dannyman.toldme.com : Free Style

April 19, 2012
Photo-a-Day, Sundry, Testimonials

Daily Routine

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/19/daily-routine/

Daily Routine

In a hospital room, the Daily Routine consists mainly of waiting.

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April 17, 2012
Photo-a-Day, Sundry

Hospital Cafeteria

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/17/hospital-cafeteria/

The green beans were good.

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April 14, 2012
Excerpts, Good Reads, Photo-a-Day, Sundry

We are the supermen . . .

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/14/we-are-the-supermen/

“We are the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and look at civilization . . .”

I am reading a book by W.E.B. Du Bois, based on this quote which was captured in a photo of New York graffiti.

Even as America’s race problem has evolved since Du Bois published Dusk of Dawn in 1940, his perspective is valuable. A fuller excerpt from Chapter 6, wherein he conducts a Socratic dialogue with a pair of composite “White Man” colleagues, and delivers an excellent perspective on world history, and modesty: (more…)

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March 27, 2012
About Me, Excerpts, Free Style, Good Reads, Religion, Sundry, Technology

The More Things Change . . .

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/03/27/party-like-its-1885/

Above all science was becoming religion; psychology was reducing metaphysics to experiment and a sociology of human action was planned. Fighting the vast concept of evolution, religion went into its heresy trials, its struggle with “higher criticism,” its discomfort at the “revised version” of the New Testament which was published the year I entered college. Wealth was God. Everywhere men sought wealth and especially in America there was extravagant living; everywhere the poor planned to be rich and the rich planned to be richer; everywhere wider, bigger, higher, better things were set down as inevitable.

— W. E. B. Du Bois
… who entered college in 1885

Actually, Chapter 3 of “Dusk of Dawn” describes a transition from the world Du Bois was born into of the latter 19th century:

“(As) a young man, so far as I conceived, the foundations of present culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization; but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable.”

In contrast with the “today” of 1940:

“TODAY both youth and age look upon a world whose foundations seem to be tottering. They are not sure what the morrow will bring; perhaps the complete overthrow of European civilization, of that great enveloping mass of culture into which they were born. Everything in their environment is a meet subject for criticism. They can dispassionately evaluate the past and speculate upon the future. It is a day of fundamental change.”

I feel my heart and mind whipsawing between a world culture which is on the cusp of some fundamental, unimaginable change, and a world in which we will pretty much keep doing what we have done, just bigger, bolder, better, faster, with nanites and a higher rate of return . . . I get dizzy thinking about this world I try to live in.

And Religionists and Conservatives keep shouting their objections to a changing world ever louder, ever more viciously. They’re still attacking Evolution, so the concept and theological implications of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption are even more of a leap . . .

But the today of 2012, when the big revolutions appear to be how the European Union will manage debt among member states, and whether Arab countries can successfully democratize, whether there will be regional wars on either side of Asia, and the capacity of fundamentalists to kill civilians . . . today’s world isn’t tottering as obviously as 1940’s “today.”

But it is the Big Things you don’t hear in the news every day; When will climate change trigger famine and mass migration? Will China’s rise be sustained to the point it becomes a world power or will it implode? When are we going to be hit by that asteroid that superheats the atmosphere? Just after the devastating global pandemic that trained against antibiotics and traveled everywhere on jet planes before we noticed it? Will nanofabrication make industry and perhaps agriculture obsolete? Will the Singularity bring upon us a supra-individualist world consciousness? Will medical science and DNA repeal the eternal inevitabilities of aging and death? Is that when we will feel comfortable encapsulating our bodies on centuries-long trips to distant star systems? The new Magellans will refer to centuries as we refer to decades. My thinking is so early 21st . . .

These are the things I tend to wonder about between meetings at work.

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March 25, 2012
Photo-a-Day

Lap Cat

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/03/25/lap-cat/

Most of the time, Maggie isn’t big on laps, but today my legs offer a warm dry spot to enjoy a sunny break from the wet weather.

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March 15, 2012
Photo-a-Day, Sundry, Technology

Cross-Continent Collaboration

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/03/15/danny-paul-seb/

Our Frenchman flew over to San Jose from London, and wanted a picture with our American colleague in Tokyo.

Rockin’ the Cisco TelePresence!

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February 27, 2012
Photo-a-Day

California Snowman

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/02/27/california-snowman/

Taken Jan 2, 2012, this is as close to a snowman as you’ll ever get in Mountain View, CA.

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February 26, 2012
About Me, Free Style, Photo-a-Day, Technology, Testimonials

Kevin Coval in Cupertino

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/02/26/remains-jane-addams-town/

This triptych of a poem caught my eye from across a classroom at De Anza college in Cupertino.

Break time during a class at De Anza College, I wander across the room. The skyline . . . that’s John Hancock. I start to read . . . words written by Kevin Coval.

My home town, Chicago, the city of broad shoulders and ambition, is where the wealthy have pushed the workers and the workers have pushed back. Jane Addams, as my memory serves, founded the Hull House back in the 19th century, to look after the needs of working people: meals, health care, education, general community services. At a time when class divisions were sharper than they are getting to be today, Jane Addams bucked the conventions of her time to push for the American ideal: that we all, regardless of class or wealth, merit a helping hand, a warm place to sleep, and nourishment for our bodies and our minds.

Growing up in Chicago, getting educated in the Chicago Public Schools, the sense of perpetual struggle for a better, more equitable future, I think it gets in to your blood. People come looking for a better life, and they find that sometimes they have to push a bit to realize that better life, if not for themselves then at least to give their children a shot. We’re all passing through those gates, at our respective levels of society, and the struggle never dies and the struggle must never be forgotten.

Now I live in the Silicon Valley, where people struggle and strive, and while the ultimate aim is to make the world more comfortable and efficient, the focus is pretty far removed from the front lines of class warfare. Even so, I ride the train every day past miles of walled mobile home parks, and I wonder if there’s more going on beneath the surface than us privileged IT folk know.

A quote from Al Franken, via The Sun:

“In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.”

Arguing over the margins, in the grand scheme of things, describes my day job.

and we need heroes
who stand up to giants
who carry a big bat to home plate
though the pitcher is throwing money
balls and the umps are in on the fix.

I’m no hero and my bat is nothing to brag about, but I relish those occasions when I do get to step up to the bat and swing, however ineffectually, at a ball I’m not allowed to hit. Its the Chicago in me. I owe more.

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February 25, 2012
Photo-a-Day, Sundry