since the racing season is just about over, it's past time.

First, an addendum to last season - about a week after I finished my second half marathon, I read about this guy named Martin Rees. The guy is a friggin' beast. He's over 60 but still runs a 71 minute half marathon, one of many world records he holds in his age group. I wouldn't be surprised if he has all the age group world records from 1500m through marathon within a year or two (if he doesn't already). Anyway, I'm inspired when I hear about people getting super good at something they started later in life, so I read that article, got pumped up, and less than a week after my second half marathon, stupidly went out for a long run (~9-10 miles). With less than a km till I was home, all of a sudden, my left knee really started hurting, enough to make me stop running immediately and limp home. The next day, walking was very painful. I completely stopped running in order to let the knee heal, but after three or four weeks or so, it just wasn't getting any better. After a great deal of research, I decided that the cause of the pain was a serious muscle imbalance, and since resting doesn't fix entrenched muscle imbalances, that's why the knee wasn't improving.

For background, ever since I first set foot in Asia seven years ago, people have made fun of the way I walk. It's strange how some things are noticeable immediately to Asians but not to Westerners. Specifically, every Asian culture I've encountered has told me in some slightly different way that I walk like a duck. That is, feet pointed outward. I always just thought everyone walked differently, and that happened to be the way that I walked. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that there was a reason I walked that way, and biomechanically, it's totally incorrect. Basically, duck feet are often caused by inactive glutes, along with other muscle imbalances. This is most likely the same reason my squat kept maxing out at a relatively low weight - I was overusing my quads, which are small muscles, and not using my glutes, which are huge, powerful muscles. If you develop this muscle imbalance long enough (like, my whole life), then you end up with what's called an anterior pelvic tilt, which causes all sorts of terrible posture problems and also sets you up for injury when you run.

Anterior pelvic tilt. Good for showing off the booty, but not much else.

So I decided I needed to fix this muscle imbalance before I got back to serious running. Basically as soon as I started focusing on working my glutes, my left knee started getting better. Ironically, my right knee started hurting quite a bit. But finally after a few months of dedicated work, both knees started feeling quite good, better than before, and I was able to get back to running again. The problem is not fixed - I looked back at footprints I left in the sand last month as I mindlessly walked along the beach, and was appalled to see the veritable duck prints trailing behind me - but it's much better than it was before, and I feel like I have a more solid base to work from now. I also notice duck walkers everywhere I go these days.

Enough of that for now. Onto the races!

Race 1: We Run Seoul (10K)

Last year, We Run Seoul was my first ever 10K, which I ran after a few months of Maffetone aerobic training and was more than pleasantly surprised to run in 48:58. This year, I came down with a serious cold, one of my first of the year, a week or two before the race. It was one of those annoying upper respiratory coughing colds, and I thought I might have to skip the race, but it was good enough by race day that I decided to run, despite doing very little running in the weeks leading up to the race. The race was crazy, chaotic, packed with people (about 30,000, I think). Having not done any speedwork, I actually felt like I was running fast, but when I crossed the 5K point at 25 minutes, I realized it was not going to be a great time. I finished in 50:01, which means I actually got slower over the last year. But it was fun, because it felt like a fast pace to me, and a 50 minute "base" 10K is not so bad.

Race 2: Season End Marathon (10K)

After We Run Seoul, I really wanted another shot at a 10K before the season ran out, so I signed up for a race over a month out, giving me some time to get ready. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. It was still beautiful fall weather, and I was excited to actually have some time to do a few dedicated workouts before the race.

Fast forward to the race, this past Sunday. It was 20F (-7C). Not only was it the coldest weather I've ever raced in, it was literally the coldest weather I've ever attempted running in. It's weird gearing up for a race wearing long pants, long sleeve shirt, light jacket, hat, and gloves. I ran around for 10-15 minutes before the gun, but just couldn't warm up at all. In fact, it took until somewhere between 1 and 2 km to be able to completely feel my feet. I also decided that for the first time since getting my heart rate monitor, I would run with the GPS watch but without the heart rate strap, instead relying on "feel". The great thing about heart rate training is also the worst thing about heart rate training - it's super easy to become addicted to constantly checking your heart rate. I was worried that going by feel without any training was a bad idea (you're not supposed to try anything new on race day), but I gave it a shot anyway.

The first mile came in at 7:15, way faster than the 8 minute pace from We Run Seoul. I slowed it down a bit the second mile (~7:45), because I was worried I had gone out too fast and was going to die of a side stitch before the halfway point, but I settled into a nice pace around 7:35, and felt pretty good, so kept going. At the turnaround, I looked down and saw 23:30 on my watch, which had me at PR pace. I picked it up slightly in the second half, and really started pushing in the last mile, and when I came out of the tunnel and into the stadium (the race started and ended in one of the stadiums from the '88 Olympics), I knew it was going to be good. I looked down before the final bend and saw I was at 46:10, and kicked as hard as I could to the finish, crossing in 46:28:61! A full three and a half minutes better than the previous race, and 45 seconds better than my prior best. All in all, a great race, and a great way to end the season.

----

So, where am I in terms of running? Well, I still don't really consider myself a "serious runner", although as my brother pointed out, I've run multiple half marathons, and am actively trying to improve my race times, so that probably makes me a "runner". :P Before this race, I squeaked my mileage up to a maximum of 21 miles per week, and got in 3.5 actual "speed sessions". Now I wonder what would happen if I could get up to 25-35 miles per week, and actually get through more than just a handful of speed sessions. 45 minutes definitely seems within reach now, but I'd really like to get down to 40 some day....

I like the shorter distances (5K, 10K), and will probably stick to those unless I get my mileage high enough to justify doing a half marathon. I like the feeling of moving fast, and 10K is a short enough distance that you feel like you're moving for sure. I actually really enjoy sprinting, too, and will probably throw in some sprint workouts for fun, but I have no idea if I can actually get official timings in sprint distances.

But even more important than the races, which are just arbitrary milestones that don't mean anything to anyone other than myself, it feels kinda awesome to be able to quickly cover the amount of ground that I can nowadays. The week before the race, I managed to complete my first "easy" run (i.e., average heart rate 147 bpm) 10K in under an hour, including warming up and some walking. When I started this whole thing a year and a half ago, I couldn't have imagined racing a 10K in less than an hour, let alone lightly jogging one. And during the race over the weekend, as I was flying next to the river on a brisk winter morning, I thought to myself, "Man, I feel like a better human now that I can run 6 miles in 45 minutes." Weren't we meant to be able to move quickly across the landscape? And as I returned my thoughts back to the modern era and headed down into the subway after the race, I realized that if I really needed to run another 10K right at that moment, I could do it. It would be painful, but I would survive. Just on my own, without water or fuel, wearing light clothes, I could totally run back in less than an hour. And that made me feel nice and warm and forget about my muscles already starting to get sore.

Race Report: Seoul Sinmun Marathon and Hangang Marathon

2014-06-06T02:18:00.002-07:00

You can skip this post unless you care about running/exercise physiology/silly athletic endeavors.

Back in late February, I went snowboarding for the first time in four years. It was a truly awesome weekend. Aside from getting some great boarding in, my friend and I were welcomed with amazingly open arms by a ski/snowboard 모임 (like a club), and we ate, drank, and partied merrily into the wee hours with sixty total strangers. Honestly one of my favorite weekends in Korea.

