Punctuated Equilibrium

In just about every petrol station in Australia, there are a range of meat pies and pasties for sale. To a North American, a petrol station is called a gas station. This has never made sense to me, as the product being sold is actually a liquid. Incidentally, Korean service stations are often labelled here as 'Oilbanks'.

But I digress.

One craving that I've had that has definitely grown in its voracity has been for a nice steak and mushroom pie with plenty of tomato sauce. On occasion, I used to drop by the old BP on Prospect Road and pick one up on the way to university. Here in Korea, there are no meat pies to speak of. Instead Korea has choco-pies, which are large Wagon Wheel-like conglomerations of marshmallow and jam. I hope that such flagrant misuses of the name 'pie' shall not go unpunished.

Apart from at festivals and in front of casinos, Australia doesn't have much of a street food culture. This is a little unfortunate, as often the cheapest and most authentic food in other cities is sold at street food outlets. Korea is big on street food culture, although the variety is usually limited to a couple of spicey things, things that come on a stick and some fried things.

Ddeokbeokki is a popular spicy rice-cake snack here. Last week I saw it being made for the first time and was surprised by the amount of sugar syrup added. During the preparation process, this ajumma whipped out an industrial sized bottle of some maple-syrup-like glucose-derivative and glugged a good half kilo over it.

Back home, non-steak parts of a meat animal often go into sausages. Here in Korea, they're sold as delicacies. That begs the question... what goes into sausages over here? I'm not especially sure, but I have noticed that the sausages here usually taste a bit bland.

In the photo above are some various parts of an animal and dipping sauce. The meat that my toothpick is impaling is a pig's lung. I don't think I've ever eaten a lung before, but it tasted a lot like liver. When I order this kind of dish, I like to have a good poke around first and work out what anatomical curiousity I'm dealing with.

Work in the lab is moving slowly these days. I'm trying to construct some fluorescence vectors for a later experiment. In biology, a vector is what we use to describe something that can be transferred. What we do is construct a small ring of DNA in a simple bacterial species, and then transfer it to a higher organism.

And a good percentage of time in any science lab is spent labelling things.

The glassy liquid in the bottle is glycerol, which we mix with bacteria in the storage tubes on the right. What then happens is that the glycerol coats the 'skins' of the bacteria and allows us to freeze them at minus 80 degrees celsius. The bacteria go into a state of cryo-preservation and can be woken up at a later date.

You know, if you have enough money you can elect to have your body frozen in a similar manner when you die. For about US$150,000 you can be preserved and the idea is that you will be resuscitated when medical technology is good enough to bring you back. There's a whole bunch of companies that specialise in this field, which is called cryonics.

While I wouldn't want to be preserved myself, I don't think it's an entirely silly idea. However, I wonder what kind of world the cryonics participants expect to wake up to. For future society, a cryonically preserved person that has been woken up would probably be more of an anthropological curiousity to everyone, would they not? Something like a woolly mammoth? How would they go about living a normal life if they had 'PREVIOUSLY DECEASED, BUT CORPSE REANIMATED' written on their resume?

This week, the professor and the elder lab members went to Canada for a conference. That means that we had the lab to ourselves. On Thursday we ordered a pizza which was nice enough, but it can be a challenge to find a pizza here without sweet potato on it. This one also had roasted walnuts, which were a surprise.

Down the road from our building is the Sobahn cafe, which I hadn't been to since arriving because it's a little pricey. To a postgrad student in Korea, pricey means anything more than five dollars.

This cafe specialises in bibimbap, one of my favourite dishes. The word bibim means a mixture, and bap is rice. So it's basically a plethora of predominantly vegetarian tidbits, all mixed up into a rice salad. Simple, healthy and usually cheap.

Cafe Sobahn's was around six dollars and pretty good. But not twice as good as the three dollar ones you can get from the corner shop.

I tutor a couple of times per week these days, because I need the money. On Tuesdays I tutor a little kid called Thomas down at Seolleung station. He's a smart kid that I'll hopefully post a picture on here some time later.
Before I tutored him last week, I dropped by a Chinese restaurant in the area and ordered this white jjambong soup. Jjambong is normally red with spice, but this one was mild.

And on Thursdays I tutor up at Lundbeck near the Garak Markets. It takes me a while to get there and I usually teach for around 3 hours. Tutoring as well as doing the Ph.D does take a toll on my energy levels, but I'm also trying to save money for the honeymoon and there's never much left over from my student wage.

