Basic Stupidity

Instead of “buying” Windows from Microsoft, a South Korean software company is making its own version of Windows.

It’s called “TMax Window 9” and both and the name and the packaging were clearly designed to bear no relation whatsoever to Microsoft products.

I can’t help but be reminded of the last time Korea struck out on its own, with the SEED encryption standard in the 90’s, which is ubiquitous in Korea and precisely nowhere else. Judging from the craptacular ActiveX controls which are necessary to do everything (a large proportion of emails I receive are unreadable, because the message contains no more than the HTML code for a webpage that requires ActiveX to view), as well as the batshit-crazy text encodings used for text…I am not at all convinced that any Korean software company can pull off a complete and operational Windows clone.

My guess is that it will be popular on nationalistic, and not technical, merits. People will buy it or pirate it simply because it’s completely Korean; government offices might be it because it supports the Korean economy—and these things will be completely independent of whether this TMax Window operating system actually works worth a damn.

My guess is that the OS gets no traction whatsoever outside of Korea. But I am glad to see another attack on Microsoft’s monopoly.

I’m still not really sold on whiteboards over chalkboards in classrooms, since I’m not sure students are well served by boards that are difficult to read, have lots of glare, and by watching professors waste their time trying to find a non-used-up marker. But in an office, they seem much better.

Which is why I think I want every bit of wall in my office covered in whiteboard paint. There’s other stuff, but it may not be as good, although it’s much cheaper.

I’m currently working on a paper that will be included in a special issue of a journal for my advisor’s 60th birthday. Today I realized that it might be getting too long when I thought maybe I’ll just put this section of material in an appendix. When a regular research paper gets an appendix, the paper might be too long. Er.

(Of course, I think the usual strategy taken by someone at this point in his or her career is to yank out any stuff that makes it the paper too long and simply publish another paper, since for me right now, number of publications is critical. Publish or perish, you know.)

I watched the classic Studio Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro” this evening. A couple notes:

• Watching a children’s movie the night after watching Oldboy creates no small amount of cognitive dissonance.
• (If you’ve seen it.) You know how there’s the soot gremlins when they first move into the house? I was baking bread during the movie, but it burned. Really burned. To the point where bits of it were literally sooty. That’s right, the soot gremlins left my laptop and caused my bread to become sooty. And now I don’t have any fresh bread to eat. Stupid soot gremlins.

I should add that, if you haven't seen Oldboy, don't go looking up the plot, since I'm sure you'll find synopses that totally give it away (Wikipedia, for example). I watched the movie knowing nothing more than it's a famous Korean movie, which is definitely the best way. It's a screwed up, violent movie about vengeance, and it's really good. That's all you really need to know.

Just this morning, I read a post on Ask A Korean [about the word “oriental” as used to describe Asians] and to what extent it’s equivalent to other racial slurs. So I was amused when I noticed on the KAIST library website (whose entire site is utterly unlinkable—it’s all one big Javascript/PHP thingy) the “Request A Book” form asks you to choose a “book classification”. The choices are “Domestic”, “Oriental”, and “Western”.

I suppose there is some logic to having “Oriental” and “Western”, though, since orient originally meant “east”.

Also, on the subject of libraries, Awful Library Books is a fun blog. Growing up in rural central Wisconsin, I witnessed the phenomenon that the blog is founded in every library I visited.

Wow, I baked some bread yesterday.danae has the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book (written by two people from the Twin Cities) and it seemed really easy—there’s no kneading, no punching down, no let rise until this or that. Anyway, I mixed up the dough on Thursday night and baked a loaf last night. Using our little toaster oven was a challenge, since the temperature control is probably way off, and we don’t have any real sort of baking stone. The result, though, is very tasty, although I can tell that the crust didn’t come out quite right—it’s too spongy and chewy in places.

However, as you can see, the end result was good enough so that I ate half of it before thinking to take a picture:

It’s looking reasonably likely that a couple friends and I will start homebrewing here after summer. There’s a website here that has all the basic equipment, but apparently their selection of hops and malt is pretty limited.

So, while I’m in the US, I plan on visiting some homebrew places and picking up some stuff (and hoping that the Korean customs people—who on the whole, know zip about beer—don’t get the wrong idea about pelletized hops).

Anyway, I was disappointed to see that Zymurgy Outfitters has gone out of business. That’s a great name for a homebrew store.

I’m traveling to a conference in Austria later this month, and KAIST is giving me some money for this. I’m not sure how easy it will be to get them to actually give me the money, though…I paid for my flight with a US credit card, so that bill is in dollars, and the conference gives the registration and hotel fees in euros—but I paid for the registration fee with a Korean credit card…but I don’t have a copy of the statement, since they email the statements to me and it’s all unreadable HTML/ActiveX stuff.

In my experience, the university accounting people who are responsible for reimbursing grant money are not known for being flexible, understanding, or having comprehensible rules. We’ll see if I can get them to pay me.

