"Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki" by Higashino Keigo

Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki by Higashino Keigo

goodreads.com rating: 4.34
my verdict: the very best

pro: everything
con: nada

Higashino Keigo is crude. To talk about his style, I can't say anything but that his style sucks. His style is worse than most junior high students. His characters are weak. I admit that there are exceptions (for example, Yukiho in Byakuyakou, or Ishigami in The Devotion of Suspect X) but most of his characters are just names. His storytelling methods are most of the time very banal, or to put it more positively, cliché. His employment of frame narratives is so crude that it hurts the flow.

Still, I like most of his novels, and love some of them. The stories he tells are way too powerful. The basic idea that sustains the whole plot is simply genius. Small devices here and there do their job artfully in delivering the overall effect. As a result, his story rivets into your mind.

Reading Byakuyakou ("Walking under the White Night") is like being stabbed with a knife in the heart. When Yasuko reports herself to the police, and seeing this, Ishigami falls on his knees and cries, who is it that can stop himself/herself from shedding tears as well? (The Devotion of Suspect X)

But, of all his works, I love this one best. I can earnestly say that writing such a story is itself a miracle (kiseki). This novel is like a touch of a warm, soft hand of your beloved when you least expect it. It is like the first snow. It is like the moment when a kid finds what he wished for in the Christmas Stocking. The boy rubs his eyes because he is only half-awake yet, but he wants to find out sooner. And the world outside is shrouded with cotton-soft snow.

What I want to tell you is, reading this book is like receiving a gift. You never knew you wanted that gift, but now you know it.

Three good-for-nothing youngsters get into a shabby house. Then they find that there's a letter in the letterbox. They have nothing to do, and a night to spend. They decide to read the letter...

I still feel electrified just by thinking about the story.

I strictly stay away from containing spoilers in book reviews. So I do not wish to talk more. But I earnestly recommend this one to literally ANYONE. There are books that appeal to some but disgust others. But this one, I believe, will move any human being. I believe reading this book will make you happy, being reminded that you also belong to the same race.

(This is the cover of the Korean edition of the book, which I read)

"The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

goodreads.com rating: 4.13
my verdict: good!

pro: actionable
con: repetitive

Recommendation is a powerful tool in choosing books to read. The title of this book sounds so banal that you can instantly say that this must be a good-for-nothing self-help book that disguises itself as a psychology book. To tell the truth, the book title couldn't be anything else. This book actually says about the advantages of being happy. However, it is also true that I wouldn't have picked up this book if it were not for the recommendation of someone (and goodreads.com's high rating of course).

There are seven principles with the happiness advantage (even though they are not systemically interwoven like those seven habits of Stephen Covey).

1. The Happiness Advantage: capitalize on positivity to improve productivity/life.

2. The Fulcrum and the Lever: adjust your mindset (the fulcrum) so as to attain the most power (the lever).

3. The Tetris Effect: you are the lucky guy! Everything will turn out best for you!

4. Falling Up: Eureka, you fell! Now it's time to get up even stronger!

5. The Zorro Circle: start out small. Retain your core circle of control (i.e. the internal locus of control) whatever happens to you.

6. The 20-Second Rule: reroute the path of least resistance. Eliminate the 20-second obstacle to good habits. Build 20-or-more-second obstacle to your bad habits.

7. Social Investment: invest in friends, peers, and family so that you have a social support network when needed.

(Almost) Every item on the list is actionable. But I'd like to recommend the item number 6, that is, the 20-second rule, to people like me who get heavily challenged in terms of willpower on daily basis.

For example, you know daily exercise is great, but what if it takes 5 minutes in the morning to get ready and walk out the door to go jogging? Shawn says he went to bed in gym clothes so that he could automatically dash out of the bed to go jogging in the morning. For me, I found myself eating less potato chips when I put it in the pantry with a door, instead of right beside the coffee machine where I can see it (and grab it) more easily. So, for a good habit that you want to build on yourself, remove any obstacle that might discourage you from doing it habitually. For a bad habit that you want to shake off, build many obstacles so that it takes a lot of time and effort to do it. In other words, put your good habits on the path of least resistance.

Have I said that I like this book because it contains many actionable items? I will recommend some from the book.

1. Choose a day of the week. This is your good-deed day. Do five good things to others throughout the day. Of course, you will count each of them as you do it and feel great.

2. To have or to be? Spend money on experiences, rather than on stuffs. (This reminds me of the good book, The Story of Stuffs.)

