Milkman! I am no Milkman! I am a South Korean Yakult Lady!
I should first explain the rather nonsensical title. One of my friends who is off doing machine learning (waves hands) showed me this paper
published at NeurlPS 2020. Of course, I did not understand a word of it, having very little background in ML. That said, the title was hysterical. I felt like I had to make an homage to it. The South Korean Yakult Lady part comes from what I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is the 6 years of my life that I spent in Korea before my family came to Canada.
I remember reading about how people used to have milk delivered to their homes back in the 50s to the 70s. I was intrigued enough by this that I decided to look a bit deeper into this phenomenon. Apparently, nearly 29.7% of people in the United States had milk delivered to their households in 1963, but his number dropped pretty quickly to 6.9% of total milk sales by 1975.
One of the things that I forgot about until a few days ago is that we had sort of a cultural analogue to milk delivery back in Korea when I was a child. I'm not entirely sure what sparked this memory. I remember now quite vividly that a lady, whom some of the neighbourhood kids and I would call ajumma, dressed in a shade of yellow, would often come around with a refrigerated cart of yakult, a kind of fermented milk beverage. Below is a picture of the modern-day Yakult lady
It looks like they don't wear that violent shade of yellow that I remember, and back in the late 90s and very early 2000s (when I lived in Korea), I don't remember them having these fancy motorized carts. They'd usually come on bikes. I find it pretty interesting that this job still exists; I wonder if my neighbourhood Yakult lady still remembers me. The last time I was back in my old neighbourhood was 2010. I wish I had taken more pictures back then just to remember how things looked like.
This past week, I finished up the final TA training orientation and boy, was I glad. I think I've had enough public speaking time to last me until at least May. In a major episode of déjà vu, I was tasked yet again with making another video tutorial for 310, this time on debugging. I honestly have a newfound respect for YouTubers; I would go insane trying to shoot video after video after video. I imagine the money kind of helps.
I'm also helping with doing an initial review of graduate school applicants who have expressed interested in software engineering/programming languages as a research area. I'm really impressed by the sheer quality and passion that some applicants demonstrate, and I hope some of these peeps will join our lab.
That's it for this week, I hope you enjoyed the random tangent into South Korean Yakult ladies.