Korea- July 31-Aug 6, 2006


	> Annals > 2006 > Korea > Korea > Annals > 2006 > Korea > Korea

by Zwei

Bier

Baduk
Oyts paper
Gyeongbok Palace
Graduation
Tokyo tour

Monday, July 31

Today I played baduk again! With Prof. Yoon, Jae-min of the department of Classical Chinese. I played with some imagination and clear understanding of the game. That is, I lost both games, but not ignominiously.

In the evening we watched a fictionalized account of the assassination in 1979 of Korean president park. According to this film it was not a well-thought out plot, but just a whim of a quixotic and sickly man who happened to be the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

As a result, I did not make much progress on the oyts paper.

Tuesday, August 1

All day I tackled oyts. I think I have the definition down; the next step is to describe exactly how the engine transforms the graph.

S gave her last lecture today. Tomorrow we will probably go to another museum or two. She wrote another letter home and I've added it to my page of her letters.

The whether has turned really nice--and really hot. I took another bunch of photos from our balcony this afternoon. But I don't know when I'll get to go through the recent photos. Maybe tonight.
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I did go through the photos, but the ones I intended to put out got lost--I have to go through and reselect them.

Wednesday, August 2

Today Prof. Lee took us to Gyeongbok Palace, Bugaksan Mountain, and Insadong. We treated him to lunch at Hanilkwan. It was a great day. The weather was clear and hot, but a breeze made it bearable. The palace has a museum which we visited until the English tour started at noon. The guard changed every hour.

I got some decent pictures, I think. But at the time, english.Tour2Korea.com has better pictures of the museum artifacts.

Insadong is a single street about a half mile long chock full of souvenir shops. Many are of the junky variety of stuff that hangs around your house ever after contributing nothing, but raising objections everytime you think of tossing it. But many other shops have real stuff. Even furniture.

Everywhere I go kids stare at me. Some even tell their moms, "Look Senta," meaning Santa. In insadong, four school kids came up and explained (after some groping for words) that they had to do a summer vacation project. And what did I think of Insadong. I gave them an answer, but they wanted it written. So I wrote, unimaginatively: "some good stuff, some junk" Too late (the usual time for realizations) I realized that I should have come up with some sort of enigmatic haiku. Oh well, I got their picture.

When we got home I in-processed the pictures, added notes to the accession list, and started re-selecting pictures. Sigh. Supper intervened and I didn't save my work. After supper S got a paper to revise. MicroSoftword killed the computer and I lost again the selection results. Maybe tomorrow. But tomorrow I'm going to tackle oyts again.

Thusday, August 3
This morning I went through all the pictures except for the balcony shots. And finally got them out there.

I spent the entire afternoon stewing over the balcony shots. Finally after supper I got them into a reasonable shape. Now S wants the computer. So I will gym and then try to get somewhere on oyts.

Friday, August 4

I worked most of the day on the formal definition of the behavior of q, the mechanism that runs an oyt space. It is now done. (Oyts.html) I mentioned it to Wayne Smith and my dismay that there are no real theorems involved. I noted that oyt spaces do have one behavior that is not a natural part of Turing machines: randomness. He thought a theorem could be made out of that. But (a) one can put randomness into Turing machines and (b) it is hard (impossible?) to define randomness such that anything can be proved to be random.

Why are oyts random: because the order of matching template against a tree is indeterminate. Why is randomness good? Because it allows for variation. Just as DNA allows small variations to be introduced and therefore allows evolution. See Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe.

Graduation and final goodbye dinner. Very pleasant, although sad to think we'll all mostly never see each other again. I have enjoyed having no house maintenance problems. The three rooms we share are enough. We each have an entire room to ourself. And S has spent much of the day teaching or in her office.

Tomorrow we leave at 8:45 AM for the airport and arrive at our hotel in Tokyo late afternoon. I've no idea when I'll be able to do any more on these logs. Now its time to pack and clean.

Saturday, August 5

We travel to Japan today.
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Airport bus terminal at Narita airport is directly outside the door of the arrivals hall and is highly automated. They were running a little late so our 4:05 bus pulled up at 4:09. After we had boarded, they announced an equipment problem and we got on another bus. The ride was along fine highways and uneventful. We passed both Disneyland and another park with an enormous ferris wheel.

For dinner we strollled the Ginza, winding up in an intimate little palce where our table--and every table--was screened from view. After dinner we continued the stroll and noticed a number of tiny buildings with nine ir ten stories of "clubs." I thought they might be interesting, so we tried to go into one. Turns out they are "business men's clubs," and used for private business; mostly I suspect, business of the monkey sort.

Sunday, July 30
Breakfast at McDonalds because we had to hurry to get the tour.

Free day in Tokyo. So we signed up for a big tour: Sunrise tour's "Dynamic Tokyo." Tokyo Tower, Happo-en garden and tea ceremony, Chinzan-so garden and fancy lunch, Imperial Palace Plaza, Sumida River cruise, Nakamise shopping arcade, Asakusa Kannon temple, and home. But Susan continued with more shopping while I went and found some stuff for supper.

Tokyo turns out to be just another big city. I am not as impressed as I expected to be. The hotel turns out to be a fancy outside with dirty carpets and funk inside. Our hotel has even shut down the food service for refurbishment during August.

notes:

Commoners can meet the emperor. They first have to volunteer and work in his garden for four days, then he shakes their hand, gives them a token keepsake, and they never see him again. The waiting list is two years. Foreigners are on a separate waiting list of only six months.

Apparently one can drink the water in Tokyo.

Canon cameras company is named after the Kannon temple. She was a goddess of mercy.

Hefty ropes are tied around sacred things.

A "Miss Geisha" contest was underway at the gardens outside Chinzan-so. So we saw lots of geishas. One gentlemen told us that the costumes were of the kind only worn in summer.

It was very hot and humid.

There are people living in tents on the sidewalk along the Sumida River.

Thee is a huge "golden turnip" atop the Asahi beer company site near Akasusa. The locals apparently have an alternate name, although still starting with "tur."

Buildings aren't really tall in Tokyo. They get small earthquakes all the time. And big ones too often.

Mar 22, 2016 01:42 GMT

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