A great fighter—“The greatest ever”—but he was so much more than that.

[…] as a young heavyweight champion he converted to Islam and refused to serve in the Vietnam War, and became an emblem of strength, eloquence, conscience and courage. Ali was an anti-establishment showman who transcended borders and barriers, race and religion. His fights against other men became spectacles, but he embodied much greater battles.

Also, these are must watch, if you haven’t seem them already:

Rest in peace, sir.

Stephen Colbert’s mother died, we learn, last week. Here’s him, giving a heart-warming, and heart-wrenching, eulogy to the woman who brought him up:

But even after the above, what struck me as even more exemplary is how he proceeds:

So, with that in mind… This… is the Colbert Report!

And the show, as always, must go on:

Condolences, Stephen.

We’re all familiar with the Google home screen, yes? That minimalistic, simple page with essentially nothing but the search box and the search button—seems like great design, doesn’t it? It seems like a well-thought-out decision on what should and should not be on the home page.

Well, guess again:

“We didn’t have a webmaster and I don’t do HTML.”

That’s what Sergey Brin, Google cofounder, is said to have explained.

“He put together the simplest web page he could to test out the search engine back when he was Ph.D. student,” Mayer told a Q&A audience at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. “The first version didn’t even have search button because the return button worked just fine. We just kind of stumbled into it.”

That iconic page design—and all because Sergey Brin didn’t care about HTML. (The article has some more tidbits; go read.)

After fighting cancer for a while, Christopher Hitchens is no more. I’ve only read (and heard) a tiny fraction of his writings (and talks), but was fascinated even in that small exposure to him. A fiery and uninhibited speaker and writer, what struck me most were his clarity of thought and lucidity of expression, and how his ideas seemed to flow, languidly almost, from thesis to conclusion.

Another terrible loss for humankind this year. Rest in Peace, sir.

(Cross-posted at GlobeTrekker)

Steve Jobs passed away today. 😔

I’ve only seen him as a public figure, of course, but I was, and will remain, a fan. I’ve admired him greatly, not just for the company he built, but for how he conducted his business—well, for the things he said and did publicly, at any rate.

A straightforward, honest man who played extremely hard when running his company, but who made sure he did the right thing all the same.

For an inkling to his way of thinking, see his Stanford commencement speech, and the interview he gave at the D8 conference.

Rest in Peace, Sir. Your legacy will live on, and will hopefully inspire the next generation of visionaries.

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Cross-posted at GLobeTrekker