3. Do you think you are doing petty things to earn living? That petty stuff most probably will lead to something greater in the bigger picture. Write down the petty thing you do not like, and draw an arrow. Then write down what that leads to. If that still does not satisfy you, draw another arrow and at the end of it write down what is accomplished by that. In most of the cases, your petty daily chore is a building block for a lot greater thing that you can be proud of.

4. Set an alarm at, let's say, 11 o'clock in the morning. When that sets off, begin writing down three good things that happened yesterday. Now your mind is set on the positive side.

5. When you get really stressed out, draw a table and divide the causes of your stress into two groups - those you can control and those you can't. Forget about those things you can't control. Focus on the little things you can tackle easily (the Zorro Circle). You will get improvement.

6. Clear obstacles to your good habits. Build obstacles to your bad habits.

7. Many people (including me!) spend energy and willpower in making small decisions that does not make any difference after all. Set up a simple rule and use it for quick decisions. Pizza or spaghetti? Toss a coin. You want to have one more cup of coffee? Set up the daily limit.

8. Make eye contacts. Look at people's eyes when they speak to you.

Wow, that's already quite a long list. At the end of the book, Shawn says about a man who thinks he is already doing all of these, while his wife isn't. Shawn told the man that he had heard the opposite from his wife a while ago. What I mean is, people (again including me) think they are doing things while they aren't. Let's start actually doing those good things. :)

"Quiet: the Power of Introverts" by Susan Cain

Quiet: the Power of Introverts
by Susan Cain

goodreads.com rating: 4.00
my verdict: well! (see below)

pro: good intention
con: this is part book, part manifesto (someone's review in Amazon.com)

All's well that ends well. So, the final verdict for this book  is well(!) instead of good. The few pages at the end of the book, under the heading of conclusion, include some really good real-life advices for introverts, extroverts, teachers, and managers.

Except that, well, like the reviewer I quoted above, this may not be even a book. Yes, of course you can call a bundle of printed pages glued together a book. Yes, physically, a book. But what about the basics you learn at school about writing? I don't even accuse this book of being illogical. I accuse it of being incoherent. In one part, the author distinguishes being introvert from being shy, and goes on bedeviling shyness. In other part, she presupposes that being shy equals being introvert and goes on advocating shyness.

Even worse, for a very large part of the book, the author depicts a world torn apart between introverts and extroverts, and affirms single-handedly that it's the extroverts' bad. For example, she says the subprime mortgage crisis would not have happened if the bankers had been introverts instead of extroverts.

I am actually amazed that she has the gut to pitch this kind of stuff in the TED. Most people would have just ended up writing in their diaries.

However, as mentioned above, the book has a good intention. I wish it had a matching quality. And yes, I wasted a fair amount of time.

"Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel" by Carl Safina

Goodreads rating: 4.38
My verdict: Good

Pro: Interesting and emotional episodes
Con: Do not expect science



Having a rating of whopping 4.38 on Goodreads.com is a feat, you know. For your information, Richard Dawkins's Selfish Gene has a rating of 4.10, Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, 4.12, Keigo Higashino's Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki, 4.33. My brief search could find only one book that has a higher rating: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, at 4.59.

This is a very interesting book, coming at you often with riveting stories of emotional depth that leave big impacts on your mind. I was an elephant lover but I am an adorer now. Wolves deserve much more respectable traits for metaphors. Killer whales, (I sigh,) they are much better beings than us humans, in every aspects.

But, is this a science book? If you expect it to be one, you will be disappointed. Most stories are told like a gossip. When the author argues something, what he brings as the proof is, most of the time, a hearsay. Yes, the hearsay is in the format of some scientist's argument, but the scientist is quite often a like-minded fellow researcher who happened to live in the author's neighborhood and told him the episodes over a dinner table.

This book is like the famous animal stories by Ernest Thompson Seton. The book strikes you with a very powerful insights about the world and the position of us human beings in it, but you'd better not expect what is told is scientifically solid. I strongly suspect the author actually believes that he is delivering a set of scientific arguments backed by solid evidences, but I don't think the author's arguments will appear on The Nature as they do in this book.

But do not underestimate this book. It will make you think about the world, mankind, and other habitants of our planet, from a different perspective than before. And once more, it is a powerfully compelling read. Science or not, you will enjoy this book and love the animals in it. And yes, there are other beings living in this world that matter too.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The title alone can attract a number of readers, I guess. The flip side of an attractive title is the disappointment you get when you find the snappy title contains nothing - like, for example, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In my case, I’ve been betrayed quite a few times already, so the nice title actually lowered my expectation about the novel. Consequently, the actual reading was very pleasant.


