The White Tiger Aravind Adiga Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group October 2008 ISBN-13: 9781416562603

The winner of 2009 Man Booker Prize, White Tiger is widely reviewed and Aravind Adiga’s first novel. The story captivates and flows. After a few chapters, I decided that it does not fit any genre. Mr. Adiga skillfully mixed rags-to-rich, coming-of-age, Indian cultural, social classes struggle, or even murder/suspense. Balram’s growth, education, struggles, and decisions felt real and touching.

I have been to India, Bangalore in particular, a few times. I have many Indian friends and work with even more. Aravind’s India feels real and brought back many memories from my years living in China. The slums, open sewage, the very poor, and the struggle just to survive are all very similar. The paragraph quoted in the beginning seems to be the key difference between China and India. Most Chinese pursue self autonomy zealously, maybe a bit too much.

The other one being the parliamentary democracy. During my years in China, I gradually developed the philosophy that democracy is a hindrance to progress for poor countries. Only until the GDP per capita has reached a certain level should they democratize. Good thing I never studied political science and have no need to prove this philosophy to be right.

I always cringe on English books or movies on China. The linguistic barrier forces all points to be shallow, to a Chinese. I don’t know how would Indians feel about this book. It certainly resonates more for those who know a bit about India. Its sales record indicates the popularity among non-Indians, just like Slumdog Millionaire.

My 4th blog on on Chinese New Year. I reflected back when the years of Rat, Pig, and Dog came. This is a tradition now.

A Chinese cycle, similar concept to century, is 60 years. This coming one is the 26th year in the 79th cycle or year 4707 from the epoch. This Ox is earthy (not golden, as many commercials would imply). There is really no real astrological significance to the earthiness of this Ox. Its effects depends on your own astrological chart and impossible to generalize.

2008 turned out to be an extreme fortunate year for me. I made many risky decisions. The largest one is to leave China. Even prescience wouldn’t have time that move better. Sun and global economy free fell after summer and Juniper was among the very few that are standing strong. I have my family together, a very rewarding job, in reasonable health, and living in the best climate area in the world. Thankful, I am to the divinity.

The 2nd half of 2008 has been eventful, a bit too much. I moved twice: once back to the US, the 2nd time to the permanent house. Monty, my pet dog, had a scare surgery that saved his life. Juniper tested my mettle with a vengeance. I watched Olympics from a distance and through the US TV set. I witnessed probably the most entertaining presidential election in recent history: Hilary’s politicking, Palin’s comics, McCain’s perseverance, and, of course, Obama’s inspiration. Honestly, there is a bit of withdrawal effect when the whole thing was over.

This year of Ox promises to be an exciting one, probably not less eventful. I so look forward to it.

歲次己丑 萬事如意.

傷感的離開北京,一群人的訝異,”為什麼離開遍地黃金的中國?”其實傷感的，是離開了那群朋友，和那些可愛的年輕人．下個牛年，他們都會是中國的精英．在呼天喚雨時，不知會不會回想當年的北京．

這個牛年可會精采了．新總統，新氣象．經濟也該回酥了．女兒再離家唸書，我們二度空巢．也步入知命的人生階段．”知命”! 從沒好好想過這兩字．我知道我的”天命”了嗎?

Today, January 19, 2009, she did it. It took her 209 days, at the speed no less than ferocious. I knew that I could never achieve this for the rest of my life. I am simply not in the same class.

Nematode is a kind of worm. It turns out to be an ancient one. It has existed long, long before humanity, probably even the entire animal kingdom.

Someone hosted a 100-book challenge website. Googling the exact words of “100 book challenge” will yield millions of hits. The idea is simple: read 100 books in a year. The rules vary and the idea is simple: avid readers want an excuse to get buried in books and not come out worms happily eating whatever from inside. Guess that’s why they are called book worms.

Yep. Here.

It is actually quite simple. Instead of producing less greenhouse gases. We cool Earth down.

High up there, there is a layer of very, very cold air. At the top of Troposphere, about 12km above the sea level, the temperature is about -10°C to -60°C. Mesosphere, 50km above sea level, gets to -90°C.

If we pump the cold air, from either the top of Troposphere or Mesosphere, down fast enough. It can be below freezing when it reaches sea level.
It can freeze the surface sea water and produce ice: a fresh water by-product from the solution to global warming.

To create the down draft, we need a big downward spiral like a funnel. As the funnel narrows at the bottom, the air speeds up and the momentum carries itself. The top of the funnel does not need to reach 12km, the spiral vortex behaves like a sucking machine. To do this, we need air moving equipment — essentially many big fans — to generate the man-make tornado, but blowing downward instead of up.

OK, it is silly to have big fans suspended in the air blowing to nowhere. There are engineering difficulties and may kill too many birds or even airplanes (although they have radars). Alternatively, we can apply energy to create this vortex.

The idea is simple, but a bit far-fetched. We lay a ring of heating elements in the ocean. As the temperature near the surface rises, the air flows up. When it hit the cold air up in the Stratosphere, it cools and goes down. The rising air forms a cylindrical curtain and restricts the down draft in the middle. By varying the temperature at the ring, I might be able to create a downward vortex. With enough heat, the vortex can reach high enough. As long as there is more coldness down than the heat from the ring, Earth cools down with this. Again, fresh water will be a natural by-product.

