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.

The good, the bad, and the hard to decipher

NYT usually does a good job with their infographics, but this one is an absurdity. The chart comapres mall retailers' quarterly revenue between 2008 and 2009.Using a mall visual to dress up the data adds nothing but confusion. It is hard to find the stores you want to look up (just like in the mall, but the mall designers want it that way - unlike designers of this graphic). And once you have found the store, you have to scroll all the way down and find the corresponding metric for the current year. In this case, a simple bargraph might have sufficed - the polygons and color coding add very little value.

Insurgent Strategy

Insurgents need to be socially disruptive - not play by the rules or at least not play how the game is "supposed" to be played. Do things that incumbents do not expect, and hit them where they least expect it. The insights are not jaw dropping, but the examples are fabulous coming from basketball, TE Lawrence, and war simulations - another vintage Gladwell piece: David vs Goliath.

Net Migration

Turns out net migration to California in the last couple years is negative - surprising. Great data set from the Pew Research Center.

Godin on Presentations

Some of the best things in life are free, and I just discovered one of them - Seth Godin's blog. He just posted a brilliant bit on presentations. Key point - presenters should get respect from the audience and give them love. So if you are not a world renowned celebrity (a la Thatcher, Robbins, Patton), establish early in the presentation why the audience should listen to you (experience, background, achievements) AND be genuinely excited that this roomful of people is here to hear you. Respect and Love. Amen.

Barry Schwartz on Rules and Practical Wisdom

Another excellent TED talk - among other things, Barry Schwartz makes the obvious yet profound observation that rules prevent disasters but encourage mediocrity. In asia, rules are few, disasters many, but a story like "dad forced to leave house because he served mike's hard lemonade to son not knowing it contained alcohol" would never ever happen. You do lose something by programming the people to follow rules, and then coming up with many of them that do not generalize well, and leave little room for thought, responsibility, or improvisation.

Entrepreneurial Survival

Bad things happen to good startups, and frequently. The worst being having to live through a downturn. Online realestate site Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman writes about how he is getting through it. A lot of it is quite sound advice. My favorites: "Compete with your successor" and "Be a Roman".

Books that correlate with high or low sat's

Interesting analysis, bad tagline. I think a more modest and accurate heading would have been "Books that high/low SAT scorers tend to read". Check out the list here . Could be easily extended to movies, bands, hobbies - hours of fun.

Sculpting with Words

Every now and then you come across a performance, a product, a skill - so sublime that it leaves you with your mouth open in awe and a sinking realization that no matter how much you practice, however much you study for the rest of your life - you will never be quite as good. Steve Nash on hardwood, BB King on the guitar, Roger Federer on the court. This piece by David Foster Wallace is an apt example. In an abstract way stylistically reminiscent of Tom Wolfe (The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test) it captures the spirit, mood, and soul of a luxury cruise. I dont think will be able to step foot on a cruise ship and not look at it with his eyes - full of curiosity, fear, and bewilderment. 5/5 stars.

Finally an explanation ...

... of how these MBSs became worth hundreds of times worth more than the mortgages they were based on. Keep up the good work, Michael Lewis. Article.

Capitalism Defined

Capitalism: The system under which the government provides bailout capital when large rich firms are about to go out of business. Article.

Booming Economy != Rising Stock Market

Shanghai Composite index plunged from 6000 to 2000 in a matter of months - with no fundamental changes in the Chinese economy. Another year, another bubble. Reminds me of this hilarious onion article. I'd be laughing if my emerging market funds were not scuba diving.

Ambient Awareness

... and here we have it, a new term to describe what Facebook news feed and Twitter are creating.

Talking Head Accountability

Historically news anchors have a hard time keeping up with talking heads as they spew out facts and opinions real time. But these days, shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report can dissect, fact-check, and rip apart these pontificating blowhards. Case in point:

Blogs I follow

A good blog is hard to find - most of them are not worth checking out twice. Here are a couple I find myself going back to periodically - because they have solid information and/or interesting opinions.

* Calculated Risk
* Greg Mankiw
* TechCrunch
* VentureCapital Wire