Speaking of Korea…

The New York Philharmonic traveled to North Korea recently on a goodwill tour. I heard about this online, but it was my friend Bob from XPDA who put up a link to where you can watch the video of the entire concert online.

First, let me say that I think this is extraordinary, and fantastic. It’s arguable that the governments of both countries have a large streak of insanity running through them. Ours refuses to talk to enemies, a dangerous stance based on bad assertions, and theirs is run by Kim Jong Il, a barking-mad megalomaniac who was skewered in "Team America" as the only sane person in the whole movie.

But I am a huge fan of goodwill missions like this. If their leader doesn’t show up (and he didn’t), to heck with him. Revolutions rarely start from the top down.

And if there is better music in the world to inspire freedom than Dvorak’s "New World Symphony", I haven’t heard it.

Listen for yourself. It starts at the fourth track of the video. The video and sound quality are fantastic.

What is it about music? Sure, different cultures have different styles, even entirely different bases of music. And yet it all appeals to me. When I hear Khatchaturian’s ballet "Gayne", some part of my blood comes alive, some long-last Slavic gene. It makes my body sing. I can feel it literally inside me, a tightening just below my sternum, a catch in my breath. I have no idea what it is, or exactly what causes it, but it’s a feeling we could all use, every day.

Watching the people of North Korea listening to our musical emissaries, I got that feeling again. The music was a part of it (I love Dvorak’s Ninth) but it was also the knowledge that this was a group reaching out, trying to make friends, trying — and succeeding — to show that there are commonalities with all of us.

I spend a lot of time on this blog railing about those who would divide us, and get accused sometimes of doing that myself. I hope that most of you see that what I do is different: I am trying to stop those who divide. Ironically, that does encourage division, but only between those who, like me, want a world where no one tries to legislate their personal beliefs on everyone else, and those who would.

Sometimes, maybe, I don’t make enough effort to encourage a positive aspect of all this — though I try to whenever I write about the wonder of science and astronomy.

So let this concert be an example for all of us. I don’t know anything about the people who sat in the audience of that concert. Maybe they are North Korean officials who truly hate the U.S., or they are rich elite who are just being self-indulgent.

But at one point, as the camera panned across the audience, it showed a young Korean woman who, ever so slightly, was swaying to the music, and I swear that twice in those few scant seconds, her mouth twitched upward in a subtle smile.

That concert, and this post, is for her.

The first South Korean astronaut, Yi So-yeon, is set to launch in April on a Russian rocket headed for the International Space Station.

There are several stories here. One is that she is the first Korean astronaut, which is cool. The second is that she replaces Ko San, who was slated to be the first, but broke some rules the Russians have set. They appear to be minor infractions involving training manuals — the first was he sent a manual home by accident, he says, and a second violation involved getting a manual he was not supposed to receive — but the Russian space agency takes those rules seriously, and after formally apologizing twice, I don’t blame Korea for replacing him.

The third story is that Dr. Yi is young — 29 — and has a PhD in bioengineering. Wow. I had just gotten my degree when I turned 29, but I wasn’t also training to be an astronaut!

The fourth aspect of this is that Dr. Yi a woman. I wish this weren’t news, but a casual perusal of the list of space-travelers makes it clear it is. The good news is, in my opinion, soon this won’t be news. Women will travel in space as much as men, and eventually we’ll be an egalitarian space-faring species.

I look forward to that time very much, and so I wish Dr. Yi a good launch and journey, and hope that one day her travels won’t be news any more.

I mentioned last week that Pamela and Rebecca are blogging from the Lunar and Planetary conference in Texas right now… but of course Emily is there as well, and has some follow-up news about Mercury, with a promise of more to come.

There’s going to be lots of cool news from the conference, so do what I do: subscribe to the RSS feeds for those folks, and get your news directly and rapidly.

My friend Kelsey asked me about some pictures she saw of the Shuttle in orbit. The pictures show the Shuttle being destroyed, and were claimed to have been taken by an Israeli spy satellite. She guessed they were from a movie, though.

She was right (she’s a space nerd after all, though she’d never admit it, so don’t tell her I said so). Here are the pix:

Click to embiggen. Can you guess the movie? It’s Armageddon, the suckiest suck that ever sucked. It’s not like that movie didn’t do enough damage when it came out, but for years it’s been making the rounds of teh intertoobs as an email meme. I first wrote about this back in 2003 (see the March 13 entry), when the pictures were first being circulated. And they’re still around! Amazing.

Anyway, if you see an astronomy or space picture that looks too good to be true, send ‘em to me (well, send a link) and I’ll see what I can do to sniff ‘em out.