Impedance Mismatch over HTTP

I saw the movie Nixon yesterday evening and I feel that I have witnessed cinema history. Nixon is one of the finest biopics ever made and has the stamp of class all over it due to a scintillating and memorable performance by Anthony Hopkins as the President of the United States.

What intrigues me is the immense power people like Nixon, Brezhnev and Mao had and how these people with their personalities got to create history and shape lives of their contemporaries and generations that followed them. These seats of power architect the events and lay the groundwork for future events in history. It is rather disheartening that people like me from the so called third-world had such little say in the way the world was being shaped for us, let alone having knowledge of how the world is being shaped for us. Billions of people have little knowledge of how the world is being shaped for them at this very moment in time. As I watched the movie, there was a sense of helplessness that I felt as a mere pawn amidst the geo-political antics carried out by the echelons of power, a certain impotence and a feeling of powerlessness.

What is it that drives a certain group of people towards power? Why is it that only a handful of people get to shape the lives of people like me and it is true even in a democracy. All things being equal, why do a selected group of people develop a hunger for power? Is hunger for power a leadership quality? If so, is the current style of leadership both in corporate sphere and public sphere simply tailored to create armies of non-confrontational foot-soldiers? The very politically correct style of today’s leadership is a far cry from Nixon’s style of ruthlessness. At the end of the day, it is a fact that leadership cannot make fans out of everybody involved. Certain decisions will draw wrath and discontent. This is one of the risks one has to take to become a leader.

The movie showed the profile of a man who rose from a very modest upbringing to the greatest seat of power in the world, whose decisions probably led to America being the sole super power that it is today. It was Nixon’s trilateral diplomacy that led to separate deals with Russia and China that probably led to Russia not getting a stranglehold over China and had it been the case, Russia probably would not have disintegrated the way it has now. India probably would have been a communist state considering the affiliation we had with Russia at that time. The world would have been a lot more communist; almost Orwellian in nature.

Nixon’s biopic is a text book style commentary of a leader’s obsession with power and pride, a lesson on how pride can bring downfall. It also offers contrast by way of solid leadership skill that errs in judgement and how a little humility and request for forgiveness could have turned his legacy around and changed history for ever.

Oliver Stone’s treatment is a great treatise in catharsis by way of cinema as the medium. Stone offers commentary on Nixon’s redemption as perceived my the media by way of some very memorable speeches and footage of Clinton and former presidents’ appearance upon Nixon’s death.

“The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain… Always remember, others may hate you. Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

Farewell to White House staff August 8, 1974.

It feels like 1998 all over again. Check out Stabilo Boss’ mosaic of web 2.0 startups where each company represents an unique idea or a new approach to better implement an old idea. Innovation is not always about new ideas, improvements in implementations of old ideas resulting in wide impacts can also be termed as innovations. I did not realize that there was so much momentum in this space. I am not exactly sure about the central theme across all these companies though. Web 2.0 is a buzzword for all I care; I should probably dig more into this.

One aspect where the US media fails abysmally is in providing a historical context to a news story such as the war in Iraq or Kashmir. None of the networks have the smarts to do so. The best way to provide such commentary is to gather a pool of professors who can make visits to the studios and enlighten the audience. The networks probably stretched thin don’t bother to budget such academic exercises.

I discovered yesterday that Israel carried one of the most daring exercises in history on June 7th, 1981 by flying into Iraqi air space and bombing Saddam’s nuclear facilities. At that time, I was a kid in a remote town in Orissa, blissfully unaware, thanks to my father’s football like designation, we were kicked from one place to another. Probably no one in India was aware.

Saddam met with Jacques Chirac and cemented a deal to build the nuclear reactor for a cost of $250 M. He said that it was to generate energy and the French obliged. Why did Saddam require nuclear energy considering that he was sitting on 2/3rd of the world’s reserves of oil?

Israel’s former prime minister, Menachem Begin was convinced that Saddam was scheming to attack Israel as Saddam had already cautioned Iran that the reactor was not meant to be used against them.

This sets up an even more interesting context now. Currently, Saddam is gone and now Ahmadinejad wants to build his own reactor and issued statements wanting Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. Now considering that the world is very interconnected, Israel cannot consider such covert operations anymore without the help of the United States. Ahmedinejad probably wants to establish superiority in the middle-east.

Recently, Bush in one of his speeches warned Iran that he would defend Israel at any cost should such a requirement arise. With Iran gathering nuclear capability, the US seems to be putting more pressure on Pakistan based on yesterday’s comments on CNN that Pakistan has not done enough to catch Bin Laden. The US probably feels the need to use its troups wisely considering its expense in Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently, the border patrol at the US/Mexico border.

Historically, the US has had a hand in enabling both Iran and Iraq with nuclear capability. The Iranian nuclear program is a huge mess with deals, contracts, lapse of contracts and debt due to the cost of the reactor. I do not understand why the US had to enable Iran in the first place if it is so wary of Iran being a threat?

By the way, one of the pilots was Ilan Ramon, who went on to become Israel’s first astronaut. He died during the Columbia Shuttle disaster. Now the disaster was such a high profile news story. Why wasn’t Illa Ramon’s profile as a pilot of the Israeli attack on Iraq not highlighted? It was probably one of the greatest moments of Ilan Ramon’s life.

Sources:

1. Israeli F-16 Jets blast Iraqi nuclear facility
2. BBC Commentary
3. Osiraq reactor
4. Operation Opera
5. Nuclear Program of Iran

I made a mistake of importing an OPML file of 296 links into Google Reader and I was stuck with it. Google Reader being a Labs product did not allow me to do a global remove of the feeds. I removed about 40 a day and emptied the list. The lack of delete functionality was probably by design. I exported my lean and more relevant version of OPML out of rojo and tried to import them into Google Reader this time. I have stayed hooked in under 36 hours.

It is simply addictive, the researchers of the interface did put in a lot of thought to come up with the interface which is not only simple and easy to use but it is insanely fast as they get data in chunks and not the whole data set as other RSS readers do.

Blog readers have a very different requirement in that there is a lot of information that has to be scanned at the fastest speed possible. News readers do not want to waste a lot of time browsing useless feeds. Google reader provides this feature to perfection. They have a scrollable set of posts which can be aggregated based on a label/category. The key J moves you to the next post and marks the current post as read. K moves the control (a cursor concept) backwards. N and P do the same except that N doesn’t mark the post as read. There are a number of other key combinations that help scroll the set by page etc. The 2 keys J and K are enough to let you fly and use the interface.

The interesting part of Google Reader is that the focus is on the content and not on the subscription. As you fly through the posts with your keyboard, you are rarely aware of which post and the author you are browsing. This feature is probably the biggest strengths of reader.