The students here are company workers and I teach them all separately. They tell me that they enjoy my lessons, which is always good to hear. Working at CDI was useful to me in this regard, it taught me how to put together a practical English lesson.
For the lesson plan each week, I print out a news article and we discuss the basic ideas and our opinions. Then I point out some specific words and phrases in the text and we talk about how to use them in different situations. Sound simple enough?

It's not always what you teach, it's the way you teach it.

While wandering the side streets of Gangnam this week, I came across this rather bemusing bumper sticker. Punctuated equilibrium is a slight modification of the general evolutionary theory. Nothing spectacular in itself, but it's funny that someone would put it on their bumper. I can only imagine their disappointment as they drive around in a honkless environment. Perhaps that was their aim after all?

Anyway, see you next time!

An Umbrella in the Laboratory

I've just entered my third month of the Ph.D here and getting into the swing of things. It takes around six months to a year in most labs until you can work completely independently. This is because there's a lot of know-how involved and the fine tuning of your methods really means the difference between an experiment working or failing. Some experiments take a few hours to do, but the more complex ones like a Yeast 2-Hybrid can take a couple of weeks in their entirety.

One feeling that you get used to pretty quickly is the one that comes after realising that you'll have to repeat a week's worth of work because you didn't get the results you were looking for. These troughs of feeling are compensated by the highs that you get when your experiments work nicely. When your experiments work, you feel like an invincible genius.
In the photo above, Chen Jing is cutting out a band of stained DNA with a razor blade. The gel that the DNA is sitting in is fluorescing pink. If you stain DNA with the right stuff, it becomes fluorescent under UV light. That's also why she's wearing the face shield, to protect her from skin damage.

On the left is Se-kyung and on the right is Hoon. Hoon is my senior in the lab and I have to learn a lot of methods from him. However, he is very 'traditional' in a Korean sense, which I would best describe as displaying a rigid adherence to a hierarchical social structure to every last detail. Korea in general does have a more formal system of etiquette and respect based on age, but Hoon is a little more intense than your average Korean. His demeanor as well as his large fingers (which can make the intricacies of scientific work difficult at times) leads me to believe he may have been historically misplaced and actually belongs to the age of gladiators.

We're learning to get along with each other as time goes by.

In the last photo you may have noticed Se-kyung with an umbrella. When I first saw this here I did find it amusing, but since taking this photo I've seen it enough times and also had to use it myself. When you need to take a photo of something scientific, you need to do it carefully. Everything in the frame has to be lined up and zoomed in to the same measurements, on a tripod and with an umbrella to shield against reflections.

Last week I attended a 2 day safety course with a lot of other new students. It was all in Korean, which meant I only understood about 5%, but it was interesting to observe the lecture room behaviour here. Korean students will often put their heads on the table during lectures and fall asleep (they even have a special verb for it: opdeurida). The lecturing professors, who I have to admit do appear boring even by lecturing professor standards, just continue on with the lecture like everyone's listening.

There was a test at the end, which was fairly straightforward. The content was a little silly at times, with such worthy safety advice as "If there is an unlabelled chemical on the bench, do not taste it" and "Don't store your lunch in the hazardous chemicals cabinet."
Safety education is vitally important to lab workers, but perhaps they also need to be testing us for common sense.

We do a fair bit of recycling here, which is good for the finances as well as the environment. I was mildly surprised to learn that they even recycle the toothpicks that we use to spot bacteria onto the petri dishes.
But I recently found out that this isn't done to save money. Do you know the two kinds of toothpicks that there are? The nice ones have pointed ends, while the cheaper ones are roughly cut and have a semi pointed end and a thicker one. The cheaper toothpicks are actually more useful to us, because the thicker end is a perfect size for scooping up a colony of bacteria, but the nice toothpicks are too pointy. In Korea they only sell the nice toothpicks, so the lab ordered some cheap toothpicks from overseas. Because they're not easy to come by here, we recycle them.

If you're thinking of a new business idea, try selling cheap toothpicks to Korean labs.

