Time had past at a smacking pace last week.
I was assigned to a new client account. It seems fun and great since it pushes me to work/study harder. In my personal life, I cought up on new/old friends, experienced being a model, and thanks to my friend, I finally found what Tokyo marathone is like(Although I did not run)today. There were so many runners and it was almost impossible to find him out of 32,000! Top runners were those who are from Africa, followed by Japanese professional runners. Quite a few wored a creative/funny costume such as spiderman, tokyo tower, or Jesus Christ... With our great teamwork and concentration, we could manage to find our friend.
Meanwhile, in order to achieve 200 books/year, I read a couple of books this week.
Let me introduce them...
1. 数学的思考の技術 (ベスト新書) By 小島 寛之
This book is about how useful to have mathmatical thinking in your life. The auther is a mathmatician, and explains the logical flow of incidents of our life.
In the final chapter, he argues that Mr.Haruki Murakami exhibits his mathmatical thinking through the characters of his novels. In IQ84, one of his masterpieces, he uses the idea of 'topology' to descrive the position of 'death' and 'life' and their relationship. It was bit ideological, but conceptualization of the new dimention of mathmatical thinking.
2. 最高裁の暗闘 少数意見が時代を切り開く (朝日新書) By 山口 進, 宮地ゆう
Authors are both jouralists at Asahi Shimbun, one of which studied law at Tokyo University and the other got a master's digree in Political Sciene at Columbia University. Therefore, this basically focuses on politics among judges in the Spreme Court in Japan.
The way how they try to get a friendly vote from their peer judges reminded me the tactics of litigation PR described in 'Appeal' by John Grisham. Given the fact that law had been created based on the common sense of citizens, the necessity of politics or PR in/outside the Court can be well explained.
3. 反貧困―「すべり台社会」からの脱出 (岩波新書) By 湯浅 誠
I was attracted by this book simply because I used to do the voluntary work at the non-profitable organization led by this auther. What he insists is that most of poor people do not have 'pools' in their life. Pools does not only mean money, but also means an apartment to stay, personal belongings, relationship which they can rely on, or energy/motivation they can draw whenever they need. Another memorable part of this book is where he talks about the government. Self-responsibility is the logic the government uses when they accuse poor people of being poor. They conclude that poverty is the resut of the lack of self-responsibility. However, when they cut budget for poor people, they perfectly ignore their seld-responsibility. They cut the budget saying 'we need to cut because we do not have money'. It's totally incoherent.
Another week begins. Let's tackle the new week!
