ideometric

Photos taken at the 7th Annual Seoul Int’l Cafe Show

There were tons of people and lots of free samples at the Korea International Cafe Show and Barista Championship. I drank way too much coffee as anyone who saw me later that day can attest.

If you’re wondering what it’s like to see a barista championship, well, imagine going to a cafe and watching other people enjoy the drinks. It kind of sucks.

Luckily there was a concurrent Cafe Show and “Fancy Food Festival” to keep people occupied. These Japanese siphon brewers were quite popular. Big crowds enjoyed the spectacle and drama of coffee making that looks more like a science experiment. It’s too bad there aren’t any explosions involved. Someone should work on that.

Unfortunately none of the espresso really tasted that great. Nor did the coffee really stand out compared to what I’m used to in the States, or even from the better cafes in Korea. The water was always too hot, or the beans over-roasted, or the proportions wrong, etc. But at least they’re trying, and with this much interest one hopes that quality will spread as competitors up their games.

Best of all, everything was free. Either I walked past the ticket booth without realizing it, or they thought I was press because I put “writer” on my name badge and walked around with my camera.

I suddenly understand why coat-checks are a good idea. Haha.

Photo taken in Myeongdong (명동)

Dark alleys are my favorite places in Korea. The space between places where things are stored, stacked, pushed aside, strung up, hung out, layered and faded. Smoke breaks, back rooms, loitering, sketchy figures, trash piles and cabbage laid out to dry (this is Korea after all). The life sustaining exoskeletons of pipe and wire. The honest patina of street grime and peeling stickers advertising who-knows-what. I wonder how many people never let their eyes wander to the margins of the world they live in.

On why “no one” saw the financial meltdown coming:

One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?

NYT

Wired has an interesting Thanksgiving related look at genetically modified food. It’s slightly creepy.

The accumulation of agricultural breeding knowledge and consumer testing has resulted in plants and animals that are physically shaped by consumer tastes. Americans like a medium-size corn kernel, so kernels aren’t too big or small. American consumers like white meat, so turkeys are grown with larger breasts.

So large that their legs can’t even hold them up. That’s naaaasty. Right?

And some food lovers argue that fast growth and genetic change have robbed turkey meat of its distinctive taste. Some are turning to heritage-breed turkeys like the Blue Slate variety that pack pre-industrial genomes.

There’s something weird about shopping based on the genetic properties of your food…

Photos taken around Samcheongdong (삼청동)

It’s almost winter in Korea. It’s a bit odd seeing the seasons change, and living without daylight savings time. The days are noticeably shorter, daylight recedes further each day, the trees have changed color and then shed their leaves, the temperature is dropping in sudden waves of harsh cold fronts.

Growing up in LA’s artificially perfect climes, it’s like realizing you live on Earth for the first time. Hi Earth. Nice to meet you. Nature? What’s that? Find the irony in having that revelation here in one of the world’s largest metropolises.

I like it.

A ten page article in the New Yorker about craft brewing and the characters involved, focused on Dogfish Head brewery.

“…to most people it wouldn’t have tasted like beer at all. There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood’s spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made.”

It’s a good read. Makes me miss being in the states; Korean beer tastes like mineral water.

Watch a ton of pundits on FOX circa 2006-2007 ridicule Peter Schiff (who was apparently Ron Paul’s economic advisor) as he speaks the truth about the impending economic crisis. Everyone else derides his “pessimism” and scoffs as he describes essentially what would happen.

This is one of the great things about Youtube and democratized media creation.

This is why I love music.

“Holding you, Loving you, Kissing you …..
Couldn’t be alone, Good at being alone,
Tell me how can you, Tell me i belong ….
It’s not why I trust you, not why i trust you…”

(might not be 100% accurate but it doesn’t really matter)

So, I really wanted a pizza delivered and I called Pizza Hut.

“Hello! do you speak english?”
“…..no!”
“uh…”
“Will you call again? Pizzzaaaaaa huuuuuuutttt!!!!” *click*

Now, I know enough Korean to place an order with no stress. The problem is that I can’t understand half of what they say back to me.

I finally ordered my pizza through a friend that’s fluent. It took 45 minutes to get it right, hahah.

If you haven’t heard of Improv Everywhere, you need to check this out! They use the internet to coordinate random ‘happenings,’ breaking norms and confusing people with good intent.

 A mob greets strangers at the airport.

 Freezing in place at Grand Central Station.

800 random people listening to the same mp3 follow its directions.

“Brown clouds” made up of toxic chemicals are blotting out the sun in large parts of Asia, a U.N. report said.

Awesome! 

Picture above I found online, it’s Korea when the yellow dust & pollution from China blows in.