Brilliant. I might say. Stupid, say the geo-physicists.

Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company (November 18, 2008) ISBN-13: 978-0316017923

When I grew up, elders told stories of famous and successful people in the history. Quickly, we learned the pattern: this calligrapher filled the whole room with his used-up brushes; that poet produced the master piece only after decades of studying; that martial artist bitterly practiced for decades and became the hero of his era. Very few Chinese historical heroes were gifted. The lessons were imbued into our bones: work hard and thou shall succeed, fail only because you were lazy. “I am not gifted at that” would simply meet “then you must practiced more.”

10,000 hours is so simple yet so depressing. A full-time work-year has about 2,000 hours. This means a reasonably healthy or smart person can become expert if he or she works on it for 5 years. There aren’t that many 5-years in my life. Let alone I already have a full-time job. I will need to choose what I want to be an expert of and there isn’t probably a second chance.

I told youngsters that life is a series of filters. Early on, the lower IQ crowd was filtered out. Later, the lazy disappeared, followed by those with low EQ. When one reaches 40 years old, all peers are smart, hard-working, and communicative. How would one get ahead then? The answer must be the choice of what to invest the 10,000 hours.

I never thought of the pronunciation of numerals gave me an advantage. It always puzzled me that Americans are so bad at arithmetic. English is the culprit! Yep, when I learned this part of English, I was lost at the logic behind the design. Guess there was not any. In fact, linguistically, Chinese is so much more logical and easy. But I had that debate and Melanie made the final judgment already.

Cultural Dimensions (ISBN-13: 9780071439596) was an interesting topic. There came the Power Distance Index (PDI). I learned to take advantage of it, as a Chinese living in the USA or an American in Beijing, without really knowing about it. Now I know the theory of my maneuvers. The concept of the transmitter vs. receiver oriented communication is so insightful. That explains so much of the cross-pacific communication difficulties.

I highly recommend this book. It is an easy and the stories are entertaining.

Coming back from the holiday, my computer was sick. No, did not download anything, just simple web surfing, by myself and family members who are all computer savvy.

It became sluggish, extremely. It froze at random time. When it unfroze, my browser would take over the screen and displayed a porn site, a survey, a sales page for spyware removal services (free scanning), or just a blank page.

I tried everything — killing unwanted processes, edit the start-up scripts, scan with a known good spyware scanner, etc. — to naught. I slugged on and managed to back up everything I can think of. Then I surrendered it to Juniper IT.

It was a spyware called vundo or MS Juan. It is nasty and clearly difficult to eradicate. IT gave me a new disk with fresh Windows installed. It took me days to restore everything.

What’s the lesson? When this computer expires in a year or so, I am switching to Linux! Good riddance, MSFT.

Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth Andrew H. Knoll ISBN13: 978-0-691-12029-4 Princeton University Press (March 17, 2003)

Joe Kirschvink, of CalTech, conjectured that Earth was once a snowball. When glaciers crept below 30 degree latitude, they accelerated the cooling down of Earth by reflecting heat back to the space. The cooling sped up the growth of glaciers. Soon, the whole Earth became a giant snowball completely covered in ice.

Millions of years would go by and only the toughest lives, mostly micro-organisms, existed on Earth. Gradually, volcanos and sea activities produced greenhouse gases (CO₂ and methane) to warm up the Earth again.

Once warm, the Earth became an oven. The average sea temperature would reach 40°C. The extreme condition stimulated evolution. At first, anoxic thrived and produced oxygen as a by-product. Millions of years passed again, and the Earth’s atmosphere became oxygen rich. That started the recent oxygen dependent life forms of plants and animals.

Isn’t this just cool!

I had a physical exam with my long-time family doctor recently. He commented that human race has only in recent generations experienced the abundance of foods. Even in our grand-fathers’ time, starvation, from famine or wars, was common. For thousands of years, human race favored those who preserve energy well. The gene pool went into a shock with too much foods. Diabetes, cholesterol, hypertension, etc. ensued and became epidemic. This, he predicted, will again reshape our gene pool.

Geologically, Earth simply does not care. For nearly 4 billion years, Mother Earth has seen lives come and go. Even the entire bilaterian life forms (those with a spine and are symetrical left and right) are a recent addition, let alone homo sapien. Go ahead and mutate, or die out completely, Earth goes on. This brings us to the epilogue of this book, arguably the most interesting part.

If God exists, he would have simply laid down the evolutional rules, set up the physical/chemical environment, and let go. The evidences of his handiwork are in the rocks. The Creationists may be right conceptually, but would have been dead wrong in two categories: God started the world billions of years ago, not thousands; God did not just created plants and animals, he also made germs, virus, and jellyfish.

Another interesting point is on how advanced we are in terms of evolution. Micro-organisms (bacteria, virus, etc.), genetically speaking, have proliferated for billions of years. Oxygen breathing animals have much shorter history and proven to be easily extinguishable too. The fact that human being can think and make tools does not make us more advanced, merely more complex. Micro-organisms have a much better chance of wiping out human race than the other way around. In fact, it is not a stretch to consider that we exist only to host them. If God has a favorite among all life forms, we are not.