Earlier I mentioned one of the longer experiments called a Yeast 2-Hybrid. The theory behind it is fascinating and elegant, but getting it to work can be a nightmare. Basically it's a way to test if two different organic molecules interact with each other. Molecular interactions are behind almost every little thing that goes on in nature; from growing hair to producing acid in your stomach. By figuring out which molecules are interacting with each other, we can draw up a diagram and get an idea of what's happening in the bigger picture.
What a Yeast 2-Hybrid does is manipulate yeast cells so that they will live or die, depending on which molecules are interacting inside them. A good example of this is 'poison resistance', which is when the yeast can only survive poison if they have the correct interaction going on. In the photo above you can see that most of the yeast spots are nice and white, meaning that they survived. But there are two spots that are opaque, which means that they were unable to survive the poison. This tells us something about what is going on with the molecules that we are studying.

And in science, one experiment is never enough proof. What you need to do is repeat the experiment until you can convince your professor and the community that your results are meaningful. A good way to do this is to have experiments with different methods. If your experiments have different methods and use different stuff, but the results indicate the same conclusions, then you have a stronger basis for making a claim. This is why real scientists know that things like global warming and evolution are beyond reasonable doubt. These two 'theories' are supported through an immense range of scientific disciplines, from molecular mechanics to ecology and atmospherics. When such broad, independent and scientifically reliable sources all conclude the same thing, you can be confident that it's more trustworthy than someone who wrote a book saying it's all a big conspiracy.
Anyway, in the photo above is the same experiment but done with different chemicals. In the dish is essentially the same colonies of yeast, but they've been given chemicals that will turn blue if the result is positive. We can see that the same pattern emerges as in the previous photo, which gives us a more trustworthy result. Isn't life grand?

It was Se-kyung's birthday this week, so we celebrated with a cake and some Chinese food. Se-kyung is finishing up her master's degree this year. It's going to be Heather's birthday next week, so I'm probably heading back to Busan for the weekend.

Here's a fried fish cutlet lunch that I had a while ago. The serving sizes are actually quite good and just enough to fill you up without going overboard. If you want more though, you can go back to the counter and get refills for free. The price of this meal was only W2,500 (about $2.50 Australian!).

It was also graduation day recently. A whole lot of vendors came to the campus selling flowers, food and photography services. I look forward to the day when I graduate, but I guess I have a lot to learn before I can consider myself proficient in the field.

The professor took us out for a nice dinner last week too. We went to a traditional Korean barbecue place to welcome our newest lab member, Keonwoo. One day I'll hopefully get a photo of the professor to post here. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met and quite friendly, but I still haven't struck up the courage to snap a photo of him. Maybe one day when he's not looking, you'll get to see a photo of the back of his head.

I'm still on the waiting list for the dormitories and my old place expired. So Hong-sup organised some new accommodation for me at the New Zen koshiwon. These types of places are popular with students because they're cheap and usually conveniently located. Mine is 30 seconds away from the shuttle bus stop.

Koshiwons have shared facilities like kitchens and washing machines which give them a more communal atmosphere than regular lodgings, known as officetels.

And here's the reason why they're so cheap. My room has enough standing space for one, but not enough floor space to do push-ups on. But it helps to keep the place tidy at least. I have free internet and a little TV too. Some people live permanently in these sorts of places, and I'm sure I could live here for a year or so. It's not so good for having friends over though.

My room is one of the 'deluxe' rooms, which means I don't have to share my bathroom. The showerhead actually sprays over the whole bathroom area, including the toilet paper (which was an interesting discovery).

I packed all of my stuff from my previous place and carried it over. Instant noodles are the quintessential student food of our generation.

The view out the window isn't particularly spectacular, but sometimes I can see kids playing in the alley below. I stopped watching them after they discovered me leering down at them one day. I guess I'm not really a creepy old man, but there's no point in practising.

Maybe I should buy a periscope.

And one of the more comical things I found was this glow-in-the-dark exit sign above my door. Even in pure blindness, it would be difficult to not find your way out of the room.

The area I'm in, which is named after the university's subway stop, has a more suburban feel to it. Conveniences are everywhere and I don't have to walk far to find what I'm looking for.

On the weekend I found a Vietnamese beef noodle shop. These are popular in Korea, and the taste is fairly good. But in Australia, there's a large Vietnamese community, so the beef noodles back home are excellent.

Back to the lab again. These days I'm pulling 8:40am until midnight as hours on occasion, but there are others here that do it more regularly. I always was a workaholic, so it doesn't bother me much. I enjoy the freedom that I have in organising my own timetable.
The machine in the photo above is called an autoclave. Because we need most of our equipment sterile before we use it, most things are autoclaved regularly. This machine applies high pressure, steam and heat to whatever is put inside. The result is that no bacteria can survive, and even viruses are broken down. Many people don't know, but bacteria and viruses are about as different as fish and rocks. Well, maybe not fish and rocks. More like fish and water.
You can see that the lid of the machine kind of looks like a submarine hatch. That's because this kind of seal is the best design for high pressure environments.