Unfortunately, the second day of boarding, I sustained a bit of a setback. Before heading up the mountain, we bought a small flask-shaped beverage for "nourishment" in the cold. I put it in one of my many pockets, and on the way up the first gondola joked that I was going to fall on the bottle and crack my ribs. As if the Fates heard me calling, on the first run of the day, I took a really nasty, really hard fall on rock hard ice and landed directly on my rib cage (probably because I'm scared of breaking my wrists snowboarding and thus didn't try to break the fall with my arms). I missed the bottle, but still managed to crack a bunch of ribs. I knew nearly immediately that I had broken ribs, but I wasn't coughing up blood, and it only really hurt when I breathed, lifted my arms, or otherwise moved my torso, so I decided to keep boarding the rest of the day.

When I got home, I knew that my exercise plan was going to have to be modified. Since I realized I probably couldn't lift weights for around six weeks minimum, I decided that instead I was going to up my cardio a bit and train for a half marathon. I put together this whole nice spreadsheet, the plan being to train for a half marathon with no more than 20-25 miles of running per week, mostly aerobic but with one day of speed work per week, and incorporating lifting back into my schedule once the ribs were healed, lifting three times every eight days. The race I was targeting was on May 24th.

The best laid plans....

Things were going great - I did a 12 mile run on April 13th, but then over the next five weeks before the race (I had to switch to a different race on 5/17), my longest run was about 9.5 miles. Not for lack of effort - just on each of those long runs, stuff started hurting, and given that I'm rather conservative with these things, I listened to my body and stopped. Additionally, all long runs were done at Maffetone aerobic pace, with literally no time spent at race pace during the long runs.

Long story short, when race day came, I had not put in adequate mileage, but hoped my fitness would carry me through.

Race 1: Seoul Sinmun Marathon. Goal time: 1:45

Race day comes, and I boldly set my goal time based on the McMillan Race Predictor. Based on my 5k and 10k times, I was predicted to run about a 1:45 half, or approximately 8 min/mi (5 min/km). When I got to the race location, I already didn't feel great. My legs felt heavy, my heart rate was higher than normal (before even starting to run), but more than anything else, the weather was hot and humid, and I had done approximately zero training in warm weather. But I went out at race pace anyway, and after only 6 km or so, I got a stitch (side cramp). As there were 15 long km left, I knew I was in for a painful day. At 8 km, the leader and I crossed paths (it was a there-and-back course, which meant he had already run 13km - hard-core), and before the halfway point, I was already taking increasingly long walk breaks at the water stops in an attempt to get rid of the stitch. Didn't work. With about 5 or 6 km left, I had cramps on both sides, and had long since adjusted my goal to two hours. And then I remembered that the second to last half kilometer was straight uphill a steep exit ramp from an elevated highway. At the bottom, I looked at my watch and knew it was going to be close, but decided I was going to run up the hill whether it killed me or not. I could already see a long procession of people slumbering up the hill like the wandering mobs of walkers in The Walking Dead, so when I started passing them, it felt great! Then I looked down at my GPS watch, and it said I was moving at 12:30/mi pace. I felt like I was flying, so I figured it must have been an error, so I looked away for a minute, then back again and it was like 12:27. Ah well. It still felt good to run up that hill and pass everyone, and then I booked it to the finish and got in at 1:59:08. All in all, not bad for a first half marathon.

Lessons learned: If racing in hot weather, you should probably do some training in hot weather. If running a half marathon, you should probably be running more than 15-20 miles per week, and your long runs should probably be 16-18 miles, unless your goal is just to finish rather than to hit a specific goal time. I was clearly unprepared for the distance and the conditions, but my fitness did indeed carry me through to a respectable finish.

Race 2: Seoul Hangang Marathon. Goal time: 1:50-1:55

Two days after the Sinmun Marathon, I was feeling pretty good and was already back at the gym doing light recovery stuff. I started toying with the idea of doing one more race before packing it in for the summer, except it was going to be a 10k. I kept putting it off until Monday, when I looked at the forecast and saw abnormally low temperatures for Friday morning (race day). Stupidly, I decided to go all in and do another half marathon, since I was unhappy with the last one. I had only run outside once in the three weeks since the last one, and just for about 10k, so I reasoned that I had actually "tapered" quite nicely for this race. Plus I've been trying to increase my sauna time after workouts recently, so I hoped I had also increased my heat tolerance.

I also decided to do a little science experiment. I have trouble with the early morning races, because I usually don't eat breakfast, but on race day you're "supposed" to eat beforehand, so I've been forcing myself to get up insanely early to eat something and hopefully have it digested before the race. But since I'm not used to eating that early, all it does is give me stomach issues. So this time, I decided I was going to skip food and just drink a bunch of Pocari Sweat (a not-too-sweet electrolyte drink) a few hours before the race. Except yesterday, when I did a dress rehearsal with the Pocari Sweat first thing in the morning, I realized that it also wasn't particularly agreeable to me - it tastes great when you're thirsty after a workout, but no good just out of bed. Thus began the great Fasted Half Marathon Experiment of 2014. I wondered - is it possible to race a half marathon in the fasted state? You're not supposed to do anything new on race day, and since I usually skip breakfast, according to that logic, I should also race fasted.

Quick background on fasting and fuel for exercise. Fuel for exercise comes from three places: ATP (used primarily for short burst high-intensity activities like 15 second sprints), glycogen (used primarily for activities in the "anaerobic zone" - like running fast enough that you're breathing hard), and fat (used for low-intensity activities, primarily in the "aerobic zone"). Contrary to popular belief, your body always uses a mix of the three - it doesn't just switch from one to the other like switching from gas to electric on a Chevy Volt. For a half marathon, glycogen and fat are clearly the main fuel sources, and out of these, glycogen is the more important one, simply because it's resource-limited: that is, you have at least 50,000 calories worth of fat on you even if you're lean, but you can only store a small amount of glycogen in your body - about 100g or so in your liver, and 400g or so in your skeletal muscles. When you hit the proverbial "wall", it means that your muscle glycogen has run out. I had always heard that "fasting depletes your glycogen stores", but it turns out that's not entirely right. Fasting depletes your liver glycogen stores, because your liver turns the glycogen back into glucose during fasting in order to keep your blood sugar stable. But muscle glycogen is only depleted when you actually use the muscles. Evolutionarily, this makes perfect sense - you want to keep the sugar in the muscles during a fast so you're strong enough to go find food in some short, intense bouts. So anyway, I reasoned that I should have just about enough glycogen in my muscles in order to finish the half marathon, although I'm not sure how much glycogen is stored in muscles used by running (running is actually a whole body activity), nor how fast it decreases during sub-lactate threshold pace, which is where I was running the half marathon. But I figured, worse comes to worse, I deplete all my glycogen, which will be interesting to experience, and I finish the rest on fat after passing the metaphorical "wall". (Note: The ratio of fat to glycogen used at a given intensity is strongly affected by your level of conditioning - better conditioned people tend to conserve glycogen during exercise, whereas less-trained people burn through their glycogen stores at a quicker rate. Additionally, the amount of glycogen that your muscles can store is affected both by your training, whether or not you fast, and your nutrition in the days leading up to the race.)

So, about 13 hours after my last bite of food, the race began. Of course, the weather forecast from earlier in the week was totally off, and it was hot from the beginning - just under 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with a "Real Feel" of 88. I forced myself to run based on my heart rate for the first half, often slowing down in order to bring my heart rate back down to my target range. The first half was quite easy, albeit hot - I hit every water stop, drinking one cup and dumping one over my head. I started to pick it up effort-wise in the second half, although I needed a large negative split to hit the 1:50 goal time (my first half was just over 57 minutes). With about 5-6 km left, I felt pretty good and decided to kick to the end. Of course, I ran my fastest km split, and then promptly had a stitch, which forced me to slow down for the next three km. I pushed the last km to the finish, and came in at 01:54:30.68. Not bad for a fasted race in the heat!

