Posts

I bought this book for 3,000 won at the Student Welfare Committee’s book market last fall semester, and I’m only just getting around to reading it. With the previous books, I posted about them after I’d finished reading them. But I have a feeling I won’t finish this one unless I publicly commit to it before I start. It’s a whopping 1,100 pages. They say telling people around you makes it easier to quit smoking, right? If you see me anytime soon, ask me, “Have you finished A Pattern Language yet?” Just to be clear, I don’t smoke. This book caught my eye from the moment I saw its title on the Student Welfare Committee’s book list. It seems to break down the environments we live in into individual elements [patterns], analyze them, and then present the problems and solutions associated with each. I say “seems” because I haven’t finished the book yet. I’ve only just read the translator’s preface and the introduction, but so far it’s not far from what I expected when I bought it. Each pattern can be very broad or quite specific, so the patterns form a hierarchy. A pattern is essential to the patterns above it and is, in turn, completed by the patterns below it. By defining these individual patterns and recombining them, the author aims to present a method [language] for creating better environments for human life. The book’s approach to architecture seems remarkably similar to mathematics. The process of combining the most basic patterns into spaces we can actually use is much like deriving various propositions from a few axioms within a particular axiomatic system. As it turns out, the author studied architecture and mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Apparently, this approach has also drawn a great deal of criticism. As the translator notes in the preface, architecture must account for countless external factors beyond the goal of creating good spaces, so idealized thinking of the kind found in mathematics is of little practical use. But the translator argues that, “even if it is difficult to put into practice, this approach to design is highly meaningful because it proposed and tested a democratic, participatory design process involving the social groups who actually use a building.” I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a piece called “A Rational World” that I’ve been dragging my feet on for the past month or two. Briefly, it asks what the world would look like if we threw out customary units like seven days to a week and twelve months to a year and redefined everything in a more “common-sense” way. Of course, any attempt to put that into practice would face resistance from a society accustomed to so many conventions. But if conventions gradually change, there’s value in such an exercise—whether to suggest a better direction for that change or simply for the fun of imagining a world that worked differently. I feel that the thinking that led me to start writing that piece has something in common with the author’s. That’s a lot to say after reading just the introduction. Time to get started for real~

