Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody replaced it over the last couple days. Brilliant so far.

I’ll try to finish GOT, since the research chapters – the body of the book – should be more interesting than the intro.

Have you started it yet?

There are things in psychology that seems painfully obvious, but need to be proven in order to be generally accepted. Take skin contact and babies. It’s seems like a no-brainer now, but wasn’t so a few decades back.

I have Clay Shirky book in my stack of books to read, but I decided I needed to read "How to Change the World" first. This book is about social entrepreneurship and mentions a client (Ashoka) that I used to work closely with when I was in the US a year back.

I recently married a Korean woman after a 2-year friendship (we’re moving to Seocho in a couple weeks), and am having similar questions about our "geographies of thought." (I’m American, un/fortunately.) That book has been on my shelf for about a year, but I haven’t had the time to get past the first chapter. Summer’s here, the time is right. Hope to see you post on it.

John Medina, molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules, gave a Google Talk in which he tells the joke of a Japanese (?) company that tried to market its vacuum cleaner for American consumption. They got the "functional" bit down, but didn’t do their language homework – another interesting twist in the whole globalization Babel. Their slogan was, "If it sucks, it’s a [Brand name]."

As for how foreigners perceive Korea? I came here after 5 years in Shanghai, which was a love affair and conversion experience. I wish I could say the same for Korea – Seoul, anyway – but can’t by a long shot. My in-laws, wonderful people, are beginning to change that, but still, I can’t help but see Korea as the sort of Lutheran, Wobegone village of Asia. So much repression, conformity, stress, status consciousness, tradition bondage.

But again, that may change as time passes.

Enough rambling. I’ve subscribed, by the way.