pwung@earthlink.net http://PolymathToBe.blogspot.com,
https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/
Twitter:@PolymathToBe
Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@the_curious_polymath
BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/curiouspolymath.bsky.social
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/the_curious_polymath/
LibraryThing:
無為
Wu-Wei is
"inexertion", "inaction", or "effortless action"
Curiosity is
A desire to know or learn. An object that arouses interest, as by being novel or extraordinary.
Polymathy is
Learning in many fields; encyclopedic knowledge.
January 2025
This tradition of the State of the Pete letter started during my gradual school years. I was writing holiday cards as I was waiting for my simulations to run, I decided that my efforts to explicate would be clearer and better if I combined all that I wanted to say into one hellaciously long letter. These tomes have evolved over the years into overly long, meandering, and verbose exercises in self-indulgence. Many of my friends have told me that they actually liked it; far be it for me to disappoint them after so many years, so the tradition continues. It is more than just an update at this juncture; it is a snapshot of my convoluted mind over the past calendar year, as far as I can recall in my old age. It is an imperfect integration of my disjoint thoughts and summary of the year, which is what many people do at the end of the year. It gives me the opportunity to practice what Joan Didion advises: “I write to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Dear
friends,
Yet
another year has gone by, it seems from my perspective that life is accelerating
in geometric proportion to my age, this is not a happy happenstance. I hope
that 2024 proved to be a great one for you and your family. My mother and I are
still live in bucolic Tipp City Ohio, where nothing changes.
The
big excitement is that this year is the big 99th birthday
celebration for mom. It happened on the date of the Harvest Moon Festival in
the Lunar calendar. Even though she didn’t care to leave the house, we did
manage to have a festive celebration.
It
is amazing to me that Dayton has a genuine Taiwanese Bakery, something that
only the cities with large Taiwanese populations can sustain, but the bakery is
thriving, so I took advantage. They made a small cake for her.
I
also brought mom into the 21st century by convening some of her
long-time friends and family from around the globe for a Zoom call. She was discombobulated
by Zoom, but she recognized everyone even though she had not seen them in many
years. Her first comment when I reminded her of who they are was: They got
old!! Even as I reminded her that they
can hear her perfectly well. Sorry. She did seem to enjoy it; she talked about
it for days.
Mom
is going strong at 99, even though she fell at home and broke her pelvis in
September. After a few days in the local hospital, she spent six weeks in the
rehab center where she had been twice before. The staff all remember her, and
they were able to get her pelvis healed and gave her great care. She checked
out on schedule.
She
sleeps a lot these days and is often very tired, but you would be too if you were
99 years old. We have a routine written down so that she can follow a schedule
rather than trying to remember her routine. Her sense of time is diminished as
well, I am having to remind her what day of the week it is and what time of the
day it is. She also needs constant reminders about small details of her usual
routine, but she is still able to fend for herself. I am not going to lie, it
is a challenge to my vow of maintaining equanimity, but she can’t help it so I
have an opportunity to practice my developing Stoicism skills.
She
has the misfortune of having to eat what I cook for dinner, and I am very
challenged in preparing meals that she can chew, will help keep her weight up,
and is something that she is willing to eat.
Life is continuing on in Tipp City, even though the status
quo is quite transient.
On
a personal note, one of the greatest discoveries I made over the last year is
the simple device known as Continuous Glucose Monitor. Dexcom and Freestyle
Libre devices are two examples. I was
able to witness aliasing in action through my blood sugar readings and
have been able to use my insulin injections to keep my A1C under the threshold
of 7.0. It is a weight off my mind.
I
am still doing the same jobs as I have been doing for the last few years: I
work for the IEEE Industry Applications Society as the manuscript
submission portal administrator as well as assisting with the planning of the
society annual meeting. I also teach electric power classes at two universities:
the University of Dayton and Marquette University, the former is in person and the
latter virtually.
I
find interactions with the students both exhilarating and rewarding, because I am
reminded of the times when I was their age: not world weary and eager to learn.