--> Hello. I’m June Huh, a mathematician who graduated in the summer of 2007. If we assume we live healthy lives for 80 years, that gives us about 30,000 days—a number rather too large for our intuition to grasp. I’ve lived through roughly half of mine, and most of you have lived through about a third of yours. Have you ever counted how many of those days you remember? Of the 30,000 days we spend breathing in and out without pause, only a tiny fraction will stay with us for long. Those days loosely connect three complete strangers: the person I was long ago, the person I am here and now, and the person I will be far in the future. I think today’s commencement, when you bring one chapter to a close and begin another, may be one of those days. I’m very glad to share it with you. One of the risks you take by attending a commencement ceremony, I think, is the commencement address. There’s a chance you’ll end up listening to the artfully disguised self-congratulation of someone whose luck, determination, and temperament happened to align perfectly and bring them great success. I didn’t come to this ceremony 15 years ago, perhaps because I was afraid, or because I was ashamed of how little I had made of my university years. But you have braved that risk to come here and be celebrated for something worth celebrating. What should one say in a commencement address? Perhaps it’s worth imagining what you would say to yourself a dozen or so years from now, or what you would like to hear from that future self today. Think about it. There are no obvious words. The expectations and disappointments, kindnesses and absurdities, good fortune and bad, and the frighteningly repetitive details of daily life over the past few thousand days—or the next few thousand—would be difficult both to recount and to hear. Nor would they serve the purpose of offering encouragement and congratulations. Once put into concrete words, our feelings can seem inappropriate or inadequate. Even dressed up in the best possible account, my university years were a succession of wrong turns. Surrounded by so many friends who were smart, healthy, and hardworking, I wondered what someone like me was supposed to do with his life. The words of one of my professors, who told me to get some rest and come back, still seem to stare at me from my increasingly sparse transcript. I imagine that, however different the degree or direction of your experiences, those of you listening have gone through something essentially similar over the past few years. And now you face a greater challenge: the daily repetition of a life that is uncertain and unclear, with an end that exists but is hard to see. It may be harder than you expect, or just as hard as you expect. Now you are adults in earnest. Don’t fear failure; take on challenges. Reject the comfortable, safe path. Don’t compromise; pursue your true dreams. This is all good advice, and especially useful from society’s point of view, but you have already considered that things may look different from an individual’s point of view. By a few blunt measures of zero-sum, relative evaluation, only some will be counted as exceptionally successful. Fickle chance, other people worn down by life, and, more than anyone, you yourself may be harsh to you. So steel yourselves. Each day from today onward will answer the old question: How will I live when I grow up? I hope you won’t be distracted by an endless succession of preparations—for a job, marriage, child-rearing, education, promotion, retirement, old age, and finally death in a respectable private hospital room somewhere. I hope you won’t grow accustomed to the temptations of rudeness, hatred, competition, division, comparison, idleness, and futility. May you withstand all the violence of meaning and meaninglessness and experience each day fully, so that at the end you can greet, without regret, the stranger who has been waiting for you all this time: your future self. I wondered what I should say to the person I was long ago if he had come to his commencement ceremony, but I couldn’t settle on an answer. I feel sorry for him when I think of the days he will experience, and I envy him so deeply it makes my heart ache. I wonder what words of congratulations you have imagined giving yourselves. Mathematics permits any definition that is consistent. A large part of a mathematician’s work is choosing which definitions to use, and their value lies in which of the possible ways of using language brings forth the most beautiful structure. Being here with special people in a special place on a special day, I feel so elated that every attempt seems precious. I wonder if we could embrace others as our own far-future selves, whom we do not yet remember, and ourselves as others who, if only for a little while, are fully here with us now. Graduates, congratulations on completing what you have worked toward for so long, and congratulations on today’s new beginning. I hope you will be kind to one another and to yourselves, and carry that kindness forward to the people we will be in the distant future. I’m cheering you on. Congratulations, and thank you. I’ve marked the parts I liked in bold at my own discretion. As of today, I have been alive for days. -->

It’s ridiculous that the space I set up to keep reading and record what I’ve read has become proof of how little I actually read. My lab internship is almost over, so it’s time to get back to it.

It's been ages since I last came to Anam 🍓🍓🍓 Aw, I'm honored 🍓🍓🍓 At Hongdoya, it's fried peppers and makgeolli Hahaha, it's still freaking hilarious even when I'm sober Collected 1 and 2 That 601 is the bus I need to transfer to Ran like crazy and made it on board

Hello! We're Team Bokumjari Strawberry Jam. ... We logged back in on another device, so our team name became Apple Jam But they actually sell apple jam? Why is my hair such a mess? --> --> Timeline by Role Planning & design Backend Frontend Planning Design Frontend/backend (me) Frontend/backend Frontend 19th 16:00 Check in, travel (Toyoko Inn → Times Square) 16:30 17:00 Dinner (Ongijeong, Times Square branch) 17:30 18:00 Travel (Times Square → All That Mind) 18:30 19:00 Theme announcement, brainstorming, sharing ideas 19:30 20:00 20:30 Settle on the idea <Service for Sharing Upcoming Vacant Subway Seats>, detailed planning 21:00 21:30 22:00 Detailed planning and design, writing user stories and preparing the idea presentation Set up AWS RDS Set up AWS RDS Initial React project setup 22:30 Prepare presentation 23:00 Team idea presentations 23:30 20th 0:00 Midnight event <Bingo> 0:30 1:00 Create wireframes (colors, fonts, page views) Plan MySQL table schema Plan routes 1:30 2:00 Travel (All That Mind → Toyoko Inn) ? 2:30 Get ready ? 3:00 Sleep 3:30 4:00 4:30

