Paul Goes to Korea

I had a little adventure this past week.  I flew to Seoul, Korea to present a paper at a graphics conference.

After landing, I got on the subway.  Korean subways are immaculately clean and they have heated seats.  They also are stocked with gas masks and the monitors presented a surprisingly graphic safety video.  Everywhere the Koreans demonstrated their technological superiority.  There were flat screen TVs everywhere including in front of escalators.  Our hotel toilet came with a control panel which I used to wash and dry my butt.  It tickled.  On elevators, you can push once to go to a floor and twice to not go there.

Getting from the subway to my hotel was hard, mostly because Google maps was way off.  Eventually, I got a nice monolingual Korean to draw me a map.  It was bitter cold that night and I was exhausted because of the time change.  When I arrived the bags under my eyes were blue from the cold.

The first day, I want to a palace built in the 14th century.  The palace guards paraded around with funky instruments and fake beards.

 
The architecture was pretty cool, but my toes were even colder.  So we sought shelter in a folk museum and learned about acupuncture and exorcism.

My favorite thing was the Buddhist temples.  Inside they have three spectacular Buddha statues.

The next few days, I was tied up with the graphics conference, but I did visit a second Buddhist temple.  A kind Buddhist lady there offered to me a free personal tour.  I peppered her with questions about Buddhist beliefs.  She said that after Buddhist monks die and are cremated they take a crystal from the ashes and store them in these.
 
Buddhists pray, but Buddha isn't God.  So I asked her who Buddhist pray to.  I repeated the question, but I don't think she understood it. 

She told me there is a large statue for a future Buddha who will be born in 5 billion years.  It's a good thing they already have his statue ready.

Korean food was completely new to me.  I tried everything I could.  I was surprised once to see my order come with a raw egg on top, but the bowl it was in was so hot that the egg gets cooked once you mix it.  Koreans are crazy about Kimchi which is cabbage or some other vegetable that has been fermenting for a few months.  I ate a bunch of it, but I didn't care for it.  My favorite was the meat you cooked yourself on a grill.  Here is a feast I enjoyed with some of my Stanford buddies.  We even ordered a second round of food after this plus drinks for the non-Mormons and it was still pretty cheap.


I gave my presentation and it went pretty well.  It helped that I was prepared for one of the questions beforehand, since I serendipitously discovered it scrawled on a piece of paper.

The last day I went to the North Korean border.  Near one of the world's most heavily armed borders, I saw this

Yes, it's a small amusement park.  The South Koreans also built a shiny new train station near the border that never gets used, but it's all ready to go to North Korea once the country gets unified.  Actually, they don't even call it a border since they insist that Korea is still one country.  The most interesting thing I saw there was a tunnel the North Koreans dug to infiltrate the South.  When the South Korea discovered it, they turned it into a tourist attraction.  Inside the tunnel, I got within 170 meters of North Korea.  The tunnel wasn't high, so I had to crouch down the whole time.  I kept thinking how inconsiderate the North Koreans were for building their secret tunnel so low.  Here are some pictures of North Korea off in the distance


I had a great time.  I left Korea Sunday night and arrived in California Sunday morning.  I love crossing the date line.

How I felt after Thanksgiving dinner

I took a class on digital sculpting a few weeks ago.  It was a short class, but I learned a lot.  Over the break, I finally had two hours free to try out what I learned.  Here is the result:

The End of the World

The End of the World

The Distant Future

See the improvement

I decided to redo two pictures that I created about eight years ago.  Now I have better software and a better computer so I can do it right this time.

My parent's kitchen in Virginia.

My Apartment at BYU in 2002.  Winter Quarters 102.

Old Version

Old Version

Frequently Asked Questions

I get a lot of the same questions over and over again.  I thought I'd answer these questions on my blog once and for all, so that people wouldn't need to keep asking me.  Here we go:

Q.  How's it going?

A.  I'm good, thanks for asking.

Q.  Did you do anything exciting this weekend?

A.  Yes, I slept in and I read a really interesting book and I ate some cheese.  I'm kind of addicted to Port Salut cheese.

