“If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”
-Herb Stein
So this morning in my LinkedIn feed there’s someone, a VC, going on about a company that just went public, Nutanix. I don’t really get what the company does from his piece but I’m curious so I go to the “What We Do” section Nutanix’s of website. It reads:
Nutanix delivers solutions that elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform natively converges compute, virtualization and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The world’s most advanced enterprise datacenters rely on Nutanix technology and solutions to power their most demanding workloads at any scale.
The last sentence seems straightforward enough and first is vague but I think I get the gist of it. The middle though? What the @#$% is that? “Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Enterprise Datacenters” is what exactly? How do I use it? (Whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s worth a lot of money.)
Contrast Nutanix’s statement with Heilmeier’s Catechism for evaluating a research project:
If you’ve already got a product, as Nutanix does, then just speak to the first four. Never mind research, the eight questions above are a good frame for just about anything you set out to do.
Not your typical popsicle. They’re savory rather than sweet. Ingredients:
The Answer
Then what is the answer? Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilisations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history … for contemplation or in fact …
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
Robinson Jeffers, 1935
Episode 3 –
Daughter, age 7, to son, age 5: “Stop talking like an eight-year-old.”
Episode 2 –
Me to son: “What would happen if a pack of coyotes got into the house?” [Note: It’s important to ask kids questions like this to keep them on their toes.]
Son: “They’d wreck it looking for our meat stash.”
Me: “… Our meat stash?”
Son: “Yeah, the bacon and sausage we keep in the fridge.”
(source)
I won’t say much here beyond, “Read Randall Kennedy’s essay in this month’s issue of Harper’s.” He’s a Harvard Law professor. I saw him talk a number of times when I was a grad student 20-25 years ago. As a public intellectual, his focus is race relations and the subject is central to his Harper’s essay. I’m not going to attempt to summarize because I wouldn’t do it justice. (Doing it justice would require a “deeper dive” than I’m able to make at present.) Suffice it to say that I believe his observations and assessments are astute and that they apply beyond race relations, i.e., they are also applicable to efforts to change our culture and politics.