Lessons learned: If you haven't put in the necessary mileage for a half marathon, running once in three weeks and then doing another half marathon in hotter temperatures will not make it any easier. However, it is indeed possible to run and finish a half marathon while in the fasted state. That being said, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody - nearly all research points to better performance with a pre-race meal and fuel during the race. Anyway, I'm done with half marathons until I'm actually properly trained for them. Really this time. ;)

Alrighty, if you made it this far, you are truly an exercise/health nerd. Congrats, and stay tuned for my upcoming one year update on re-engineering my health!

Young People Of Korea: It's Up To You

2014-05-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

It was a clear morning on a peaceful late summer day in New York when I returned home from a pleasant jog with my Dad and found the answering machine beeping urgently with an unusually high number of unheard messages. We only got through a couple ("Where are you? Call when you get this") when another call came through, this one from my older brother. Before hello, he simply said, "Turn on the TV." The date was September 11, 2001, and both of the Twin Towers had already been struck by planes. While we dizzily tried to catch up on what had happened from both the TV newscaster and my brother, right before my eyes, I saw (on TV) the first tower just completely disintegrate and collapse.

It was a shockingly surreal moment. How could the Twin Towers just ... disappear? How could terrorists launch such a successful coordinated attack on multiple high-value targets simultaneously? The illusion of safety and security was instantly shattered, and for the next few days, we flinched every time a plane flew overhead. America was irrevocably changed on that day, and the repercussions continue to be felt.

Not long after, I was back in California for my fall semester, and at the end of a class which was as far from politics as one can imagine, our extremely soft-spoken, mild-mannered instructor informed us very simply that America was changing for the worse, the powers-that-be were entrenched and out to keep their power and money without regard for the betterment of the nation, and that it was up to us, the young people, to take the country back and build it into the nation we wanted it to be.

As the unbelievably heartbreaking tale of the Sewol ferry continues to unfold here in Korea, I find myself returning to thoughts of September 11th and how it was a watershed moment for America. But before all that, I simply find myself struggling to understand why this tragedy has affected me so greatly. And part of it, I think, is the sheer surreality of the whole event. Just like September 11th, we watched this unfold in real time, and just like the events of that day, it nearly defied belief. How completely and utterly helpless I felt watching a ferry sinking slowly enough to be surrounded by cameras and boats and helicopters and the friggin' Coast Guard and supposedly trained rescue professionals, only to watch a bunch of people pulled out of the water while the majority of the passengers were literally left to die (just seven - seven kids! - were saved from inside the boat). Even as I write this, I am overcome with anger and sadness thinking not just of the massive loss of life, but of the inescapable conclusion that it simply didn't have to be that way. There was plenty of time to save the kids on that boat, but they were sent to their deaths by obscenely inhuman cowardice and, frankly, gross incompetence.

This is Korea's September 11th. Not because it signifies the opening salvo in a war on some ambiguous enemy, but because it is a chance for change. Just like September 11th shattered the illusion of safety and security in America, the Sewol tragedy shattered the illusion that Korea is a grown-up society that takes care of its own. I've spent a fair amount of time here, and I've noted to friends on many occasions that the paternalistic nature of Korea is at times annoyingly oppressive (c.f. internet censorship) but also often quite admirable. Up until the Sewol, it really seemed that Koreans looked out for one another more so than almost all other cultures; that everyone was in it together.

But it's impossible to look at the Sewol and keep this harmonious image of Korean society intact. Instead, you see a society dominated by old rich people that control both corporations and the government, a media that can't be trusted to report the actual facts, a safety service that is both disorganized and undertrained, and corrupt businessmen who flagrantly violate regulations and treat human life as discardable.

What good is a society that doesn't take care of its youth? In America, we squandered our moment of change. Despite the sense of unity and feeling of togetherness that permeated the initial days after 9/11, rather than rebuilding a better society at home and nurturing the rare international sympathy that poured in after the attacks, we launched two wars that cost both our national treasure and our credibility on the international stage, we built a security apparatus based on ineffective theater, personal humiliation, and mass surveillance, and we've polarized politics to the point where nearly nothing gets done and long term visions are sacrificed to short term elections and the moneyed winds of corporate interests. We care so much about our youth that we'd rather give guns to the mentally ill than affordable health care to kids. We're no safer, we're certainly poorer, and many people, including myself, think we're going in the wrong direction.

We may have dropped the ball in America, but in Korea, this is your defining moment. It's up to you, the young people (or at least the young at heart) of Korea. You are the only hope. The generation running Korea has proven itself incapable. They will lie, they will cheat, they will misdirect, because the only thing they seem to care about is keeping power and getting richer. Except it's not your Korea that they're building and profiting from; it's theirs.

I saw an interview with a high school student today, and she said that the disaster had affected her greatly, and all she could do in response was study hard so in the future she could make Korea into a better country. If this tragedy inspires a whole generation of young people to feel similarly, then perhaps some good will come of it.

But make no mistake; this will not be an easy fight. Everyone is working against you. Society is working against you. They don't want you to win. But that is why it is so important to prevail. Young people in Korea need to take a hold of this country and steer it to that healthy society that we were told we already had. Young people are the creative engine of this country, the heart and soul of this country, the literal lifeblood of this country's future, but the time for waiting and listening is done. The powers that be had their chance, but they let the country down in an unforgivable way. The way forward is via the youth. And sadly, incomprehensibly, against all reason and understanding, that way is missing 300 of its own.

Defeating The Runner's Stitch, aka Letting The Bad Stuff In Is The Best Way To Destroy It

2014-04-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

I had run less than 500m in my second ever 10K road race when I started to feel it - an uncomfortableness on my right side, just below the rib cage. The beginnings of a stitch. To say that this was an inauspicious start to a race would be an incredible understatement; this was the beginning of a disaster.

A stitch is essentially a runner's cramp, and I've been prone to them for as long as I've been running. Before I became aerobically fit, I used to get stitches nearly every time I would try to run "hard". Since then, they've become much less common, but every now and then, when I least expect it, one maliciously emerges from dormant muscle memory and sabotages a workout.

Zooming back to the race, the weather was perfect - clear and cool. My legs were feeling a little heavy at the start, probably from the weightlifting session two days before, but condition-wise I should have been fine. The gun went off, and I set out about 20 seconds per mile slower than my target pace to make sure I didn't overdo it too early, yet even at this easy pace the Stitch was quickly threatening to ruin my day! I started cursing to myself, and slowed down another 5-10 seconds per mile. My mind instinctively turned to all the possible negative outcomes: I'd have to embarrassingly stop running within the first mile; I'd push through and the stitch would just get worse and worse, and I'd have to stop later on; maybe I wouldn't even finish the race at all. In fact, I had essentially just left the gates - I could simply give up and turn around.

And then, because I wanted to enjoy the beautiful spring morning, something inside of me resolved to deal with the Stitch in a completely unexpected way: I decided to embrace it. I had a little internal chat with the Stitch. I simply said, "Look, Stitch, I'm not going to fight with you. We've still got 45 minutes to go. Let's be friends instead." And then I thanked the Stitch, because he would keep me honest with my pace for the rest of the race, and I told him that together we'd enjoy the morning run.