(A separate issue is that the exchange rates are terrible right now, so just paying for registration and flight will take up almost all the money I budgeted for this, and I’ll have to pay for the hotel (€34 a night for 9 nights) and food by myself…with Korean funds, at about 1800 won to a euro. Ugh.)

...you are eating pancakes with real maple syrup and drinking Moosehead beer.

We are in Yeosu, a small city on a peninsula on the south coast. One of our friends in Daejeon used to live here, and is good friends with a Canadian guy who throws large Canada Day parties. He also is opening a bar and I am posting this from the about-to-be-opened bar while people eat pancakes and bits of construction get finished. Good times.

Last fall I started reading some of Haruki Murakami’s novels, starting with Kafka on the Shore , which is a novel in which one of the main characters can make it rain fish.

Well, recently it’s been raining tadpoles in Japan. Crazy.

So today I ran across the following citation while following Tom Lehrer’s advice on success in mathematics:

N. I. Fuss, Solutio quæstionis, quot modis polygonum n laterum in polygona m laterum, per diagonales resolvi quæat. Nova Acta Academis Sci. Petropolitans 9 (1791), pp. 243–251.

Looking around further, I found a cluster of papers all with precisely the same citation. Ack. I hate it when this happens: a certain reference gets copied over and over and probably no one has ever looked it up; they just cite it because everyone else is citing it.

Well, I wanted to find the paper to discover whether people were just citing it so they could look all cool and stuff, citing something in Latin from the 18th century, or whether they were citing it because the paper was relevant and interesting. Unfortunately, the major math article indices only have articles from about 1810 or so, but perhaps I could find a library that has microfilm or something and get a paper copy made for me. I go about searching.

Nothing comes up. I search for the author—whose name is a common English word—and can’t get anywhere, although I can find out who he was easily enough. No results for the journal, which is strange, because I quickly realized that Euler published most of his work in that journal. When you cannot find the journal in which the most prolific mathematician ever published most of his work, something is fishy.

Finally I started searching for information on the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (which is what I puzzled out from “Academis Sci. Petropolitans”) and, working backwards to journals published by that organizations, found this page from the Euler archive and learned that some doofus screwed up the Latin: the journal’s title is Nova Acta Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae. I’ve forgotten nearly everything from my year of Latin in high school, but I do remember that noun declension is terribly important and you can’t just go around changing “ae” into “is”.

It’s like genetic mutation. Some bit of transcriptase comes to work hungover, copies some DNA incorrectly, but then afterwards the newly-mutated DNA gets copied—and if the change is relatively harmless (like massively misspelling the journal’s title), it sticks around. Well, I’m going to find a way to cite this article correctly and include a snippy little note about all the other incorrect citations.

Anyway, armed with the correct name of the journal, I quickly find not just a copy of the table of contents for that volume but the entire volume itself! Screw getting a microfilm copy from some library—here’s the actual article available from Google Books, via the New York Public Library!

(BTW, check out Euler in the table of contents —his articles in that issue take up pages 3 to 165.)

So on July 22nd, there will be a total solar eclipse that will narrowly miss Korea. The entire peninsula, though, will get a pretty good partial eclipse.

Unfortunately, I will be…in Europe.

But mark your calenders for August 21, 2017! That solar eclipse will cross the entire continental US and I certainly want to see it.

Here at KAIST they don’t seem to be very good at email. Two examples from this week:

The first one was receiving this message:

Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:49:07 +0900
From: KAIST 메일 담당자 <mailadmin@kaist.ac.kr>
To: my kaist.ac.kr address
Subject: [주의] 개인정보를 요구하는 피싱메일 경보

안녕하세요. KAIST 메일 관리자 입니다.

최근 개인의 Email정보와 비밀번호등을 요구하는 피싱메일이 KAIST 구성원
들에게 전달된것을 확인하였습니다.

내용은 아래와 같습니다.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|제목 : VERIFY YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT                                    |
|                                                                    |
|내용 :                                                              |
|VERIFY YOUR "KAIST.AC.KR" EMAIL ACCOUNT.                            |
|                                                                    |
|Dear kaist.ac.kr Email Account Owner,This message is from           |
|kaist.ac.kr                                                         |
|messaging center to all kaist.ac.kr email account owners. We are    |
|currently                                                           |
|upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting  |
|all                                                                 |
|unused kaist.ac.kr email account to create more space for new       |
|accounts. To                                                        |
|prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below  |
|so that                                                             |
|we will know that it's a present used account.                      |
|                                                                    |
|CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOW                                   |
|                                                                    |
|Email Username: ...............                                     |
|EMAIL Password: ................                                    |
|Date of Birth: .................                                    |
|Country or Territory:...........                                    |
|                                                                    |
|Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account  |
|within                                                              |
|Seven days of reading this warning will lose his or her account     |
|permanently.                                                        |
|Thank you for using kaist.ac.kr!                                    |
|                                                                    |
|Warning Code: VX2G99AAJ                                             |
|                                                                    |
|Thanks,                                                             |
|kaist.ac.kr Team                                                    |
|________________________________________________                    |
|                                                                    |
|Message sent using GamCo                                            |
|WebMail                                                             |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

발신자는 [1]tharien@gam.co.za 로 되어 있는 메일입니다.

