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Full time Seoullite/Part time New Yorker

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Translate "British English" to "English"

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If you are interested in Corpus Linguistics or Data Driven Learning (DDL), this may be of interest to you.  This will be part of my reading for tomorrow.

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A look at the ways that the construction of language can have implications for the way we think, act and parse the world around us.

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Cycling

Ive been itching to ride my bicycle since winter started. I'd love to ride more in winter a lot if possible but y allergies don't seem to agree with that thinking. I took a short ride and felt great after. Surprisingly, my legs still felt strong and I didn't feel winded after taking some of the bigger hills that I thought would slow me down. My bike also felt surprisingly smooth with switching gears and pedaling. Hopefully the weather warms up sooner or later so I can jump back in the saddle.

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I wish I remembered where I came across this photo.

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Weird weather

Riding in the subway just now and saw the Han river frozen for the first time. Pretty cool to see. This extremely cold weather in Seoul has also made me think a lot about the extremely warm weather that New York was having when my wife and I visited two weeks ago (ranging from 45-55 on a few consecutive days).

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What really goes on in my dog Radar's head

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Body Worlds Exhibit in Seoul

Hyesil and I, along with our friends Daniel and Rachel, checked out the Body Worlds exhibit today in Seoul.  I didn't realize that it had been at the War Memorial of Korea for almost this whole year.  If I had known, I definitely would have checked it out sooner.  If you've never heard of this exhibit, here's the description from the original website:

BODY WORLDS is the original anatomical exhibition series displaying authentic human bodies, willed by donors through the Institute for Plastination’s Body Donor Program, and preserved using a process called plastination. Invented by Dr. von Hagens, plastination is a groundbreaking process in which real human specimens are preserved through the science of plastination. The specimens resulting from the revolutionary process are called plastinates. Plastinates show the inner workings of the body and the striking whole-body specimens show the human body in real-life poses, like never seen before.

It was quite interesting to see real bodies preserved using this plastination technique.  At times, it was strange to distinguish if these models were real or fake. But then you would see things like hair, eyelashes, or the look in the eyes of the "model" that would make you think twice about what you were looking at.  It was more scientific than I originally thought it would be, with lots of anatomical and biological descriptions accompanying each body part or figure.  Being a bio nerd in the past, it was interesting to see all these body parts and physiological processes that I had learned about up close and in the "flesh". 

After seeing this exhibition, I am definitely going to read up on the process of plastination a bit more.  If you're in Seoul, I highly recommend heading down to the War Memorial Of Korea in Samgakji to check it out before the end of its run there (my friend said he had heard it was on till March).