The Stitch was thrown off guard with my offer of friendship, and started fighting back in confusion. At mile 1, he didn't know what to do. At mile 1.5, he started to kick up a little harder, but I just smiled and told him to enjoy the run, and slowed down another 5 seconds per mile. By mile 2, I could sense he was seriously considering the offer of friendship. And then between mile 2.5 and mile 3, we finally made peace, and he decided not to ruin my run. I picked up the pace for the second half of the race, and ended up beating my previous 10K PR by about 1:45.

It's impossible to navigate through life without encountering negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But how we deal with them means everything for their power over us. It's so easy to get stuck in a cycle of negative self-talk, being angry for feeling jealous, frustrated for being sad, annoyed at the fleetingness of happiness, but none of these reactions are helpful in the least. We now live in a world where we do everything in our power to just not feel bad, as if acknowledging less-than-positive feelings would be akin to admitting defeat. But distracting ourselves from unpleasant emotions just reinforces an unhealthy way of traipsing through life. Instead, we have the option of accepting and embracing sadness, despair, and pain, and by doing so, gaining control over them and getting back on the path to happiness.

Everyone knows how to deal with the good times. But how you handle the bad says a hell of a lot more about you.

And with that, I'll leave you with why Louis CK hates cell phones, because he gets it:

Thirteen Things I've Learned From Going To The Gym In Korea

2014-03-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

These are some of the things I've learned from going to a paid fitness club in Korea:

1) Gyms are friggin' expensive here. But if you're expecting Sports Club LA/Equinox, you will be sorely disappointed.

2) Everyone is so incredibly important that they need to carry their phones around with them while they workout. If a phone call comes in while running on the treadmill, it is imperative to immediately take the call outside, but leave the treadmill operating.

3) Hanging upside down is oddly considered exercise.

4) So is this strange machine with a "belt" that vibrates, but I deliberately chose a gym that didn't have one of those things, in order to reduce the ajumma quotient.

5) Korean men never, ever wash their hands after going to the bathroom. Ever. #1 or #2, doesn't matter. There's soap in the bathroom, but it never has to be replaced because I'm the only one who ever uses it. Remember that, ladies, next time you're holding hands with a Korean guy.

6) Given the obscenely disgusting hygiene fact from above, you might find it surprising that they actually brush their teeth quite a lot. Sometimes immediately after taking a dump and then not washing their hands. I'm not judging. Okay, I am. It's disgusting.

7) Shoe tying is a lost art in the Republic of Korea. Equally rare as hand washing, it seems that no adult Korean person knows how to tie their shoes, at least among men. All shoes exist in a sort of permatie, and are worn like slippers. As a corollary, everyone is very adept with a shoehorn.

8) Back to the gym: female trainers do a much better job training people than male trainers. Especially when it comes to training girls. Male trainers make girls do completely useless exercises.

9) Despite plentiful cultural mores around touching the opposite sex, many of the "exercises" that male trainers in #7 give their female clients are thinly veiled excuses to touch them.

10) I am the only person in my gym, other than the one trainer who's a bodybuilder, who seems to know what the power rack is for, and how to use the safety pins. I did see one other member using the pins once, but they were about mid-abdomen height and used as a sort of trampoline (he had placed mats over them to improve the bounce).

11) When counting reps in Korean, you can shorten some of the two syllable numbers to one (하나, 둘, 셋, 넷, 닷(-엇), 엿(-엇), 일곱, 여덜, 아홉, 열).

12) And back to the locker room: hair dryers seem to only be used for balls. Yep, I said it.

And finally:

13) In general, people are super nice and polite, and way more chill than American gyms. Never seen a meathead fight. Yet.

Running Sucks (But It's Not Supposed To)

2014-03-16T02:32:00.000-07:00

Today I jogged a 10k. It was kinda a bummer, because I was looking forward to racing, but apparently I overstressed my body the last few weeks, and ended up coming down with a cold. Since it's not worth getting really sick just to race (while already sick), I decided to go to the race and just chill. It's kinda crazy to think that a year ago, there would have been no way I'd be able to just go out and run a 10k without really thinking too much about it, let alone jog one in under an hour (with a cold). Sometimes it's nice to put the ego aside and just enjoy the weather and companionship of running alongside a whole bunch of strangers. Plus, I got to collect a new bridge!

Yet while I was running, it struck me that a lot of the people seemed to be having an absolutely miserable time. The 10k merged with the full marathon after about 1km, and it was as if we merged with a mob of zombies. People looked like they were dying on their feet. Many people were not even really "running" anymore, but were doing something more akin to shuffling. Some people groaned (I laughed to myself, thinking of the opening to Shaun of the Dead). One very intense-looking girl passed me, grunting loudly ala Monica Seles with each and every step - there were still at least five miles to go, so not sure how well that one worked out for her. Other people looked like they just wanted to give up on the side of the road and die.

Anyway, obviously it was a race, which is when people push their bodies to the limit, but I often see this too at the gym on the treadmills, and while jogging outside - so many people look like they're in serious physical pain and mental anguish when they're running! That used to be me, too - since I had no aerobic base, every time I'd run, it was a fight against stitches, burning lungs, etc. Honestly, it really sucked! And as a result, I gave up running every time I started.

This time around, I've discovered that running can be pretty fun, enjoyable, and pain-free. I totally look forward to long, slow runs now. Partially because my aerobic capacity has improved to the point where I actually can run slowly without stressing my body too much, but also because it's meditative. I get to leave my phone at home, no distractions, no music, nothing, just me and whatever landscape I happen to be passing through. I've even gotten into the habit of "collecting" the cities that I visit by going on runs while traveling (which incidentally is also a great way to combat jetlag). I had a fantastic run up the Thames to Big Ben back in December, a dangerously long tropical run in Taipei a couple months ago where I was led astray by a betelnut-chewing old man, and a jaunt around the Imperial Palace with 1,000 of my closest friends in Tokyo. Running turned into something that I enjoyed doing completely apart from any focus on the results, or "in exchange" for doing something unhealthy (you know a lot of you do that), and as a result, now I spend more time basking in these low-key runs. And having spent enough time doing that, I can also enjoy my occasional harder runs with speed work thrown in, because it's fun to go fast after spending so much time going slow, but more importantly because it doesn't feel like I'm killing my body (except for this week with the cold, where I clearly overdid something).

For the vast majority of people, running is not supposed to suck. Unless you're actually training for elite events, running should be a reasonably enjoyable activity. There's something to be said for just running all out until your body has given all it has, and I've totally been there too, but if all your workouts are like that, then all you're doing is teaching your body that running equals pain, and unless you're a masochist, your body will eventually win (and running will lose).

So, chill. =) Slow down, get some sun, breathe in some fresh air, and marvel at the fact that you can traverse across the landscape of our world like no other animal on earth.

English Translation of Today's Chosun Ilbo Kim Yuna Article

2014-03-04T21:30:00.001-08:00

Translation is hard! But I just spent a little bit of time making a rough translation of today's Chosun Ilbo's article about Yuna's homecoming party/fan meeting, because I realized that the official English translation left out some good stuff.

