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THE TRUMP-KIM summit was looked at from a variety of perspectives from around the world.
Depending on your viewpoint it may have been either an historic first step towards eventual peace and rapprochement in the Korean peninsula or just a photo opportunity for two ego-driven world leaders.
For Korean national Kyle Hyunsung Kim who’s lived and worked in Dublin for the past eight years, it doesn’t really matter about Donald Trump’s involvement. The only thing that matters is that it works.
Kyle is one of the organisers of the Dublin Korean Culture Meetup Group, an online group of both Koreans and Irish people who share a love of both cultures.
As the name suggests, the group gathers regularly and is an opportunity for Korean people to meet each other and Irish people in their new city.
Originally from Seoul, Kyle runs an online student recruitment agency called Lingospy from here in Dublin. He says the recent improving relations between North and South Korea have got all Koreans talking.
“We are very excited about what is happening right now, and especially about the summit itself. It is actually very funny because my fiancée is American and she kind of thought the whole summit was a photo-op and was about stroking President Trump’s ego and stuff.”
I partly agree but from a Korean point of view it is actually a very exciting moment. I can see we are now one step closer to unification and ending wars. I feel very positive about it.
“To be perfectly honest with you I really don’t care what Trump may gain in terms of the credit or anything. What I care about it is that we can actually be one nation again and we can travel to each other and visit each other. That’s what really matters.”
The division of Korea occurred after the Second World War due to the presence of US and Soviet troops in the country, and was then copper-fastened by the Korean War.
It is the ambition and hope of most Koreans that both north and south will be reunited in the future but, as Kyle explains, it’s less of a political aspiration than a personal one.
My granddad is from North Korea. He’s passed away now but when my mom was a child he always her sat down with notes and a list of his family members, their names and addresses. And my granddad gave them to my mam and said whenever Korea is unified you have to find those people, they are your blood family. And that’s the reality of it, we still have family over there.
“He used to live in North Korea before the war and when the war broke out he went down south and he could not go back to the north after the war. So he remarried to my grandma and then they had my mom. So then he had his ex-wife and his child and everything in the north. We don’t actually know if they’re still alive.”
Kyle explains that there’s no way of getting in contact with that family north of the border but that his mother has been very excited about the recent cooling of relations between north and south.
Especially, he says, about the diplomatic work being undertaken by South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who met with Kim Jong-un in Korea’s demilitarized zone in April.
On the future, Kyle says he is hopeful that the positive steps that have already been taken will translate into concrete progress. He says that he doesn’t personally like Trump but that he believes his judgement of Kim’s intentions are correct.
When Kim Jong Un took the power from his father, I remember Korean people were saying when he was a kid we knew he studied in Switzerland. And people said when he studied abroad and was exposed to the culture of the western society there will be big changes when he takes power.
“I think this time we will really see the big changes coming,” he adds.
All this marvellous science is to be commended! But please could someone come up with a gizzmo that would figure out the Inner Workings of The Female Mind, cos lads I’d buy one .Please…some one…
And mental disorders but wouldn’t a cure for all diseases be a priority?
Oh come on now. You will just have to accept that some things are, and always will be, beyond the bounds of science.
Yeah…women.
Not possible on earth, they are from venus….
Just think of the female mind as like Schroedinger’s cat in a locked box where you have hopelessly lost the key to open it
Well if the cat is anything like his missus leave the #ecker in the box!
Women are like a Web browser with 279 tabs open at the same time, you can expect a question on any of them at any time so be prepared..; ) I believe Google are Woking on an app.
Hot, gaseous, full of acid and thick?
l fooking love science. It may not have all the answers but it sure does have all the questions.
Unless it opens a gateway to hell lol.
where?
Not only are our smart phones more powerful than all the computers used during Apollo 11. The very watch on your hand is also more powerful. Mathematics
You mean that place that only exists in religious mythology?
Science has the only answers.