And if you autoclave things the wrong way, this is what happens. In this photo, the plastic lids of the test tubes melted and fused onto the tubes themselves, as well as the rack. We had to throw these away.

In the last blog post, I told you how we can get foreign DNA into bacteria by simply giving them a heat shock. Another way to do it is with this machine in the photo. It's called an electroporator and what it does is apply a short zap of electricity to your bacteria. What you do is plop the bacteria into a special tube with metal sides and mix them with the DNA you're interested in. The electrical charge pierces the cells and carries the DNA in with it, because DNA is negatively charged. But it all happens so quickly that the holes in the bacteria seal up fast enough that some of them can survive.

Here's our newest Ph.D student, Keonwoo, helping me to prepare the electrocompetent cells. Keonwoo is a funny guy and we get along well. He smokes a lot of cigarettes and his voice sounds a little like Smegol, but he's very chilled. His English name is Keanu, due to the similar spelling, but I pointed out that this was because the spelling was wrong. According to the revised romanisation of Korean, his name should be spelled Geonwoo. So I sometimes call him Geanu Reeves.

The weather has been warming up nicely, but the other day we had precipitation that was a mix between snow and rain. I'm sure there's a proper name for it, but I called it Snain. When spring fully arrives, I hope to start jogging again.

That's all from me! See you next time.

Year of the Ox

The Year of the Ox quietly arrived this past weekend without much ado. I wonder what ox-like things lie in store for us this year?
So far I haven't noticed anything particularly oxy about things in general, but perhaps it takes a while for the oxiness of it all to settle in. I'll keep a lookout and report to you as soon as I see something.

Here's a typical shopping list of mine for the week: bananas, juice, ramyeon, bread and cheese. I eat lunch and dinner almost everyday in the university cafeteria, so these things I only need for breakfast.
I was a little worried about getting a balanced diet on a strict budget up here, but the university cafeteria are doing a good job. University veterans know that there are only four basic food groups for grad-students. They are: sugar foods, fat foods, caffeinated and free.

This device is called a homogeniser. I think it blows lots of tiny bubbles and mixes liquids, like a cappuccino machine, but for science. It makes a high pitched squeal when it's on, but I haven't had the dubious pleasure of switching it on all by myself yet.

We visit the Suwon campus a couple of times per week to check up on our plants. They're nice and cosy in the greenhouse, where the temperature is usually around 27 degrees celsius. I like how rice is grown underwater like in the pots in this photo, and also out in the paddy fields.
Did you know that rice doesn't have to grow underwater at all? It can be grown like any other crop, but the fields are often deliberately flooded with water because it keeps weeds and pests at bay. Because rice is a type of reed, it's perfectly happy in or out of the water.

I'm slowly getting used to the sight of snow everywhere, but I still like walking on it. Last week it snowed a lot, covering everything like icing on a cake.

The steps in front of my apartment are usually free of snow, as are many of the entrances to the university. The reason is because the ajossis sprinkle calcium chloride dust over these areas, which melts the snow by dissolving in it. So why don't they use good ol' table salt then?
Well, because table salt is bad for the environment, especially if you have a garden nearby.

A few nights ago when I left the lab, it was snowing quite heavily. I'm not sure if it was enough to warrant being called a blizzard, but I like to entertain the idea that it was. We shall just call it a blizzard for the purposes of this photo explanation. Anyway, during this 'blizzard' the other night, I was trudging along the crunchy snow toward the bus stop and I noticed that all of the traffic was crawling alongside me at walking pace. When I got to the bus stop, there was a line up of all the different numbered buses just waiting there, with their engines running.
I guess that when it snows heavily, the bus drivers don't drive for safety reasons. The area around the campus is quite hilly and I know that the roads are slippery even to walk across.

My favourite person, Heather, came up to see me last weekend for the Lunar New Year holiday. She's the first visitor I've ever had in Seoul, so it was pretty exciting. We didn't do anything special, just watched a DVD, walked around a bit and ate in restaurants. That's why I like Heather, because we can just hang out and not do anything particularly special and still have a good time. We sat in a coffee shop for a couple of hours talking about schools and teachers.