Q.  If you became a fugitive where would you hide?

A.  I've got the perfect spot.  I know about an underground room in a church building that pretty much no one knows exists or how to get to it.

Q.  How can I be more like you?

A.  Well you can start by learning how to program a computer.  Then spend a couple hours analyzing the books on your bookshelves.  Try to figure out why you arranged your books the way you did.  Then ask yourself how I would arrange your book collection if I was there and then rearrange it like that.

Q.  When a plant grows where does the material that makes up the plant come from?

A.  It mostly comes from the air.  It does not comes from the ground because then there would be giant holes beneath trees.

Q.  Can I use your bathroom?

A.  Yes, you may.  It's down the hall and to the left.

Pet Dragon

I stumbled on some interesting pictures of Calvin & Hobbes which made me think how much I would like a pet tiger.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any tigers on the market, so instead I bought a pet dragon named Draco. Here is a picture of me and Draco taking a nap.

Self-Potrait

If you seen my artwork over the years, you may have noticed that my pictures have a lot of architecture in them, but few people.  Well, that's about to change.  I've been playing with some software and I can finally do a half-decent job creating characters.  This is supposed to be a self-portrait. 

Left: Realistic                                                                                Right: Caricature

Royal Kissing

Charles the Simple

I like history, because many of the best stories are actually true ones.  Back in the year 911, the Vikings were charging through France.  The French king, Charles the Simple was in no position to challenge them.  Charles had few options left and decided to offer land for peace.  He offered the land of Normandy to Rollo, the leader of the Vikings.  In exchange, Rollo agreed to become a vassal of the French king.  This required Rollo to perform two ceremonies.  Rollo had to be baptized and he had to pay homage to Charles.  The ritual of homage required Rollo to kiss the foot of the French king.  Rollo refused to do it.  Instead, he ordered one of his warriors to kiss Charles's foot.  The warrior obeyed Rollo, but instead of bending down to kiss the king's foot, he grabbed the foot and lifted it up to his mouth.  In doing this, he threw the French king onto his back.  With Charles flailing on his back, the warrior kissed his foot!  And that is how the Vikings came to rule Normandy.

This story still offers powerful lesson for us today.  Next time, your boss tells you to kiss his feet, do what Rollo did.

The Gift of Tongues

I've developed a little trick I can do with my tongue.  Unfortunately, no one can see what I'm doing because it's all happening inside my mouth.  You can only see it from very close.  I don't even think my dentist gets this close.  I apologize in advance for the proximity

Here is my latest performance of Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King:

 

 

When most people try clicking their tongue, they move it up and down, but I'm moving it side to side and catching against my molars for a much louder, richer sound.  This is what it looks like when I do it slowly.

I do this when I'm bored or in the shower.  I think I've actually developed strong tongue muscles which allows me to extend my tongue into my nose a little.

Corn Cups

The Stanford cafeteria is a magical place.  Its cups are made from corn.

They look like ordinary plastic cups, but they're even tougher.  I should know.  I have a habit of ripping cups apart.  The cups claim to be biodegradable.  Naturally, I was skeptical and so I immediately decided to investigate.  I threw a cup into my backyard two months ago and I've been closely monitoring it since then.  Here are a few of the photographs I've taken:

Pretty exciting, huh?  To keep everyone up-to-date on its progress, I will now be posting daily updates about the status of the cup to this blog.  It could turn into dirt any day now.

Eternity's Length

I'm trying something new.  I like making artwork, but I've never created anything that tells a story.  I've never created anything that even comes with a message or a devious hidden agenda.  Here is my first attempt:

The number of conceivable books is finite, but incomprehensibly large.  It’s so large that “astronomical” wouldn’t even begin to describe it, for it surpasses all astronomical measurements.

 Yet if you had eternity, you could read every conceivable book a billions times over and still find time to listen to every conceivable song, to play every conceivable chess game, and to watch every conceivable DVD.