Note: I am 100% sure that I mistranslated some stuff, because I did this really quickly, had to look a lot of words up, and certain nuances just don't translate that well from Korean to English. But it's reasonably close. Enjoy!

~~~~~

“I've Been Tired Of Skating For Awhile … But I Don’t Have Any Regrets”

2014.03.05 03:07

(Kim Yuna’s first fan meeting after returning home to Korea)

- “Hometown decision” was absurd, but happy that everything is over
- Spine injury, but won’t affect everyday life
- Ready now to qualify for the IOC Athlete’s Commission

“A gold medal in our hearts!”, “Like a key to my life’s existence.”

On the 4th of March in Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo-gu Times Square, at the “E1 Homecoming Party for Kim Yuna”, as soon as her fan’s affectionate and endearing messages of support and encouragement came up on the big screen, “Figure Skating Queen” Kim Yuna’s (24) eyes welled up. The video was filled with witty messages like, “Kim Yuna is the only girl who can make me cry”, and “Guys beware! Aside from me, they’re all wolves”. When the three minute video ended, Yuna’s eyes were moist. “Each and every moment was touching,” she said, “and I’m truly thankful.”

170 fans were chosen by lottery to attend the day’s event. But hundreds of fans who did not receive invitations in the nearly 10-to-1 lottery surrounded the site and made the excitement that much more electric. It was the first formal fan activity for Kim Yuna since the close of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and younger Olympic teammates Kim Haejin (17, Gwacheon) and Park Soyoun (17, Sinmok) were also present.

Jun Hyunmoo, the host of the event, interviewed Yuna, asking her a series of questions in order to relieve some of her fans' curiosity. Asked if she had any regrets about figure skating, she said, “I think that I’ve done enough (in my career), so I don’t have any regrets.”

Asked if it was tiresome to look at her skates now, she laughed, “I've been kinda sick and tired of skating for awhile.”

With the close of the Sochi Winter Olympics, Kim Yuna ended her figure skating career of 17 years and 7 months. The worry among her fans that the rigorous training necessary to maintain her place at the top of the sport had broken down her body also came up. However, Yuna said, “I found out that my spine is tilted about 10 degrees to the left, but it’s not that severe and won’t affect my everyday life.”

Regarding the “surprising hometown decision” that gave the gold medal to Adelina Sotnikova (18, Russia), Yuna was calm and poised. “While I was dumbfounded, the fact that it’s all over puts me on cloud nine,” she said, adding, “I wasn’t really overly focused on the result.” About the scoring incident, Kim Haejin said, “When Sotnikova’s high score came out, I was wondering what score they were going to give to Yuna, and I was angry when the score that came out was too low.” Park Soyoun also said she is “still incredibly upset” (about the result).

Kim Yuna shared that her most memorable competitions were the Vancouver Olympics, Sochi, and the 2013 World Championships, explaining that “in all three of those competitions, I performed cleanly.”

She said that for the time being, she’d like to rest. “When you’re an athlete, each and every day is tense and stressful, so I’m happy that I can just relax and enjoy things,” she said. However, she said that there is still an ice show at the beginning of May that she is preparing for. Although she avoided answering the question of where she sees herself in ten years, she said that since she participated in the Sochi Olympics, she’s now qualified to join the IOC Athlete’s Council, and hinted that she might take on that challenge.

Afterwards, she gave to her fans autographed CDs with her performances. Said Yuna, “I’m so thankful for the steadfast support I’ve received from everyone up till now”, and “because of you (the fans), I was able to get to where I am.” As the fans cried out three times, “Yuna, we love you!”, Yuna raised her hands above her head in the shape of a heart, and the event drew to a close.

Follow Up To Health Upgrade, Part 2

2014-01-16T19:38:00.001-08:00

More stuff about becoming an aerobic beast that didn't fit in the last post.

First, a few people have asked me how much cardio I actually do. The answer might surprise you: on average, I've been doing between 2.5 and 3.5 hours of low-intensity cardio per week. That's it, and that's all it took to see the massive benefits. That's not a lot, people. I'd like to get that up to around 5 hours per week (I don't think 5 hours is necessary for health - I just want to see if my aerobic pace will improve), but it's tough to do that along with the lifting I do.

However, I do walk a ton. I live in a large city, and I love walking. My gym is a 15 minute walk away from where I live, and the nearest subway stations to me are 7 and 10 minutes away. So along with the targeted cardio, the constant movement also needs to be taken into account when analyzing your own fitness regimen. That being said, I was walking a ton before I got healthy, so while I'd say constant movement is necessary, it's not sufficient. And it's certainly lacking in the West, where we drive between parking spots that are 100 ft apart.

Another important point for me is that I use minimalist shoes (specifically, Merrell Trail Gloves, which I absolutely love). At one point a few months ago, I considered buying more padded shoes so that I could run more, but then I realized that that would completely negate the whole "better body awareness" that I mentioned in the last post. I decided that the signal of "my feet and lower legs are starting to hurt" that comes at the end of a run is actually a fantastic signal; it means that it's time to stop running. And again, since I'm healthy now and giving my body enough time to recover, the distance that I'm able to run before my feet/legs start hurting has been slowly increasing over time. Although I have no desire to run a marathon, at my current rate of progress, in about a year I should be able to healthily run a marathon in minimalist shoes.

About the minimalist shoes - I've been on the barefoot bandwagon for quite awhile (about six years), but it didn't "work" until this time around. When I first lived abroad, for four months in Tokyo in 2007, I walked around in a pair of fairly unpadded shoes. It was my first time walking a lot on a daily basis, and man did my feet hurt. Part of that was surely the newness of it all, but I think another part had to do with my health. Since I wasn't healthy at the time, my body was not reacting to stresses in as positive a way as it is now. Basically, my feet just hurt all the time. Also, when I started running again this time, after very quickly developing some Achilles pain (along with constantly sore calves), I discovered that my running gait sucked. If you're gonna go barefoot/minimalist, be very very careful, and learn how to run properly. I focus on trying to be as light as possible when I'm running, and the forefoot/midfoot strike basically guarantees me an ideal gait of 170-180 steps per minute without thinking about it. My main technique problem was not letting my heels come down to the ground naturally, and that's what caused the Achilles issues. If you're running on your toes, or you hear pounding when you're on the treadmill, you are most certainly doing it wrong.

Another fascinating change I've seen is that teaching my body to run has changed my perspective on the world that we live in. I like to think of it in terms of scale. Previously, when I was aerobically unhealthy, the scale of the world that I could thrive in was small. I could run a couple miles if I wanted or needed to, but it was fueled mostly by anaerobic energy (i.e., carbohydrates) and required immediate refueling and rehydration. Also, I was scared to death of the sun. As such, my world was small.

In contrast, one of the most enlightening things in the Kilian Jornet NY Times spread was about how he can run for hours and hours in the mountains without breakfast or even water during the run. No way, I thought. Impossible. Yet the fitter I've become, the more I understand. That 10 mile run I did in San Francisco a few weeks ago was done fasted (~14 hrs), and I didn't have any water with me on the run. Yet when I finished, I felt ... fine. A bit hungry, sure, but not lightheaded. Mouth was a bit dry at the end, possibly from the salty sea spray while crossing the Golden Gate, but I barely sweated on the run, despite being out there for nearly two hours. Essentially, if my feet weren't sore, I felt like I had plenty of energy to run right back if I really needed to.

In other words, I realized that the scale of the world I could thrive in had grown by at least a factor of ten. In less than two hours, with no food or water, I had crossed a distance which half a year ago would have been nearly beyond imagination without a car. The City by the Bay suddenly seemed a heck of a lot smaller. A similar thing happened in Seoul - if I could run between two distant subway stations on opposite sides of the city, then the whole city seemed way more manageable. What's 45 minutes end-to-end via subway if I could do the same thing in 75 minutes on foot? I started "collecting" the bridges crossing the Han, and am increasingly enthralled by the massive urban structures I run under, over, and through. This modern world of ours was not made to be traversed on foot, but if you can, it feels like you can conquer it.

