"Today's discomfort index will be 87.2."

...so said the weather forecast on TV this morning. And they weren't kidding: the first thing I noticed stepping outside was the heat. The second thing I noticed were the cicadas: they're out in full force, an almost deafening sound that makes you feel like you could be attacked by a swarm of locusts at any minute.

Against my better judgment, I hiked up (part of) Bomunsan, a local mountain. I got a decent view of the city but was wiped out afterwards. So I wandered the streets looking for someplace to eat that looked (a) air conditioned and (b) big enough to have an English menu. I eventually wound up in a barbecue place that was really tasty.

Apparently I'm failing to communicate the Korean line for Do you speak English? While I guess it's not strictly necessary, as I'd find out quickly enough by throwing English at people, but I wanted to learn the Korean phrase for this so I don't come across as assuming that everyone speaks English. As it turns out, all I'm getting across is that I don't speak Korean. This phrase has been met with confused looks every time I say it...I suspect I'm not pronouncing English correctly.

My linguistic (mis)adventures continued when I ducked out of the heat midday into a supermarket. A couple of friends requested specific items from Korea: kim chi-flavored seaweed, and barley tea. This turned out to be harder than I thought. The place was unnerving enough with store workers at every turn shouting out some sale. But I eventually found the seaweed. I was hoping at least one of them would have some little kim chi icon. No dice. I even memorized the Korean characters for kim chi, but couldn't find them on any of the bags there. The barley tea it turned out was conveniently labeled in English, but the only English words on these packages were self-evident ones devoid of meaning, like flavor and quality.

So I asked someone in my fractured Korean. The problem was I didn't know the word for seaweed. So as much as I pointed to the seaweed, she thought I was just confused and took me over to the kim chi. It turns out that the word for seaweed is kim. And somehow I couldn't quite get beyond "kim chi type kim".

Other discoveries: yes, the video game channel is real. But there's also televised Go. Even more agonizingly slow to watch than to watch someone planning their Starcraft moves.

Tomorrow will be just as hot. And I'll be in a suit. But (hopefully) in well-air-conditioned buildings...

"I pray to God for an affordable car"

Lately I've been growing increasingly cavalier about packing for domestic travel. When visiting my parents, I could always count on them to have an extra bar of soap; even the most podunk of Southern rural towns has a Wal-Mart to get forgotten items. So it was somewhat impressive that I should get everything packed up at the last minute on Sunday, given that I only discovered at 9 PM that I needed to bring a suit. I swear, next time I'll plan ahead.

The flight was amazing. From the moment you sit in the terminal and listen to the Singapore Airlines agents making uber-polite announcements, the United agents next door sound like heartless bastards. I had twelve hours of being pampered, and got kim chee fried rice on the plane. All of which makes American airlines even harder to go back to.

Getting off the plane we all shuffled into health inspection, everyone trying their hardest not to cough. H1N1 paranoia is high here; masked inspectors took everyone's temperatures (though calmly in the terminal, not in hazmat suits on the plane like that one YouTube video shows). I've already been given three pamphlets about the warning signs of the flu.

In the terminal at Incheon, I saw four car commercials, conveniently subtitled in English. Hyundai and Kia apparently own this place. The most amusing showed a series of scenes where people say things like, "I pray to God for a minivan I can afford", and of course the punchline, "Thanks to Hyundai, you don't have to pray any more!" Something about claiming your company is answering people's prayers seems just a little sacrilegious.

So far, my feeble attempts at speaking Korean seem to have gone unappreciated by the locals. Maybe the airport staff are just more jaded, but no one seems impressed by my impressive vocabulary of "hello" and "thank you". Fortunately the conference staff has had student volunteers to meet me at the airport and at the bus stop.

But now I'm here in Daejeon, in a nice hotel with a great view of the city, and I'm intent to go roam around for a day, armed only with a phrasebook and a collection of tourist maps. I hear there's a free "foot spa" down the street. Rock on.

Two thousand five hundred ninety two

This infographic from the New York Times is a beautifully rich visualization of something that often gets reduced to a single statistic: the number of soldiers and security officers who died last year in Iraq violence. The stark small multiple of little people--one for every casualty--calls out the thousands of individual tragedies and shows how each died: some in firefights, some in bombings, still others by torture. The other thing that grabs you is how many of these deaths aren't even Americans--the American media tends to focus only on the 901 U.S. troops who died last year. Iraqi soldiers and police officers seem to be bearing quite a burden themselves.

Whether or not you believe the Iraqi war serves some greater good, it's hard to look at this and not be in awe at the sheer scale.

Google Reader's gaffe: you can't fake a social graph

Over the holiday break, Google snuck in a little "tweak" to ther RSS reader, Google Reader. The idea was simple: why not make it easy to share your favorite posts with a single click? Before, there was a little Share button that posted items to a public feed with a hidden URL. Only people you gave the URL to could see these items. But what if you could share things with your friends automatically?

Problem: who exactly are your friends? Google let Facebook eat its lunch in the social networking space, but it does have zillions of Gmail and Google Talk users. Any Gmail user you send email to gets added to your Google Talk contact list. Not all of them are actually friends. So a number of users were a bit miffed to discover their shares suddenly broadcast to all these people. People wear lots of different hats, and just like teenagers don't necessarily share their LiveJournals with their parents, you might not want to share every amusing Digg post with your grandma.

To be clear, Google doesn't appear to share Reader items with people who don't have Gmail or GTalk accounts. (It still does share things with people I know I've never chatted with.) And Google has now offered a workaround to restrict sharing, and there's a setting to remove people from this service. And to be fair, I've discovered a few interesting tidbits from my friends. But the interesting lesson here is how communication doesn't necessarily imply friendship.