Bill, like string theory too…
Jake not if the universe is a hologram and then when you dive into Quantum madness reality goes out the window but yet it exists and seems weirder than the idea of a god?
Quantum theory is supported by mountains of mathematical evidence, Michael. Unless God has started writing equations on the night sky, then no, it is not weirder than the idea of a God.
But it is mathematical evidence in agreed theory by those who went to the right universities mainly, most of science seems to be based on who went to the right universities in my view. I am not at all saying they are wrong but science does have a biasness to it based on certain universities and who pays towards certain research.
The faith some put into some of these theories like string and dark matter seem weirder than the idea of God. Evolution seems strange where the physical realities can change the DNA for the biological necessities of life but how as there has to be something to cause the right changes than randomness as well as the speed of evolution that can take place like worms that evolved to survive the tin mines in Cornwall I believe as tin oxide is deadly and they have evolved to survive that poison so quickly?
Another is what existed to cause the big bang as all reactions need a trigger or does physics not work with the big bang, so what was there before that? Is it the word God or the idea that there is an intelligence beyond the physical that scientists hate or is it because they want to be Gods themselves to give them an ego boost in coming up with something that will make them famous and will make them remembered beyond death. What is wrong with the idea of God, what is so terrible about that idea?
Most of reality is space and energy, so big bang, hydrogen, stars, super nova’s, the elements. planets, DNA, Complex life, self awareness and now humanity. Too many accidents to say “here I am” and here is me saying what is wrong saying that a God exists and here in the Western world Jesus where god became man. I can see Darkins face now…
I am not telling people that I am right or they are wrong but debating is good for the soul, lol.
Michael, I’m sorry to say that you have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s clear that you have all these ideas about science and what you *think* it is, but you’ve obviously never been educated on the topics in any detail. I say this not as an insult, you’ve just demonstrated that you don’t understand a lot of what science tells us about the world.
Science does not have ‘biases’. Science is a process of learning about the natural world, it doesn’t take a stance on anything. What you meant to say was that scientists or the scientific community have biases, and though this may be true, ‘going to the right university’ has nothing to do with it. If you have evidence to back up your claims, scientists will listen to you and take you seriously. It doesn’t matter where you graduated from.
I’m not going to pick apart your assertions about physics and biology simply because what you’ve said makes little to no sense. I’d recommend reading up on the subject or talking to an expert on the topic before spewing out all this stuff.
Also, scientists are not opposed to the idea of a God. The problem is that there is no *evidence* for a God, so they don’t take the idea seriously because it is not falsifiable and it is an unsubstantiated claim. If you could provide evidence for a God, you’d win a Nobel Prize and you would be lauded as a genius, and scientists would envy you.
Malachi, I just take in philosophy, religion, science and use them to look at subjects, you can be a scientist without letting science tell you where the full stops are. The first thing we need to understand is that nothing is certain, that people who get things right in the past does not say that they will always be right and that is true with science. People need to question things, step back and enjoy science instead of turning science into a war, ever heard of Locke and Berkeley?
Just because a person knows stuff doesn’t mean that they agree with what they know and just because there is no evidence, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist until people find the evidence either?
People do not know what there is if they disagree with something, people ignore everything they dislike or disagree with and therefore do not search any further into that subject. Sometimes to search for something you need to have the same enthusiasm as a believer and only then you are able to argue your point and to understand it fully if you agree or disagree with it?
Like chess, it doesn’t matter what side you are as the moves are the same?
It is fairer to say that you disagree with my point because… Of what you believe rather than you hoping that I know nothing?
Science does have issues and there is a class system at play especially in the U.S. and this system can be seen in the Art world as well. Take the big bang, have you ever heard any scientist up to recently talk about what caused it or what was before it, this use to be taboo especially in certain universities. As a Horizon program on BBC2 showed last year I believe, as some scientific questions even up to the 80s were career stopping and this isn’t new as Einstein had the same problem for years after he wrote his book Theory of Relativity.
What science is and suppose to be is not always the same?
how advanced would we be if we used the money we spend on war for peaceful scientific research?
