Nadal (and Kobe)

Couple of weeks ago, I watched last year's epic Wimbledon final: Federer vs Nadal. It was quite a match - a contrast of styles, an upstart knocking on an established champion's door, ebbs and flows of competitors hitting their strides, and the microscopic margins of error. Made me wish for something that provided a background for Nadal like Chuck Klosterman's piece did for Federer. It is now here - this week's NYTMag has a superb feature on Rafa. It is a solid article touching on his game style, character, and upbringing. The most interesting part was how he was coached (and raised) by his uncle Toni Nadal. It just appears to me that what makes Kobe Bryant a brilliant athlete but a fatally flawed character, is the lack of someone like Toni in his life. Never has any article about Kobe mentioned a mentor in his life that taught him how to be a human being - everyone around him exists solely to remind Kobe that he is untouchable. Kobe's is an otherwordly talent supremely unmatched by his inability to become a inspiring man in his life outside the court. Lets hope there is still time left for him to figure this out.

Clay Shirky on the Changing Nature of Media

How social networks and blogging/microblogging are changing the media landscape.

Tom Vanderbilt on Digital Traffic

Tom Vanderbuilt, who wrote the entertaining "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do", now has a piece on the virtual digital traffic. "Data Center Overload" profiles how companies are managing server farms that number up to 45000 machines in a single location. Data centers are the factories of the internet age, and for companies that rely on computation - their efficiency directly translates into the bottom line (Amazon estimates that each average 100ms delay per page load decreases their sales revenue by 1 percent).

The trend these days is to move more and more software infrastructure to the cloud, which means that data centers will migrate to locations that have the lowest energy and bandwidth costs. There it is - an opportunity for economically depressed towns with excess power generation capabilities ...

California High Speed Rail

I was driving down to LA from San Jose this weekend, and it took a good six hours of mind numbing driving through the monotone central valley landscape (farms on both sides flanked by foothills close by to the west and more further out the east). So I was quite excited to notice the NYT Magazine article that has the details about the route, challenges, and timeline for the recently funded high speed rail. It seems somewhat absurd that it is so difficult to build a new train line in the relatively sparse and flat california landscape when they have been built decades ago in the dense european and asian capitals. Here's hoping that the impediments raised by petty politics (e.g the city of palo alto refusing to play ball), tough forecasting (imagine estimating ridership in 10 years), and inexperience (acela is the only other high speed line in the nation) - will not hold us back and we will take a bold steps towards creating a blueprint for modern long distance public transportation for the United States. LA to SF in 2 hrs 40 minutes - si se puede!

Succeed - Iterate

Short and to the point TED video about success.

Pico Iyer on the Simple Life

Pico Iyer writes about his choice to live a monastic life in Japan and why he renounced New York. Its been very interesting to experience how his prose has evolved towards simplicity over the years - it now resembles a late Mondrian, or a piece by Miles Davis. Sparse, with all clutter and ornaments removed - probably very similar to how his life in Kyoto is.