We went to a quaint little area up in Jongno-gu, because Heather had heard about a special brunch restaurant there. There are a lot of foreign embassies in Jongno and it's a nice and quiet suburb. I'm at the university most of the time, so it doesn't really feel like I'm in Seoul until I get out and about.

The area has a lot of foreign themed restaurants, like this one. Unfortunately our brunch place wasn't serving brunch, due to the long weekend holiday, so we walked around. This particular restaurant was selling $10 Australian wine for $80 per bottle. So we sat there for a while, pretending to admire the decor, before sneaking out quietly.

We went to a place down the road called Oz's kitchen. The food was all Italian and it was decorated with vintage-era pots and pans. In the photo above is Jang-Ho, Heather's brother who also lives in Seoul and came out to meet us. He's looking at an eggplant pizza that we ordered. It had a pesto base and the eggplant was thinly sliced and lightly grilled. Quite different from your regular Korean pizza, that will often come with toppings like sweet corn and sweet potato.

We also ordered a clam and angel hair soup, just to see how good the chef was. Angel hair is my favourite kind of pasta because it holds sauce well and isn't too filling. This dish was pretty good, and definitely a traditional style, but it had very subtle flavours.

Then we wandered back to the original place that Heather had suggested and they were open for coffee and desserts. I don't drink much coffee usually, and the reason is because I like its effects and I don't want to become so used to them that I have to drink coffee everyday just to be normal. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid. Perhaps I worry too much. Perhaps I just need a cup of coffee...

When we got outside, Heather said "hey let's take a photo of ourselves in the snow." It was actually snowing lightly, but it doesn't turn out too well on my camera.

Heather and I are approaching our 1000 day anniversary later this year. I wonder what she'll buy me. Ho ho.

Hi hunni!

She had to leave for Busan soon afterwards because she had to go to her family's ceremony. Most Korean families will have traditional ceremonies on the Lunar New Year and Chuseok holidays. I went to one once, and it was okay.

Heather delivered a gift from her mother, which was a whole lot of banchan (Korean side dishes). Heather's mother had heard that I like cucumber-kimchi, so she made it for me, even though she'd never made it before. I'm lucky to have nice in-laws. She also gave me some ddeok (rice dough) to make soup with. In Korea, they say that if you eat ddeok soup on the Lunar New Year, you turn an extra year older. They also say that when you are born, you are one year old. So sometimes, your Korean age will be two years older than your logical age.

The following day, there was a new year celebration with GOA'L up at Koroot, which is where I lived for a couple of weeks when I first arrived in Korea. On the walk from the subway station, I passed these video games which I remembered taking a photo of and putting on the blog. Incidentally, the photo is still there, in the July 2006 archive. It seems like so long ago now.

Here's the front of Koroot, which is a large house that was donated to the adoptee community by an anonymous benefactor. Adoptees who return to Korea are allowed to stay here very cheaply and it's a good way to meet people. I met some people here in 2006, who I'm still very good friends with today.

In the basement, GOA'L and Koroot had put together a nice Korean meal for us. In this photo wearing the red cap, is Cody Winter, who has been in Korea for over 10 years. He's since gotten married here and has a kid. We hung out in Busan together once and he knows me but always forgets my name. In Korea, I'm better known as 'that Australian guy'.

The food was good, and on the left there you can see some ddeok soup, which turned me a year older according to the Korean rule. I don't mind turning a year older now, but it'll be a different story when I'm around 35 years old. Then I'll never eat ddeok soup at new year's.

After dinner we played some games. There was Jenga, Monopoly, chess and Korean Go-Stop. We ended up playing Monopoly and although it went for around 2 hours, it was much more exciting than I expected. The game started with 7 players, but halfway through I realised that there was no way I could win, with my measly 4 properties (and no sets). So I merged with my two neighbours and we pooled all of our resources together. But just like bacteria in antibiotic media, our opponents quickly adapted and were soon thriving. They also formed merged teams and in the end it was three teams on the board. The properties and cards were all written in Korean, which made things interesting.
With some good decision making and a couple of lucky rolls, we won the game and the crowd went wild.

The crowd consisted of me and my two team mates.

After that we went out to Mike's Cabin and had some drinks. Apparently after that I stopped taking photos for the rest of the night, but I remember going to karaoke. I also lost my scarf somehow that night. Anyway it was a good time. I'm fairly busy in the lab these days, but I'll try to get out and about on the weekends and see some more of Seoul.

That's all for me this time. See you soon!