It was raining when I went shopping. So they gave my bag a jacket. Makes sense in a pedestrian friendly public-transit city.

I just finished Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. The most valuable take-away was his constant refrain that deregulation and increased global competition has simultaneously empowered consumers and investors by aggregating and enhancing their collective power, while shafting workers and average people.

Increased competition has lead to a race to the bottom to maintain competitive advantages predicated on cutting labor costs, and indeed any cost that might reduce shareholder profits. This negatively impacts wages, job security, working conditions, retirement plans, union participation, health care, the environment, and society as a whole.

Profits for corporations and their shareholders have gone way up, but they have not been shared with society or with workers. Instead, the rich have gotten far richer, and the rest have done merely okay, benefiting from lower cost goods but losing stability and income growth. This is in contrast to the post-WWII social contract (see Fordism) that emerged between unions and large oligopolies sharing profits with labor, ballooning America’s middle class, providing social mobility, and fueling American economic growth and the mass-consumption/mass-production economy. For a variety of reasons, that arrangement broke down and we can’t turn back the clock, nor should we try. But that doesn’t mean the current system is good or that it can’t be changed for the better.

Reich’s aim is to encourage political engagement. The problem is not greed or corporations in and of themselves; these are distractions. The underlying problem is that the current way of doing things perversely incentivizes myopic self-interest, speculation, short term investment and profit maximization, rather than sustainability and public good. That we let our consumer-selves get the better of our citizen-selves, and that this shows in our tacit acceptance of the status quo where profit is the sole concern and social well-being is completely missing from the equation.

The problem is finding a balance between the good and the bad. Increased choice, lower costs, more competition, greater economic dynamism, efficiency and innovation are all good things. But they need to be accompanied by policies that mitigate the negative impacts on labor, inequality, quality of life, environmental degradation, the exploitation of labor abroad, the blind eye turned towards oppresive regimes we trade with and invest in, etc.

His conclusion was a bit sparse, but I think the point was that the solution is necessarily political and democratic, requiring the force of legislation, and that we can’t let the monied interests and corporate lobbies continue to define the rules of the game, on either side of the political spectrum…

This is interesting, Google is datamining search terms and their geographical origin to map out and graph flu epidemics. It matches up with CDC figures fairly accurately.

There’s a lot of data to be gleaned from search statistics, this seems like the tip of the iceberg, but interesting no less.

Also, this is part of Google.org — which “aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease.” Sounds good.

Walking around one of my classes today, a girl stopped me to say that she visited her uncle in New York last winter break. Then, in broken English, “We are all neighbors, everyone in the world.”

12 year olds randomly dropping wisdom on you, gives you hope. If only they’d pay attention in class haha.

Some photos from yesterday. Walked around the Han river near Yongsan before heading over to Hyewa for dinner. 63 Building was once the tallest building in Seoul. It’s got a popular observation floor up top with a view of the river.

A lot of people are excited by the Obama win. It is, no doubt, historic and promising. I wonder though if any smart people in the campaign or surrounding it have plans to channel and repurpose the high degree of interest and engagement generated by Obama’s message, especially among the young and generally apathetic. The passage of Proposition 8 is a reminder that progressive change isn’t assured.

Can the virtual and social infrastructure built up to win the presidency be retooled? Didn’t Obama create a sort of online social network with a fair amount of success? It would be interesting to see that idea taken beyond the election to play a role in progressive governance, mobilization of support and activism, etc.

UPDATE:

Apparently, the answer is yes (or maybe).

http://change.gov/

Check it. Though right now it seems quite Web 1.0, churning out press releases. Kinda lame. We’ll see if it turns into anything more exciting. With a domain name like ‘change.gov’ I’d expect something more…

Watching the election today (wooo!), one thing that stood out to me was Facebook status as a political space.  Seeing everyone log their hopes, anticipation, and then response to the election creates an interesting disjointed dialog & shared experience

I wonder what life is like for these guys who sit in a box all day. Especially the ones in the subway stations. That must suck.

This one is even spacious and open compared to some of the boxes that have only a tiny window.

The convenience man…living life in a box.

I went to the the Seoul Media Art Biennial at the Seoul Museum of Art yesterday. There were a lot of interesting pieces, and with three full floors for the show, it was almost overwhelming. Here are a few pictures I took during my visit. Maybe I’ll add descriptions when I have more time.

One of quite a few pieces using projectors. This was a bit surreal, as the light had the feeling of daylight, but without any window.

For this piece, air was circulating in a pipe as the storage medium for the data displayed on the screen.

You could upload data from your mobile devices via Bluetooth to incorporate it into the dialog between these two heads.