Finally, the fitter I become, the more in tune with nature I feel, and the more I welcome "positive stresses" in my everyday life. For instance, cold doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to. Not only can I endure it, but I can thrive in it. I find myself seeking out small stresses, knowing that I'll come out stronger on the other side. The scientific term for this is hormesis, and it's the basis for everything from building muscles to dealing with cold temperatures to winning a battle of the wits. But again, and this is super important - you need to start from a position of decent health in order to level up via positive stresses. If your body is always on the verge of breaking down or getting sick, then throwing intentional stresses at it isn't going to make it stronger, it's just going to push you over the edge to illness or injury. But on the flip side, if your body is strong and healthy, you'd be amazed at how adaptive it can be.

What health problems can we solve by taking advantage of the body's built-in hormetic stress response combined with aerobic health, healthy diet, and mindfulness? Or maybe a better question to ask: what problems can't we solve?

Give Dennis Rodman a Break

2014-01-11T02:51:00.002-08:00

I've been watching the media firestorm over Dennis Rodman's recent visit to North Korea, and I gotta say, I'm solidly on the pro-Dennis Rodman side. This post is not satire - I seriously think the media should give him a break.

First, let's talk about the press conference. It was obvious to me from the get-go that he was drunk (which doesn't excuse anything - just an observation). His "spokesperson" should have pulled him away from the mike before he said anything dumb. But if you listen to what he did say, he actually made a reasonable point - Chris Cuomo from CNN probably doesn't know a damn thing about North Korea, whereas Dennis Rodman has actually set foot in the hermit nation four times in the past year. Yeah, what he said could easily be interpreted as implying that Kenneth Bae did something wrong, and that's why he's in prison, but what he actually said was (courtesy of CNN itself), "Do you understand what he did in this country? ... No, no, no, you tell me, you tell me. Why is he held captive here in this country, why?" It's a valid question to Chris Cuomo - how much of the situation that you're yelling about do you actually understand?

Are we really naïve enough to think that Dennis Rodman went to North Korea as a mere publicity stunt? Clearly there are way easier ways of getting PR from the safety of America. In fact, here's a good one - playing armchair quarterback for foreign policy from the CNN "news" desk and deliberately provoking outrage and putting American citizens (i.e., Dennis Rodman and his crew) in a very uncomfortable position while they're still in an extremely dangerous nation. Good job, Chris Cuomo. You think he's free to say whatever he wants while his minders and government officials watch? Would you have the balls to venture into sensitive foreign policy from a press conference in Pyongyang?

Anyway, the real reason I support Dennis Rodman is because, along with the trip by the New York Philharmonic back in 2008, Dennis Rodman's visits have been the most incredible cultural exchanges with North Korea in literally decades. Dennis Rodman is not a politician. He's not trying nor pretending to be a politician. For better or worse, he has the best access to North Korea out of everyone in America, and possibly the world. And I believe him when he talks about cultural diplomacy through basketball.

The main arguments against his visits are the usual: you're supporting a tyrant, you're legitimizing a monstrous regime, you're just being used as a PR prop, etc. And the people with this opinion will suggest the following course of action instead: do nothing. Which is why I fully support what Dennis Rodman did, because it's incredibly simple. Here's what Dennis Rodman did:

Something.

We can analyze this thing till the end of time, yet we still know so little about North Korea. In the midst of that uncertainty, without political motives, Dennis Rodman took a chance and did something. That's how humans deal intelligently with the world - they act under uncertainty and then respond to the information they attain. It's easy to sit back and yell about how interacting with our enemies is so damaging, yet deliberately provoking them and/or avoiding contact is somehow better? Obama got the same treatment from the conservative media back in 2008 when he said that he would meet "rogue leaders" without preconditions. The right was all over that. Same thing every single time he's bowed to a foreign leader or dignitary (the Saudi Arabian King, the emperor of Japan, the President of Mexico, the President of Cuba, along with a few others). Now the same people are having a hissy fit because Dennis Rodman bowed to Kim Jong Un. What would you suggest as an alternative? Is it better to go into an unfamiliar country with unfamiliar customs and just do whatever you feel like, and deliberately not show respect to that country's people and leaders? Have you considered the possibility that one can be respectful without automatically becoming subservient?

Learning about other cultures brings the world closer together and makes it a better place. That goes for North Koreans (even if they're the hand-selected elite) interacting with American basketball players, and it goes for Americans (even if they're strangely dressed heavily tattooed former basketball celebrities) meeting with the leaders of our sworn enemies. I have a very hard time believing that middle aged basketball players playing a few games with North Koreans is somehow endangering the fate of Americans in North Korea, or the tenuous relationship itself. It's just basketball, man. You gotta start somewhere.

So with that, I'm with Dennis. Way to go, man. What you did really was historic.

Just one thing - please, please, try not to sing anymore.

Peace.

Follow Up To My Health Upgrade

2013-12-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

It finally happened - I got a cold. For the first time since I drastically reengineered my health half a year ago, I found myself coming down with something. Since temporary setbacks are often a good time to judge your progress, I decided to take this opportunity to write an update on my personal journey through health and fitness reinvigoration.

Last time, I wrote about how low-intensity aerobic training had completely upgraded my health. My sleep schedule normalized, my digestive issues completely disappeared, my energy and mood both skyrocketed, and I generally felt "good" for the first time in my life. Since then, I've realized just how drastic a change I've actually made, but the real eye-opener is that I had never seriously considered that there was anything wrong with me - although my baseline was shitty, I never knew anything else, so I just wrongly assumed I was normal. Well, there is nothing normal about getting cold after cold in the winter, having one slowly improve but never quite disappear, only to tail right into the next one. For as long as I can remember, every single year I would come down with an upper respiratory infection that would last at least a month. This made training (gymnastics) difficult, because you're constantly coughing and can't get enough air. This literally happened every single winter, and I stupidly assumed that I was just susceptible to bronchitis/URIs (which I was), and there was nothing I could do about it. In retrospect, that seems completely ridiculous. Young, "healthy" people should not be sick for over a month every winter!

So back to that cold. After three weeks of round-the-world travel, consistently less than ideal food choices, holiday stress, sleep deprivation, and a ton of baby visits, I woke up jetlaggedly early last Friday on a fine San Francisco morning and decided to go out for a run. I ended up running a little over ten miles, from SoMa to Sausalito. That was my longest run ever, and I followed it up later that day by seeing a few different groups of friends, drinking plentifully with each group. The next morning, I woke up a bit congested. I met a friend at the gym, got a quick workout in, and noticed that the congestion wasn't going away. The next day, I was still feeling kinda congested, and only got a couple hours of sleep in due to more visits and an early flight the following day. I woke up that morning, finally decided I had a cold, and was lucky enough to treat myself to 14 hours of unadulterated luxury flying across the Pacific in United Economy while listening to a small child across the aisle scream incessantly throughout the entire flight.

Now, I know some might disagree that I actually had a cold, but that morning of the flight I know that's what it was based on how I felt. Except in contrast to every single cold I've ever gotten previously in my life, my immune system fought this one off like a friggin' champ. I never got sluggish. I never "felt like shit". No sore throat, which accompanies most of my colds. I never had a cough, or anything even approaching an upper respiratory infection. Heck, I even started feeling better on the flight! For the first time in my life, a cold left me with zero downtime and really not very much unpleasantness. Sure, it's possible that I coincidentally caught a really light cold for the first time ever, but it's also possible that coincidentally my health just magically got better at the same time I changed my diet and exercise. That's the problem with anecdotal stories like mine - they're experiments of one, and it's impossible to rule out chance.

