Searching Seoul

Another eventful week and another interesting travel. This week I had to make a short hop to Seoul, South Korea. This is one country (out of a hundred odd other nations) which I know very little about. To be honest, if you asked me to point it out on a world map, I'd be stumped. Such is my ignorance.

In my 3-day stay in Seoul, I discovered that it is a lovely city with some very lovely people. The experience started at the hotel in which I stayed. The hotel has some of the most courteous staff I've ever encountered and a very distinguished ambience that easily beats some of the other good hotels I have stayed in other countries. Added to this was a night life that was almost 24*7. At around 2 am when I peered out of my hotel room (my biological clock was still set to my country's Std Time) which faced the downtown street, I could see people huddled under umbrellas (it was monsoon season and a typhoon seems to have hit the country) at the bus stops waiting for buses and taxis. And it seemed to be a safe city too considering that I could see some women also on the streets at that unearthly hour.

The way the city was organized was pretty amazing. It has some underground networks below the street that connect various buildings in the downtown and also has a mall of its own. Lovely! Beats the hassle of negotiating through traffic to cross streets.

Speaking of which, what amazed me the most was the lack of small cars (or compact sedans) on the streets. Most of the time (by which I mean 90%), I could only see a variety of Korean and imported luxo-barges and nothing less. I haven't seen so many S-Class Mercs and 7-series Bimmers (or is it Beemers) per square kilometer elsewhere. And mind you, I hardly saw anything smaller like the C-Class or the 5-series. I guess the people here go only for the real things. One of my hosts told me that Seoul has some of the most horrendous traffic jams and some of the most expensive real estates in the world. No surprises there.

The weather was muggy but bearable. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to explore the downtown or the city to my satisfaction (it was all work and not much play). But I vowed to myself that I would return someday. Which is why I'm collecting some more info from the net on Seoul and South Korea in general. So if you get to read this post and you've been to Korea or know about Korea, do drop me a note. Thanks in advance.

July '07 - July '08

Its just over a year that I started to blog. At that time I didn't know what blogging exactly was. I still don't know much about it. But it was fun going back in time and checking out all the stuff I had done in the past eventful year which otherwise I'd have conveniently forgotten. Never would know that documenting experiences could be so interesting. Nice.

All those darned definitions!!!

Do you remember this problem from high school. "A block of wood slides over a wooden inclined plane having an angle theta. Compute the distance the block will slide before friction stops it." (or something like that). Why would anyone even worry about a dumb block slide over a dumb inclined plane? Weren't the wheels invented to save you from all that trouble? The only time I would have worried about such a thing would be if I belong to the ancient Egyptian civilization and was building pyramids (great structure those! built before they could fully understand the wheel). So coming back to the problem, a totally unconvincing and impractical issue.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am reading that funny but interesting book "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman". So while reading this book I hit this interesting chapter about the education system in Brazil. At some point in his distinguished academic career, Dr. Feynman taught students in a University in Brazil. From his personal teaching experiences, Dr. Feynman mentions that the education in Brazil was quite pedantic, by which I mean bookish. Students were supposed to read a book cover to cover and then memorize them. Thus the students could easily rattle off a huge complicated definition or identify any complex scientific theory from a book. But if they had to explain it in terms of occurring in nature or understand the practicality of the phenomena, they would be lost. This was particularly true for students of Engineering and Physics. No wonder, Dr. Feynman found the Engineering and Physics students quite dumb when it came to applying their knowledge.

Having said that, looking back at what I studied and what I understood (in practical sense, that is) I don't find myself in a situation dissimilar to those students at the Brazilian Universities. Looking back I now realize that the things I felt quite complex and going over my head were actually so because I could never relate to the practical usage of those theories (my experimental observations were always extrapolated in the lab because we could never get the right readings). So was Math. Math always was and has been my nemesis. The only thing I could do well were the Partial Differential Equations and Trigonometry because they were quite elegant and I had a great Prof. who taught them well. But now I realize that if I found practical examples for those other problems I'd certainly be much more comfortable with Math. With regard to Physics, I never had a genius for imagining things in my mind (just like the problem I mentioned at the start). It was during this time that I came across these great eye-opening books "Maths can be fun" and "Physics can be fun" by a Russian author named Yakov Perelman that changed the way I looked at these subjects. Unfortunately, I could not sustain that interest for long (completely my fault and not those books). And all those darned definitions one had to memorize!! It was like taking a very cold shower on a very cold morning (couldn't think of a more apt comparison. When I do, will re-edit). Brrrr!! I still have nightmares about my grad school days.

But if you still are studying or have a passing interest in Physics or Maths, don't miss out on the books by Perelman. They will certainly change your views about these so called difficult sciences for the better. So have fun while you learn.