Probably not much farther in fairness. The simple reality is we develop technology and knowledge at a much faster rate when at war. It’s estimated that the Second World War developed in 6 years the same amount of technological advances as 30 years worth of peacetime research.
That’s because WWII motivated people to spend money on research. But what if we were motivated to spend those sort of funds all of the time?
No, the advancements came due to strict military requirements as often these needed to be fixed well and on a tight budget. World War Two specifically saw massive developments in aircraft propulsion, metallurgy, rocketry and radar all due to requirements which developed during that war. Most notably the major developments came from countries which could barely afford to keep the lights on due to the scale of the spending on weapons. Tanks needed to be tougher, planes needed to be faster, planes needed to be detected a lot earlier and bombs needed to be delivered without risking what little manpower a strained Air Force had left. The Crimean War saw the birth of what is modern surgery due to the unique brutality of the wounds inflicted in that war.
Also, due to the unique IED-centric warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan we have seen massive developments in the areas of automation, robotics and prosthetics because of the large number of amputees created by that war, the end-goal being to create prosthetics good enough to enable experienced but wounded soldiers to be sent back into a war zone.
The simple fact is war makes humans realise very soon where we are lacking and militaries have tough requirements for how these failings need to be addressed.
Or maybe all those developments would have happened anyway. Id say its more likely that technological development would happen at an increased more constant rate. War might just bring about an overall reduced rate of development but in a sinusoidal fashion, increased during times of need. Since there is almost 2 trillion a year spent of military those funds if they were available would have to increase scientific development. Look at the host of private nuclear fusion companies trying to develop z pinch reactors but have to get private funding to get a few million to fund their projects.
Those developments would of course have happened eventually but it is clear that war significantly advanced their progress. The space programme as a very good example would not be where it is today were it not for the incredible advancements by Nazi engineers during the war. They turned what was only a theory before the war into a weaponised system in only a couple of years and it was these weapons that served as the foundation of the first generation of post-war rockets for the new space agencies. The same goes for modern surgery, were it not for the sheer amount of living test subjects generated by the American Civil War all the way up to WW2 we certainly would not have seen the level of advancements in medical procedures in such a timeframe.
Also the point about money investment is a weak one as it completely ignores the law of diminishing returns. Research especially suffers heavily from this as investing 10x more money is definitely not guaranteed to generate 10x the results. In fact past experience has shown that it would probably generate much closer to a 2x increased return, much lower than the sheer level of progress experienced during wartime.
The headline author doesn’t seem to understand how science works. It’s not a matter of deciding what you want to discover…
@George Salter – Yes you’re right, unless of course one is a member if the climate change cult.
Wow, Dude, you managed to squeeze your little quip in there despite it being completely irrelevant to the original comment! Fantastic stuff.
PlutoFlyby was a massive high for me and there’s more to come.
Still no cure for the hiccups on the horizon?
Lots of ifs,coulds and things that are needed. Better hurry up before we destroy ourselves
And scientists are “on the cusp ” of making which discoveries? As I read it MIT are saying “gee, wouldn’t it be awesome if we cracked these problems “. Headline a little misleading.
What about Jesus!!
Spoiler alert, he dies at the end of the book.
But he came back!!
Kind of like John Snow!
And if they never went to the moon due to all the solar and cosmic radiation???
And not one of the several conspirators involved has said anything in 40 odd years. …
I love it when people declare that they think moon landings never happened. It makes it easy to see who you should avoid at all costs.
If the landings were faked,then why didn’t the Soviets blow the whistle on the whole thing?
The brain dead people will come up with this original thought “Think of all the hospitals we could have built”.
Science is the business, there’s so much left to learn. There’s most likely things that we’ll actually never know as we don’t have the instruments to even comprehend then.
If people want the real answers they should look no further than within our quantum world, there lies the answers to everything.
Left out some of the most important scientific developments that will happen mainly brain computer interfacing and nuclear fusion.
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