Personalized Advertisement in Korea

We received an advertisement from the GS supermarket in seoul. I agree that that wold normally not warrant a blogpost, however this was quite special in the way that it was personalized. This advertisement contained 10% discount coupons for the items we most frequently brought at GS. In the order of frequency, so ham was on place one, followed by milk, eggs, laundry detergent, chicken meat, cornflakes, cheese, butter and kim. 

I didn't really decide yet if i like that (are they also saving which brand of condoms we prefer? when do they delete these data? do i want my landlord to know what we buy?), but I'm quite fascinated. The woes and wonders of modern technology....

Graduation Day at SNU

Monday, 29th of august was the graduation day at SNU. Congratulations to all graduates :)

Apparently most graduates want a picture with the front gate in the background. Also the remaining campus was crowded like hell.

Caffè Pascucci at SNU

We suffered for the last year...  i had to walk more than 100 meter to the next coffee shop. No, seriously, i think there are no people who complain about to few coffee shops in the SNU main campus, but more variety is always a good thing. So now we have also a Pascucci at SNU. While the prices are quite high, students get a 20% discount, which makes it still not a cheap coffee shop but at least acceptable.
The ice-cream is quite good, fluffy-creamy, not like the baskin robins ice-cream which is ice-.....  ahem yes just ice ^^
also do your self a favor and try the gelato honey toast... delicious :)

Gelato honey toast. Served with vanilla ice-cream and chocolate or caramel syrup 

I really like that building style :)

Cheer up

The perfect item for research students, authors etc.:

What would The Church do?

I like the song 'What would Brian Boitano do', from the old south park movie. The song is a parody of the phrase 'What Would Jesus Do'. So i decided to see where people look actually for guidance. Not only comparing this parody with the original saying but if possible with the various ranks in the church.

Now when i looked into the ranks of the church i found it very difficult to simplify. Therefore i compare only to ranks within the catholic church and even there i have to simplify. Interesting is also the wikipedia article on the hierarchy of the catholic church.

Figure 1: Google hits for the phrase 'what would * do'. Sorted roughly by ascending level within the hierarchy of the catholic church (from left to right). Articles were included in the search query when necessary.

Well... the winner is obviously 'What Would Jesus Do'. Now the next question which comes to my mind is where are people interesting in WWJD? The answer was obtained from google via regional interest search for the phrase 'What Would Jesus Do'

Figure 2: Darker color indicates higher search volume for WWJD

Obviously the regional search is not statistically relevant. Mainly due to search volume measured in english. So please refrain from citing this figure for anything than fun purposes ^^.

What really surprises me is the high position of Jamaica. Anybody an idea what they scored high?

Two Panoramas

I had a few days of and went with my wife on vacation. First to Sokcho (which is in the far north east) and then to Busan.

This is the view from my old dormitory in Dong Seo University Busan. One of many reasons why i stayed in korea ^^.

This photo was taken at an rest area half way between Seoul and Sokcho. 

DNA Sculpture at SNU Suwon campus

I went to the Suwon campus to attend a lecture a while ago and saw there this DNA sculpture / installation  thingy.

And in case you didn't know, yes SNU has a Suwon campus. Its in a techno park from Gyeongie province and consist of i believe 3 buildings. Originally it was intended for the Business school, but somehow they belived it not fancy / convenient enough so the higher ups sent the school of converging science there. The campus is conveniently reachable by a SNU owned shuttle bus.