In any case, I can now visualize the strength of my immune system pretty well. I think of it like a gauge, where 100% is "fully healthy", and 0% is "completely broken and sick". The stresses that you place on your body deplete your immune system and bring the gauge down. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, if it's "good" stress - in fact, stress is necessary to get stronger, as long as you give your body time to recover. So when I lift heavy things, that's good stress. When I drink too much alcohol, that's also stress, albeit bad stress. When I'm stressed, that's additional stress on the immune system. Sleep deprivation - more stress. All these things make the bar go down. But now, since I have a normal immune system, the bar fills back up quickly. Eating good foods fills it up even quicker (I specifically go for lots of vegetables, and bone-based soups such as seolleongtang, galbitang, samgyetang). Getting quality sleep fills it right back up. Basking in the sun tops it off. And another thing I never expected - the low-intensity aerobic exercise that I focus on (with heart rate down in the 180-age range) seems to be rejuvenating for me. It's healing. And if I don't get enough of it, I don't feel quite right.

In case you're interested in fitness specifics, last month I ran my first 10K ever. Before the race, I had done less than an hour total of "speed work". I don't mean in the week prior - I mean since I started doing low-intensity running six months ago. About two weeks prior to the race I did two minutes fast, eight minutes "aerobic" intervals for an hour or so, and then the Monday of race week I did five minutes fast/five minutes "aerobic pace" intervals for about 8K. That's it. I knew my approximate "fast" pace from the fast intervals, and thus set my goal time at 50 minutes, despite having no idea if I could actually maintain the pace for that long. I ended up finishing the race in 48:58, which I was incredibly happy with. For point of reference, in April I ran about 5K in San Francisco during a training run (pre-Maffetone) in about 31 minutes, and I felt like crap and ended with an awful stitch in my side. The improvement from that to a sub-8 minute mile pace for 10K in such a short amount of time is pretty mind-blowing to me. I'll take it.

Back in that original post, I stated that I thought my cardio capacity was "somewhere near average". Now I am quite certain that it is well above average. This is evident not just from the race, but from the way I feel in general. I feel exactly like how people who live at altitude describe going down to sea level: it feels like I have more oxygen at all times, and that it takes less oxygen to do everything. I'm certainly not running up mountains yet, but I can at least imagine it now. And contrary to conventional wisdom, my muscles didn't "melt away" from focusing on cardio - in fact, all of my lifts are currently at new maxes, despite barely lifting for the first four months of the new training (I was doing one day a week of light maintenance work), and losing weight from when the previous maxes were set. Improved cardio makes lifting easier, because I recover faster both in the gym between sets and also in the regular post-workout recovery period. Everything works better this way.

In general, though, one of the best changes that has come with my improved health has been a much greater body awareness. As I've gotten healthier, I've gotten more sensitive to how my body feels, what state of recovery it's in, how different foods affect it (e.g., the Standard American Diet makes me feel awful and lethargic, and after two weeks in the States, my mile pace had slowed nearly a minute per mile at my aerobic heart rate) and so on. All of which begs the most important point - health is an individual initiative, and works differently for everyone. Too much of health and fitness advice tries to give people a "routine" to follow, and they feel that as long as they follow it to the letter, they'll get results. But it doesn't work like that. There is no getting around the fact that you need to listen to your body, and you need to listen closely. I now have a much better sense of when I'm headed towards overtraining, and as soon as I am, I pull back and simply rest. And I feel no guilt at all, because since I am finally healthy, I know that my body will recover and come back stronger than it was before. Whereas before, I knew that there would be a very long asymptotic return to baseline, perhaps never reaching it.

So, where to go from here? On the health side, I'm going to keep pushing my body with lots of low-intensity cardio, but augmented with more heavy lifts and sprints once the weather warms up. There are also a multitude of literal mountains I can't wait to climb, because I know I have the energy and fitness to easily do so. This health change has been one of the most important things I learned this year, and it has been an amazing adventure combing through the research and discovering how connected so many modern health problems are. It's incredible to me how short-sighted the traditional view of health is, when in reality it's holistic and based on the complex interactions of huge systems. Now I'm left wondering how long it will take to undo the effects of three decades of poor health. Whatever the case, I'm certainly not going back to the old life, cause the new one just feels too damn good.

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

2013-11-29T19:33:00.000-08:00

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else:

1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. "banchan" (반찬)

Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang, or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of banchan, based on the thousands of different vegetables, herbs, and wildlife found on the Korean peninsula, and the sheer diversity means that you will never get bored eating Korean food.

Mmm, banchan. Lots of banchan.
From http://nulsan.net/477

2) Paper crafts, a.k.a. hanji (한지)

I had heard talk of hanji for quite some time before I visited Jeonju and discovered what it really is. Essentially, hanji is traditional Korean paper. Paper? What's so special about paper, you might ask? Well, it's actually pretty darn amazing what they do with the stuff. Aside from the obvious use as a writing surface, hanji in its most interesting form is essentially a fabric that can be blended with other materials such as silk to create beautiful clothing. Some hanji dresses from a designer I like, 전양배:

전양배 hanji fashion show in Beijing.
From http://onbao.com/news.php?mode=view&num=39494

3) Cold weather fashion

Seoul gets coooooooold in the winter, but compared to other cities, Seoul's women don't let sub-arctic temperatures temper their fashion sense. No sirree. Korean girls are hard core when it comes to going out in cold weather. Whereas other cold winter cities (New York, Beijing, San Francisco in summer, etc) will see people bundled up as though they're setting out for a trek through the Siberian wilderness, Seoul's winter fashion is characterized by ... well, mostly the same fashion from the rest of the year, except sometimes with leggings. Through some rigorous observational research, I've determined that the approximate temperature at which girls will switch from bare legs to leggings is around -7 or -8C, although there is always the occasional outlier wearing miniskirts without leggings all the way down to -20C. Hard core, my friends. Hard core.

4) Mass-produced pop music

I used to not be a very big k-pop fan, but over time it's grown on me. The most impressive aspect? The sheer efficiency and output of the industry. The major producers sign the talent really young and train them nonstop to be pop stars. It's an intensely cutthroat system - if you speak up in dissent, you're just replaced with another cookie cutter pop star - but it's hard to argue with its effectiveness. K-pop is strong and popular in most of East and Southeast Asia. The New Yorker had an interesting article on k-pop production awhile back. The redeeming aspect of k-pop for me is that there actually are some really talented musicians in there. Ailee (에일리) and Hyorin (효린) are two that come to mind, and of the major girl groups, 2NE1 has the most unique sound and look. On a side note, Korea also has an amazing indie music scene, and it's quite sad that it's so overshadowed by the factory-produced k-pop. But if you look for it, you will be pleasantly surprised.

Still from 2NE1's new music video for 그리워해요 (Missing You)
From https://www.facebook.com/2NE1/posts/582209398494925

5) Hierarchy

Social hierarchy is stronger in Korea than anywhere else I've seen. I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that South Korea does it better than anywhere else. Literally every interaction in Korean society is at least partially dictated by hierarchy, and everyone knows their role. Eonni (girl's older female friend/sister), oppa (girl's older male friend/brother), nuna (guy's older female friend/sister), hyeong (guy's older male friend/brother) - these are just the beginning. Birth year, class year, school year, junior/senior at work, etc. The extremely strict adherence to hierarchy makes for a culture where everyone knows what to do and how to act because of societal scripts, but comes with all the problems one might expect of a culture where everyone knows what to do and how to act because of societal scripts.