Easily you can see the novel is about pain, or at least, loneliness, since it is about the wife, not the time traveler. But once you open the book, you realize it is also about the time traveler himself, and his pain. I will reveal one very important part of the plot, which means, you must stop reading this article if you don’t want a spoiler. I am giving this book a solid 4-star (out of 5) rating. So, if you are interested enough already, go read it!

The time traveler’s pain lies in that he does not have any control over his own time travel. He calls it a disease, and a doctor is trying to fix it. Henry, the time traveler, feels that he cannot and must not alter any events in the past. However, somehow he made his mind to do two audacious things: to train his younger self to increase the probability of survival when he leaps in time, and to tell her future wife about what will happen and what should be done. The second part, Henry telling Clare of some of their common future, creates a loop of causes and effects, and the fun part of the novel.

I don’t think that anybody will call this a science fiction in a serious sense. The author does not attempt to explain any kinds of time paradox, nor does she even try to make the events more plausible by explaining things in a pseudo-scientific ways. It is extremely uncommon in a usual time-traveling sci-fi that the time traveling self interacts with himself in the space-time he travels. Henry says that he could not affect the way things evolve even though he tried, then later he does things that might well affect the future, for example, buying winning lotteries and picking stocks with clairvoyance. More profoundly, what if he could avoid meeting Clare in their initial encounter-to-be? Henry says he dare not ride on airplanes because of the danger of being on 5,000 feet high in the air when he gets back from time traveling, but the danger is not much less for a car traveling.

However, the gist of the novel lies in the feelings of the people involved in the fate of Henry’s. Therefore, this is not a science fiction, and is not to be blamed for such minor factors. Readers are fixated on such memorable scenes such as when Richard cuddles newly born Alba or when Henry meets 82-year-old Clare.

In this respect, it is too bad that the author actually made the time-traveling a disease, which some people might be able to control well, like Alba. Alba will find it extremely difficult to avoid becoming a superhero after all, with her “controlled” disease. This takes all the epic nature of the disease away from her, and makes any further story-telling on her future meaningless.

Still, the final verdict on this novel is, yes, a solid 4-star rating. The emotional depth of the happy and sad story between Henry and Clare is strong enough to pull any reader into its gravity.

Cyberspace Polluting the Real World

The New York Times had an impressive article last week, about data centers of Cyberspace giants polluting the air we real people breathe. Whatever you do on the Cyberspace, some of the actions require computer processing. These are done remotely in data centers, where huge (though nothing to compare to ENIAC) servers are run throughout the day to take your orders. Data centers are huge buildings packed with servers, which means 1) they require a lot of energy, and 2) they emit a lot of energy, in the form of heat. You might remember news about Google or Facebook worrying about cooling systems in their new data centers.

For energy use, it is not just about how prodigal these data centers are in terms of energy consumption. They do eat up a whole lot of energy, for sure. But they are doubly polluting because they all have backup electricity generator, mostly run on diesel. The following picture shows a backup diesel generator at a large computer data center. (Picture at the courtesy of Richard Perry, New York Times, copied from the news article.) According to the annotation on the picture, there are six generators in total in the data center, enough to power 7,000 homes. And yes, they are polluting. Amazon was once fined by the environmental authority of North Virginia because they were running diesel generators without permits.



In addition to generators, large data centers also hoard on flywheels and lead-acid batteries for additional backup. Indeed a super-conservative insurance measure. Why do they do this, then? Because data center operators lose jobs if there’s any failure in the system. These people are not paid for energy efficiency. They are paid to keep the system running 24/7.

The amount of electricity used in data centers is also massive. In 2010, data centers used about 2% of all the electricity used in the US, or 76 billion kilowatt-hours. The whole paper industry used 67 billion kilowatt-hours that year. Doing things in the Cyberspace does not save energy as we expect.

According to a research done by a consulting company, the utilization rate of facilities in data centers is around 6 to 12 percent. Up to 94% of computing resources at data centers are idle, in other words, in a standby mode to be prepared for a surge in usage.

