When you blog a link to poetry:

[The man watching] is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, that i picked up from a talk by Tim Oreilly during his [recent talk] where he chided the audience for focusing on trivial banalities while leaving bigger problems un challenged. A subsequent speaker picked up the theme, and likened it to abandoning NASA to work on DisneyLand.

I think the sentiment is grand, and the poem is inspiring.. and in particular the following lines, are probably going to keep me up nights for a while:

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

/mh