6) Building really big things

Most people don't know this, but Korea's heavy industries are the world's best. Guess who built the Burj Khalifa? Samsung Construction and Trading. Taipei 101? Samsung again. Petronas Towers Tower Number 2? Also built by Samsung. Make no mistake about it - Korea is the world leader in building really big things. Not content with simply making "tall" skyscrapers, now Korea is going for more challenging things like "invisible" skyscrapers. And aside from skyscrapers, everyday construction in South Korea is astonishingly fast and astoundingly high quality. It's not uncommon to leave for the weekend and come back to find a completely new restaurant where a few days before there was a convenience store or cafe. South Korea also dominates at shipbuilding, although China is a huge player there as well.

7) Economic development

Starting in the early 60's, South Korea's economy developed faster than any other country in the history of the world (although China is now doing the same thing). This was the result of focussed government-directed economic development unlike any seen before. Sure, a good deal of the growth came from "fast-following" their neighbors to the east, but give credit where credit is due - South Korea's economic development was the result of massive work and effort on the part of South Koreans. Now South Korea is essentially the most developed country in the world, thanks to a few decades of blistering labor and growth. Was it worth it? Many Koreans have suggested to me that the country was a happier place back when it had the world's lowest GDP.

8) Public transit

Korean public transportation is amazing. The Seoul metro is cheap, fast, and blankets the city and surrounding areas. And where the subway doesn't go, busses do. From small town bus to aggressive intercity express bus, Korean public transit goes everywhere and won't break the bank. Not only that, it's safe and super clean! Just watch out for the pushy ajummas.

Also fitting loosely under the public transit category, last time I went hiking up in the Bukhansan mountains north of Seoul, I was amazed to discover that the exquisitely well-maintained hiking trails are actually part of the official road system - they have numbers and "road" signs just like the highways! Super cool.

Now that public transit is solved, here's hoping that South Korea goes on to build the first Hyperloop.

9) Phonetic script

Hangeul (한글) is the phonetic script that Korean is written in. Koreans are proud of it, and I'm here to tell you that their pride is entirely justified. Hangeul is simply the best phonetic alphabet on the planet. Sure, there are a few exceptions that need to be memorized, but compared to the disaster that is English spelling, hangeul blows away the competition. Learn how to read in less than a day! Aspirations and glottalizations are built directly into the script! Each character comprises exactly one syllable! Beautiful design.

To be fair, when Korea switched from Chinese characters to hangeul, they introduced ambiguity into their writing system. I think the ideal writing system for Korean would use hangeul for pure Korean words and all verb conjugations (i.e., the entirety of the agglutinative awesomeness that is Korean), and use Chinese characters for all words derived from Chinese (한자어), but of course that would make it a lot more difficult to learn and read.

10) Change

The final thing that South Korea does better than anywhere else is change. When South Korea decides to do something, they can achieve that change seemingly overnight. Before the iPhone came to South Korea in 2009, there were no "smartphones" (except of course for the numerous "dumb" phones that made video calls and played TV as early as ten years ago). Within a year, smartphone penetration was among the highest in the world. This is why I'm confident that South Korea can grow into its potential - despite all the obstacles and problems that would accompany any country after five decades of breakneck growth and modernization, the national eagerness to change is a strength that can lead South Korea into a brighter future.

So, with that I'll conclude my somewhat random list of ten other things that South Korea does better than anywhere else. Hope you enjoyed. Until next time!

Is It Worth It To Learn Korean?

2013-11-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

Learning Korean as a non-Asian foreigner is an exercise in masochism. Note that I specify "non-Asian". Why does that make a difference? Simply because Koreans possess a deeply-ingrained belief that non-Asians are incapable of speaking Korean. The self-fulfilling prophecy of it is that since Koreans expect you to be incapable of speaking Korean, due to this mental block, they are likely to not understand you regardless of your proficiency level. Additionally, they won't respond to you with normal Korean like they would respond to an Asian person, because they assume you couldn't possibly understand. You will rarely ever have an opportunity to hear natural Korean, because Koreans simply won't speak it with you unless 1) they are open-minded and awesome (meaning they have probably lived abroad - thank you to all of you), or 2) they have known you long enough that they've gotten past the odd sight of a foreigner speaking Korean.

In short, nearly every time you open your mouth and Korean comes out, you will be treated like a child or a circus monkey.

As a foreigner speaking Korean, you will begin every conversation the exact same way. Regardless of what you say, you will hear, "한국말 잘 하시네요!" - your Korean is very good. Every time I see a certain 할머니 in my building and say hello to her, she comments on how I "even know how to do greetings properly". That is, she is impressed with my ability to say hello. If you think this is a one-off thing, it's not. It is often difficult to move beyond this subject to what you actually want, because people are so caught up with the novelty of foreigners speaking Korean.

My Korean has gotten to the point where I sometimes think it would be better if I didn't know any. It throws people off that I can have difficult conversations. They simply don't know what to think about me, and in a society with such strongly defined thought patterns learned since birth, I think it miserably confuses people that I can converse in 우리말 ("our language"), because as a foreigner, I am not part of the 우리. I'm not part of the "we". Yet I understand the nuances between different verb endings, and I use the proper formalities when I speak.

Yet still, after conversing for awhile in Korean, I very often get asked if I can read and write Hangeul. The written language is literally the most well-structured phonetic alphabet in the world, taking less than a day to learn how to read, and people are amazed that a foreign mind could possibly comprehend it. This is a variant of "Wow, you're really good at chopsticks", and it's incredibly insulting. These micro-racial insults wear on you over time, and no matter how good you speak the language, you are never actually speaking the language - you are simply performing a trick.

I've gotten good enough at Korean that I'm offended when people use incorrect formality levels with me (i.e., when they talk "down" to me in situations where they would speak respectfully to a Korean). The first time I found myself offended, I was surprised at myself. But I realized that the language is not just a way of expressing ideas - it's a method of conveying culture and societal nuance. This was also around the time that I started "accidentally" using proper honorifics without thinking about it. Of course I still screw up from time to time, but I "get" it. Honorifics are more than simply habit. They convey a certain level of familiarity. In the same vein, I love when younger girls call me 오빠, because it means they've accepted me into a familiarity level normally reserved for Koreans. (On the flip side, when younger guys call me 형, it's almost always because they want me to buy something for them. I'm not dumb.)

So despite all this, despite all the pain and ridicule and incredulity and feigned misunderstanding, is it worth it to learn Korean? Absolutely, without a doubt, yes. Learning any language connects you with the culture in a way that nothing else can. Reading native literature allows you to peer into the collective mind of the culture that created it. Besides, what better way to give the finger to culturally-instituted racism than to be one of the few people that can understand the language swimming around the minds that comprise that culture?

Language is culture. Culture is language. There's no way around it. Koreans are protective of their language because they're protective of their culture, and given their history, it's not unreasonable to see why. However, you can't guard language, at least not very effectively, and the Korean language is a treasure that should be shared widely. Sharing is strength, because it stems from openness and vulnerability, while protectionism and racism are weakness stemming from fear. I look forward to a day when Koreans are eager to share their language and culture widely and without preconditions. Until that time, I'll keep reading my 만화, keep composing terrible Korean poems, keep singing my Korean karaoke, and I will undoubtedly give you a nice, big smile when you comment on my incredible ability to say hello. I am a monkey, after all.