Conda updated?

Using a tip from Travis Hathaway, here is a shell one-liner to check if a Conda environment is up to date:

conda update --all --dry-run --json | jq -e '.success and (.actions | length) == 0'

It exits (-e) with 0 if the environment is already updated and 1 if updates are available.

I use this in CI so that I get an email if my environment.yml file is holding any packages back.

Because this command actually executes the dependency solver, it won’t report the environment as out of date unless a package both has an available update and can be updated while satisfying all the other dependencies’ version constraints.

Newly excavated posts about teaching

When I migrated from Blogger to Jekyll a few years ago, I left a bunch of posts behind, with the vague resolution of importing them at some point. Today, I excavated a few more from the archives, all about teaching:

• The benefits of a nonnative teacher (2020): A very long-winded way of saying that language learners often benefit from having a teacher who isn’t a native speaker of the target language, because then the teacher has empathy for the student. I think I stand by this take.
• Things that are a thing here (2018): Just a few days into my Fulbright job, I was enamored with how seriously Korean teachers took their profession—and still am. But knowing what I do now, I would not write “Art, music, literature, and ‘morality’ class matter [in Korean schools] just as much as the STEM subjects.” Of course, all these subjects factor into your GPA, but as in the US, many Korean teachers and parents believe that the best jobs go to STEM graduates. And thus, even if it’s not their intention, they tend to celebrate students’ success in those subjects with a bit of extra energy.
• Centering students as creators (2017): Notes from my undergrad internship. I think I see the germ here of an idea I’ve grown more certain of since: When you don’t know how to proceed, the first thing you should do is start. You know—open a document, put your name and the date, choose a font. These first steps shake off the fear of failure and assure the brain that it is safe to proceed.

Server-side KaTeX rendering with Jekyll

This post explains how I set up server-side KaTeX rendering to improve the load time on pages that include mathematical notation.

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Two novels to understand Korea’s political turmoil

On Tuesday night, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law across the country for six hours. He retracted his declaration only after the National Assembly passed an emergency resolution ordering him to back down. As of this writing, the Assembly has drafted but failed to vote on articles of impeachment. Instead, Yoon’s party has announced a plan for the president’s “orderly resignation.” Many details remain up in the air.

As an American, it is not my place to take sides or say what Korea should do next; I can only observe and interpret. With that as my goal, I would like to discuss two novels that may supply context to the current political situation.

First, to understand the images that Koreans associate with “martial law,” we must discuss Han Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts (한강, «소년이 온다»), which is available in an English translation by Deborah Smith. The novel portrays 1980’s 5/18 movement and the ensuing government crackdown in which public officials killed, sexually assaulted, arrested, and tortured pro-democracy activists in Gwangju on false charges of communist sympathy—crimes that the Korean government has since acknowledged.¹ As Friday’s New York Times explains (paywall), Han Kang’s recent Nobel Prize offered a moment of catharsis and vindication for victims of the 1980 incident; the recent turmoil has cut short their celebration.

Next is 28 by Jeong You Jeong (정유정). Set in Hwayang, a fictional city on the outskirts of Seoul, this 2013 novel imagines the outbreak of a highly infectious disease transmitted between humans and dogs. Once the Korean government grasps the infection’s contagiousness and lethality, the president imposes a swift military blockade on the city. Within, anarchy prevails. As the citizens of Hwayang clash with the occupying troops, 28 makes transparent reference to the crimes of 5/18, but pushes further to ask how martial law would unfold with modern technology and social media. Jeong also raises difficult questions about the transactional relationship between humans and animals. (And, because it is a Jeong You Jeong novel, there is a serial killer running around.) It looks like Chi-Young Kim translated this novel into English at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, but all I can find is an excerpt.

These modern novels remind us that in Korea, the concept of authoritarian rule is more than a rhetorical foil, but a living memory than looms over public policy and civic life. At this moment, martial law is no longer in effect, President Yoon has apologized, and the democratically elected National Assembly controls the government. That means that Korea’s future is, for now, safely in the hands of its people.

How I self-host fonts on this blog

I recently transitioned this blog to self-host its fonts (IBM Plex Sans, Sans KR, and Mono) from within the GitHub Pages artifact instead of calling the Google Fonts API. This makes the site a little more “static” by eliminating the need for your browser to download font files from an external domain. Here, I explain how (and why) I self-host fonts without bringing them into the source tree.

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