Running
I run. Running makes me feel alive and healthy and gives me time for excellent meditation.
I started a long-distance running to join the Atlanta half-marathon race in March 2020. At this moment, unfortunately, due to Covid-19, all events after that have been canceled. I hope I could complete a full course marathon sometime!
Kayaking
The Jordan lake in NC is a great place for kayaking!
Languages
I like learning languages. I am interested in learning the similarities and differences in languages. My mother language is Korean which is very different from other languages I know. I learned English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. Eight different languages sounds like a lot, but I barely speak many of them fluently and the last four Roman languages are very similar to each other. I can identify what language someone is speaking. ^^
I used to be an accountant. Accounting can be seen as a linguistic activity where financial transactions (thoughts) are translated (expressed) into lines of record (sentences). I liked accounting because of the taste of learning a new language and also because of the joy of abstracting the parsimonious representation from complicated phenomena, the latter of which happens all the time doing mathematics or statistics.
The programming languages are also very interesting to me. It is a communication tool between the human and the machine. I started a very crude form of programming using Excel functions and macros, and I learned about visual Basic when I worked as an accountant. Playing around with the new devices seemed so powerful and so fascinating. As I started having an interest in statistics, I began learning R which became my main programming language, and found it so versatile, thinking “I should have learned this stuff earlier!!!” Learning that R is not ideal for dealing with memory and speed, I have learned lower-level languages like C and C++. Programming used to be a very exciting hobby when I was an accountant (accountants seldom program), but it became more like a job now. But I still like it a lot!
Contact
email: hunycho _at_ live _dot_ unc _dot_ edu
twitter: @consult_stat (in Korean)