Pooling risks reduces risks. Suppose a data center have a peak time utilization rate of 90, but most of the day runs at 10. Since utilization rate of 100 is a nonsense, this data center keeps its facility level at 100, giving a safety margin of 10. Suppose another data center with exactly the same specs. If we can combine the two data centers into one, we do not need resources of 200, because the peak time will be most probably different for the two data centers. We might end up needing only, say, 150. The actual necessary resources depend on the covariance of the facility utilization rates of the two facilities. This is the basic concept of risk pooling.

So, the answer can be found in risk pooling. According to the article, there are 2,094 data centers in the US in 2010. Using a simple binomial probability function, I could get interesting numbers as follows:

1) Assuming simple binomial probability distribution (and normal distribution), a data center that has average utilization rate of 12% can operate on a probability of failure of 1/10^50, with only 19.3% of its current resources. This shows the hyper-conservatism of the data center industry. They are massing up more than 5 times necessary resources to prevent any blackout. Perhaps you think 10^50 processing orders (such as clicks of a mouse) can happen in your lifetime? No way. It takes 1.06*10^33 years if 3 billion people clicks at the speed of once per second 24/7 nonstop.

2) Pooling two such data centers will require only 34.2% of one data center’s resources, not 19.3% * 2 = 38.6%. Pooling ten such data centers will require the resources of only 1.43 data centers, not 1.93. Huge savings on resources keeping the same probability of failure.

Seeing the calculation makes the pooling solution so attractive. Then why don’t they do it? Because the data they are dealing with are sensitive data such as personal information. There are also business reasons, political and legal complications, and technical feasibility to some extent. So what? Cyberspace polluting the real world is a real phenomenon. We must start addressing the issue first by realizing it. Before people realized the significance of it, climate change was a kind of urban legend to many people.

Metro 2033: A Powerful Narrative about Human Existence

The so-called post-apocalyptic fictions deal with the lives of survivors of a certain apocalypse. The art of the genre lies on how to depict the lives of human beings after the world as we know is scrapped. In this respect, post-apocalyptics are destined to be part sci-fi and part fantasy, both of which factors can lead to a big failure if not controlled well. Most of the time, writers are so involved in creating the new world, and fail to capture the simple fact that what they tell are, after all, about human beings. On the other extreme, some writers use the post-apocalyptic setting as a mere prop in their theatrical setting, which means, the post-apocalyptic part of the fiction is merely an unusual setting..

Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky is by all means a very well written post-apocalyptic novel. The writer did not indulge himself into his own creation, nor did he simply borrow the scene of a post-nuclear war Moscow for no purposes. The themes are about human nature, and they are well woven into the story where people are forced to think about human nature.

The theme of this novel has two layers. One is the communication conundrum. The other is about the purposes and weight of life. The first theme on communication is dramatically presented at the very end of the novel, when the right message is finally delivered only a few seconds too late. The second theme about life is repeatedly presented by the hero of the novel, Artyom. But this theme again is revisited very powerfully at the very end of the novel, where he says that we human beings are doomed to creep on earth. In this sense, in that we human beings are left with the doom because of our fear of communication, the two themes are interwoven - beautifully.

The most attractive aspect of the novel lies in its ending, where the coda is thrown at the reader like a sudden death. Throughout the whole time, Artyom narrates all kinds of thoughts on life and mankind to the reader. He is quite verbose. Then, at the very end, when all is lost, he does not elaborate. His action speaks louder, as he tears open the gas mask. It is time to go home.

I already said that this wonderful piece of art accomplished the dual objectives of a post-apocalyptic novel, which means the description of the life after the apocalypse is also all too powerful. I’ve heard some people say that the mutant creatures are too extreme - rather phantasmal than sci-fi. Yes, they are, to a certain degree. But not without a reason. Think about the librarians. They are big, brutal, but are also humanoid, and have hands rather than paws. They echo people’s speech. And they live in the library. Isn’t this wonderfully allegorical?

Even from the perspective of pure ideation, Glukhovsky is excellent. There have been much imagination about currency after an apocalypse, like bottle caps in the Fallout saga. In the metro, it is the bullets. Means of life are gauged against the means to kill lives. At the same time, it makes a perfectly realistic sense. Since the life in the metro is full of danger, bullets become indispensable commodity to rely on, for survival.

Even though I have shed glimpses of this wonderful fiction to make my points clear, I did my explanations rather vaguely, because I sincerely do not want to ruin anybody’s experience with this novel with some careless spoiler. I recommend this book very strongly. Whether you seek action, violence, fantasy, or food for thoughts, you will find it.