Since their social network Orkut doesn't get much use (outside of Brazil at least), Google's trying to infer a social graph with their communications services. They're certainly not the first--people have tried using email to deduce social networks for ages. But email is a poor proxy for friendship.

To see why, if you've been using Facebook and Gmail for a while, try this simple experiment: Go to Facebook's Friend Finder and give it your Gmail account and password. (You trust them, don't you?) Be sure to uncheck the box "Select All Friends", then scroll through the list. Everyone you've ever emailed with Gmail who has a Facebook account is in this list. How many of them are really your friends? For me, only about 40% of the Facebook users I've emailed are actually friends--the rest are random cc's caught up in a "reply all", university staff, recruiters for jobs I no longer want, etc.

The answer, of course, just like with Facebook Beacon, is opt-in: out of all the people you've ever emailed, you might want to share things with some of them. Or perhaps framed another way: out of all the people you've ever emailed, only some of them are friends.

How many of your Gmail "friends" are Facebook friends?

Helpful hint: when suing Google for $5 billion...

for alleged "crimes against humanity" by knowingly choosing to name themselves with an anagram of some of your social security number upside down, putting you at risk of a "terrorist attack"...

...it's generally not necessary to include in your (public record) court filing your driver's license, bank account number, and debit card records.

The details of Google's brilliant nefarious scheme are on page 18 of this pdf (with some help from the Philadelphia 76'ers).

You can't make this stuff up.

Some quetchup with your spam?

In the past few days I've gotten a couple invites to some sort of new social network called Quetchup, even some from people I didn't even recognize. Let's call this Odd Thing #1. But I'm a sucker for social networks (it is, after all, my job to study them) so I went ahead and clicked a link to "join Rowyn and his friends today". Never mind that Rowyn is, in fact, a woman. Odd Thing #2.

Signing up is a three-step process. On the first step, they ask you to choose a screen name, along with your first and last name. Don't worry, though, your first and last name "will not be visible" and "will be kept strictly confidential". (So what exactly do they need them for?) Odd Thing #3. Call me a Facebook (or Friendster) snob, but this is one of the most infuriating things about MySpace: not being able to find people you know in real life because people hide behind cutesy screen names. They also wouldn't let me sign up until I told them how I heard about Quetchup, which was a little odd since I just clicked through a mammoth URL purportedly from Rowyn. Odd Thing #4.

But the piece de resistance here, and the reason I caution anyone who wants to try out this site, is that Step 2 of the process demands your login for one of the Webmail services, and informs you that by providing this you give consent for them to invite everyone in your address book. Odd thing #5. Since Gmail adds every single person you ever replied to to your address book, this ain't so hot. This scores Quetchup a special place in the circle of hell previously reserved for Plaxo and Facebook apps that automatically "notify" your friends. I supplied an old hotmail account that surely didn't have anyone to spam.

And finally, when it was all said and done, I wasn't even Rowyn's friend. Odd Thing #6. I went through all that to sign up, and she still had to explicitly approve me as a friend. (Perhaps this is because she didn't explicitly ask Quetchup to spam me in the first place.)

And even when I did become her friend, I couldn't see her name. So now I have an account on a social network with one friend. I'm afraid to let it scan a list of people I've emailed to see who else is on the site because it'll spam them all. I can't search for anyone by name because names are "confidential". It's like MySpace without the personality.

Which is too bad because they have some interesting ideas ported over from Friendster, like letting you see your second-degree friends (friends of friends), who may well be your actual friends in real life. Facebook still has yet to do this, even though people who many of your friends know on the site may actually know you in real life. And no app developer can do this either, since it's against the Facebook developer terms of service.

Not just gimpy. Disabled

Yup. It's official. Yesterday I went to the DMV. One hour and $6 later, I had an official disabled parking permit. I felt weird joining the ranks with the elderly lady with a walker in front of me, but then a pain in my ankle had me sitting right beside her.

This tendinitis/bursitis/plantar fascitis (yes, apparently I have all three) hasn't gotten much better over the last month. It's like playing whac-a-mole with different tendons and ligaments. This doctor's strategy seems to be a carrot-and-stick approach: be nice to it with orthotics, a cane, and minimizing walking (hence the permit), while simultaneously tormenting it with physical therapy and cortisone shots.

At least with the cane I look the part of the disabled person, though fortunately not the old man. I found a nice black cane, which I'm told makes me look "dapper". (So far I've worn a suit with it three times and a top hat once.) It also makes a huge difference in how people treat you. People surrender their seats on trains (it helps that I look like the dude with the cane in the icon on the window). People try extra hard not to run you over. Even TSA screeners treat you gingerly at security (though I get my own personal wanding every time I go through, thanks to the metal in my boot).

As amusing as this has been, it's getting old. I've found people are much happier with the barfight story than the real one. But I miss dancing, hiking, and standing up for longer than two minutes at a time.

It has given me an interesting perspective on mobility, and how much it impacts your life. It affects how you spend your time and who you spend it with. It's such a simple thing to be empowered by, something I'd taken for granted (and being in my 20s probably justly so). But lots of people live with these infirmities, and have them much worse than I do. I heard an interview on NPR about how people experiencing hearing loss tend to withdraw from their social circles, because they feel they can't share the same experiences as easily.

It's easy to fall into the trap of retreating into a disability and giving up. One grandfather did just that after his hip replacement; he decided it was far easier to sit in his chair and be lazy than work at trying to regain his strength. The other decided that having only a quarter of his heart working wasn't going to stop him, and poured himself into researching vitamins, drugs, and exercises, fighting for every last day; ultimately this probably gave him an extra year or two to live.

So while this gimpiness is annoying as all hell (how annoying is hell? pretty friggin' annoying), it is only temporary. I need to be more like the latter grandfather, doing everything I can think of to bring closer my triumphant return to the world of the standing.