이와 같은 피싱메일은 상당히 교묘하게 정상메일처럼 내용이 작성되어 있기
때문에 사용자 분들의 보다 높은 주의가 필요합니다.

앞으로도 이러한 메일을 수신하시면 진위여부를 확인하신후 처리하시기 바
랍니다.

감사합니다.

Brilliant. As far as I can tell, this is an authentic message, and it seems to have been copied from a typical spam / phishing email. I responded, asking if perhaps their system had been compromised by a spammer. No response yet.

The second one came today. It’s some kind of message about a mistake in our insurance witholding on this month’s paycheck. Naturally, this is a message that was send to many people, and the sender wisely (attempted) to use the bcc field for the addresses. Unfortunately, his mail client or mail server (I think it’s the default KAIST webmail client)…included the bcc field, making the blind carbon copy not terribly blind at all. There’s roughly 1500 email addresses there. God help us (and the KAIST email servers) if someone hits “reply to all”.

I’m watching the anime series Death Note right now—which I highly recommend, it’s really good—and in the last episode I watched, one character’s cell phone rang. It had a song clip as its ringtone. What song was it? The series’ opening theme song.

I thought it was a nice bit of branding/marketing.

The series is about a high school student who is extremely smart, and is extremely bored. He finds a Death Note, which allows you to kill anyone by simply writing their name in the Death Note (while thinking of their face, so that you kill the right person). He starts killing off criminals, and the police start looking for him.

There’s a lot of interesting character conflicts, cat-and-mouse games, and scheming. And megalomania, of course. There’s 37 episodes, and starting at about episode 10 it starts taking a lot of unexpected plot twists. I am totally hooked. I recommend not reading about the plot too much and simply watching it.

Right now danae is making what can only be described as fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

They are really good.

The planets swing around the sun; winter follows autumn, spring follows winter; submit grades on Friday…receive complaints on Monday.

I actually received a text message from a student, asking me to check my email. The text message was sent at 12:45, as I was returning from lunch. I had left for lunch at noon. Seriously, who the hell expects people to check their email during lunch hour?

So far the complaints seem to be garden-variety whining, which of course is a bit annoying, although I am sympathetic to some of the arguments— in a basic big lecture class here, your grade is largely determined by two events: the midterm and the final. If you do okay on the midterm, you can start studying harder, but you don’t have any idea of how much the helps until you receive your final grade, at which time it’s too late to change anything.

One wrinkle to this is that KAIST charges tuition based on your GPA. From 3.0 up, you have a free ride; below that, your tuition increases linearly. So the students who were hovering near a 3.0 who have fallen below are desperate to keep their GPA above the magic limit.

(I’m not entirely certain about the tuition stuff; everything I’ve learned about the tuition formula has come from…students with poor grades in math classes, which is like trying to learn how to drive safely from watching footage of auto race crashes.)

So on Friday I wrestled with inputting grades into KAIST’s grade system, which I think was implemented in about 1999 and hasn’t changed since then. Today I have to try and write emails that politely and sympathetically say NO.

What time is it? It’s Beer O’Clock.

I have a wonderful mother-in-law. She knows that I enjoy good beer, and so wanted to send me some New Glarus beer for my birthday.

It so happens that mailing glass bottles of beer across the Pacific Ocean is not quite a fantastic idea.

Just a few minutes ago, the department secretary called my office and asked me to come downstairs for a package. I walked into the department office to see a USPS Priority Mail package with one flap open, a bunch of Korean Post Office tape haphazardly wrapped around parts of the box, and a pungent aroma of beer-soaked cardboard wafting through the room.

I had to sign for the package, which I’ve never had to do before. I suspect I was signing a damage waiver.

I truly appreciate the gift, but I think I’ll ask my mother-in-law to not send any more beer to Korea…

Update...here's a picture of the package. This is how I received it:

We’ve had Seafarers of Catan for a while but played it for the first time this afternoon. It’s super fun, and I say that not just becausedanae

and I (who were playing together) shrewdly constructed a massive and successful trade empire and won. I realize that basically everyone has already figured this out, but if you are one of those people who like regular Catan but haven’t played with Seafarers, I highly recommend it.

I use Pilot G2 gel pens and totally love them. Sadly, Pilot is a Japanese company and their products are not sold in Korea. (At least, I can’t find them here.) I am currently down to my last refill for my beloved Dr. Grip. It should last me all summer, but I am a little uneasy and anxious about not having spares.

(I’m not asking anyone send me refills, since it will definitely last me until I get back. Unless it doesn’t, in which case I will make a frantic and desperate post pleading for help.)