Work in progress. From the 19th to the 21st, I participated in <Korea University Summer Hackathon: A Voyage Together>, hosted by Korea University’s [ software development and research society DevKor · Design and Formative Arts Emergency Committee · Business School Student Council ]. I learned about it from a promotional post in the KAIST School of Computing class of 2018 group chat. I’d wanted to try a hackathon at least once, and the dates didn’t conflict with my lab internship, so it was a great opportunity. The application asked for some basic personal information and a portfolio in any format. I hadn’t written a CV or portfolio recently, so I took the opportunity to make a new page on my website. My education and work experience had been sitting, not quite organized, near the bottom of the homepage; moving them to a separate page made everything look much cleaner. If you’re interested, take a look ~ . I remember struggling to find anything substantial to put in personal statements in my first and second years of college, so it feels good to have something to write about now. Each team had five members—one planner, one designer, and three developers—and with twenty teams, the hackathon had around 100 participants in total. I considered gathering a few friends interested in development and forming a team together, but that didn’t fit the spirit of the event. I also thought working with entirely new people would be worthwhile, so I applied on my own. Each team had one leader, regardless of their role, and the application asked in advance whether you wanted to lead. I didn’t have a strong preference either way, so I selected “Not sure.” After my participation was confirmed, though, the organizers contacted me personally to ask if I could be a leader. I guess fewer than twenty people had volunteered. Since they asked, I couldn’t bring myself to say no, so I agreed. On the evening of the 13th, a week before the event, there was an online pre-event to form teams that would plan and develop services together at the main event. Team leaders gave idea pitches introducing themselves and the kinds of services they wanted to make, and the other participants listened and applied to join a leader’s team. Idea pitches. Pitching an idea without knowing the theme was a bit funny, but it was unavoidable for a hackathon where advance work wasn’t allowed and the theme would be revealed on the day. So instead of proposing a specific idea, I introduced things I’d developed and described the motivation they shared: an eye for problems across different fields and the drive to act on them. To be honest, I didn’t prepare very hard for my pitch. The allotted time was quite short—two minutes and thirty seconds—and I’d only agreed to be a leader the day before the pre-event, so there wasn’t much time to prepare. Above all, as a fifth-year undergraduate who’d been around the block, I can’t deny that I rather arrogantly assumed my fellow undergraduates couldn’t have done all that much (the event was open only to undergraduates). But wow, the moment I heard the first leader’s presentation, alarm bells went off. They were far better prepared than I’d expected! And it wasn’t just the first person. The second did well, and so did the next. Some had remarkable accomplishments; others, even without those, had a clear philosophy and conveyed it remarkably well. As I listened, I was suddenly afraid that, far from having the upper hand as a leader in this team-building process, I might be the one desperately hoping to be picked. My turn was fourth or fifth from last, and while I waited, I hastily worked a philosophy of my own into my pitch. I finished with a presentation I wasn’t ashamed of, though I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it either. A reminder not to let my guard down or get conceited: I need to step out into the world now and then and remember how small I am.

It’s been far too long since I posted The Number Devil , so I thought I’d write something. It’s not that I haven’t been writing. Once I got past a brief spell of laziness after the semester ended, I wrote drafts on several topics, but none seemed good enough to post. I’ll polish up a few and post them soon. Writing is best when inspiration strikes and you can toss the words onto the page like stir-frying bean sprouts, but I seem to be a little short on that inspiration lately. I just got back from playing soccer. I can’t remember the last time we had enough people for a full game at school. I’d been making do with futsal, but wow, playing soccer again after so long was incomparably more fun. I wonder if everyone’s like this, but I seem to write best when my head isn’t quite right—late at night, say, or when I’m dazed after intense exercise. Right now, it’s both! Of course, the quality sometimes suffers, and some parts make me cringe, so I have to revise them later with a clear head. The important thing is to get a draft down first. These days I’m doing a lab internship in the industrial design department. I’m not planning to go to graduate school. On the last day of the spring semester, I went to a KLMS workshop at school, where a professor and a graduate student I met asked if I could help with the technical implementation of their lab’s research. So I’m working with them over the break. That means I’m in Daejeon Monday through Thursday and Seoul Friday through Sunday, for anyone who wants to meet up. The paper I read during my first week as a lab intern looked like Woo Young-woo. Feng Zhou et al.

This guy is my KakaoTalk profile picture right now. Know who he is? He’s the Number Devil, from the book of the same name. The book was so popular that some of you probably recognized him right away. Why did I make this strange-looking guy my profile picture? You know that feeling when you unexpectedly come across a cartoon character you saw all the time as a kid but haven’t thought about in years? That rush of nostalgia. To be honest, I didn’t think much of him back then. (I was looking him up on Namuwiki and rediscovered his real name, which I’d forgotten: Teplotaxl!) When I read the book, I identified with the little boy having the dreams, not with him. But yesterday, or maybe the day before, I was scrolling through Instagram when he suddenly appeared in a post, and I felt something strange. As a kid, I’d thought of him as an all-knowing ghost of a teacher. Looking at him now, he just seemed like someone my age with a beard. I felt an odd sense of kinship. I wonder if he’s done his military service. I’ve been having thoughts like that a lot lately— about how I’m really not that young anymore. When a hugely successful idol is younger than me. When I watch a camcorder video my dad took of an open class at my preschool sports program and realize the teacher in it might have been the age I am now. When I realize my mom wasn’t much older than I am now when she gave birth to me. It’s not that my age makes me feel inadequate. Sure, I sometimes envy people my age who found success early on. But I’ve worked hard in my own way, and I’ve achieved a few modest things too. Speaking of getting older, for some reason this year I found myself noticing spring arrive—the flowers blooming, the grass sprouting. I figured I just had more time to look around while walking now that my final semester was a little less busy. Then I had a meal with a friend and told them about it, and they said it was because I was getting older. I’m not sure I understood exactly what they meant, but I took it as a joke at the time. The more I think about it, though, the less it feels like something I should laugh off. Growing up, there have been a few milestones that showed me I’d reached a new stage of mental growth. The one I remember best happened around middle school: I gained the ability to think something over before saying it out loud. I don’t know exactly when it started, but suddenly I was doing something I definitely couldn’t do before. I think being able to notice and enjoy the arrival of spring might be another milestone like that. And more recently, I feel like I’m learning how to appreciate song lyrics. Until now, most of the songs I loved had won me over with their melodies. Of course I understood the lyrics, and some of them moved me, but I think it’s only recently that I’ve fully felt what happens when lyrics and melody come together as a song. I used to think that just as people stop growing taller once their physical growth ends, there would come a point when the mind’s growth plates closed too. After that, you could learn more facts, but your depth of understanding wouldn’t change much. I thought I’d already passed that point. There was even a time when I arrogantly responded to my parents’ advice by thinking, “Do you think I don’t know that already?” But seeing myself discover new milestones even now makes me realize I was wrong. The mind keeps growing, even if it grows more slowly than it did in adolescence. I imagine it’ll keep doing so until just before I die. I’ve had that thought a few times. The most vivid was at the end of my first year of college, on a trip to Australia. After spending the day exploring a national park, I got on a train back to Sydney, pleasantly worn out. BTS’s “Euphoria” was playing in my earphones. I felt so satisfied with the day that I wondered whether I could ever be happier. What if this moment was the peak of my life, and it was all downhill from here? When I got old, I wouldn’t have the energy to roam around like this, and fewer new sights would make my heart race. I’d overlooked mental growth. As the years go by, I’ll probably find more to feel even in the same things—just as flowers, grass, and song lyrics have come to mean something different to me over the past few years. So far, my mind seems to have grown just fine on its own. But it suddenly occurs to me that there might be things I can do to help it along. Maybe there are heights I’ll never reach unless I make a conscious effort. Perhaps I should read more books. I went to bed early tonight, hoping to get to sleep sooner, but I couldn’t sleep. These thoughts kept running through my head, so I just rambled on and wrote them down.

Server Start \n\n mysql.server start \n\n mysql -u root -p