Even though I am no longer their age, I am still eager to learn. I taught three
classes in the Winter, two of them are duplicates of the advanced Contemporary
Power Systems class and the third was an introductory class to Power
Electronics. I only taught one class in the Fall because University of Dayton
cancelled my Introduction to Electrical Energy Systems class even though I met
the requisite enrollment target. The university, as with many private mid-sized
universities, is suffering through a drop in the college aged demographics. Their
overall freshmen enrollment dropped significantly, so they are consolidating
classes and reducing staff and faculty. I am sure my meager stipend contributed
mightily to their bottom line. It is ironic that I have also heard that three
state universities: Illinois, Purdue, and Ohio State had record freshmen
admissions in 2024. Here is how I really felt about getting the news. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/ruminations-cancelled-classes-it)
I
did get to teach the Power System Protection class in Fall 2024, which still
surprises me as I took the class myself 30 years ago and had not delved into
the topic until I started teaching the class in 2022. Computing and
communications technologies have changed Power System Protection considerably,
thus making the material I that I had learned 30 years ago more than a bit
obsolete, there is nothing like learning the material as you are teaching it. It
is good to know that I am still capable of learning on the fly. I am sure my
father would have been aghast, although he would be happy to know that I am
teaching out of the same book he had used when he was taught by the author of
the book during his time studying at Westinghouse.
These
students, both advanced undergraduates and gradual students, are keeping me
fresh, sometimes they are typical students: “give me the information so that I
can digest it”, and “Will this be on the test?”. I am trying to change that mindset
by using the flipped classroom and conducting the classes as an extended seminar, asking thought questions and
challenging them to state their opinions and then defending those opinions with
the pertinent information that they had learned in class and from their life
experiences. Ironically, the larger classes are very difficult to engage in
conversation and to motivate, the students will try to hide and perhaps believing
— wrongly — that they can remain anonymous. I always loved challenges, so they
are cold called in class. It is much easier to turn the smaller classes into an
effective adda, a Bengali word referring to the place of ritual meeting
and/or conversation of a group of people (i.e., a symposium), they have no
place to hide. I am having a great time experimenting with this format
while also trying to stay sharp enough to answer my student’s thrusts and parry,
an intellectual challenge.
Here
is a geek out from my power system class: my favorite graphic presented at the
beginning of class, a Sankey diagram of energy use in the US. You know it is a
geek out when someone says they have a favorite Sankey diagram.
What
do I do with the snippets of time that I have? Well, I am glad you asked, you
may not be so happy after reading this self-indulgent part of the letter, so feel
free to skip.
I
started posting my blog on Substack in 2023, even though I also have a blog on
Blogspot; both are listed atop this letter. I did not want to abandon all the
content I had in Blogspot, I will occasionally judiciously pick different older
essays from Blogspot and rewrite them or republish them in Substack. I am using
Blogspot as a repository for the book
reviews I write and for personal writings, like this letter.
I
did not expect Substack to take off as it did. I just thought that is was a
friendly environment for a neophyte like me, besides Heather Cox Richardson is
also on Substack, so it made me feel connected with a writer that I respect
immensely. There has been a massive expansion of Substack writers, many of them
are refugees from the shrinking major traditional media companies after the
election, it has turned into a kind of a social media outlet for newsletters
and extemporaneous musings from some very smart and insightful people who are
very good at what they do and are seeking an outlet. It is not quite like the
social media that we are familiar with, Substack is its own thing. Happily,
many of the voices that I had followed have also migrated to Substack: Paul
Krugman, Garrison Keillor, Robert Reich, Gary Marcus, Vashik Armenikus, amongst
many others, so it is quite exciting. I have also tapped into rich veins of
well-considered knowledge and opinions in Stoicism, philosophy and AGI
(Artificial General Intelligence) on Substack. The AGI crowd has kept me fueled
with ideas that are good counterbalances to those who are blindly following the
Piped Pipers of Large Language Models (LLM).
Every
week or so, depending on my variable attention span and the depth of the topic
that I choose to write about, I contribute my bits to Substack about
volleyball, engineering, my rather circuitous wanderings, and anything that I
can think of while taking my morning shower. For my friend Warren, I will say
that the showers are much better for idea generation than sitting on the
throne. I don’t know why.
Much
has happened in the social media world in the past year. It will be interesting
to see if TikTok will remain viable in the US. I, thankfully, never succumbed
to TikTok, you don’t want to see me TikTok dance. I have also had a Twitter
account for years, I actually had two at one time, but I had deactivated one of
them earlier this year as I did not have much use for one, let alone two
accounts, and as a protest. My one account sits there lonely as can be keeping
me appraised about the once strong community of exceptional people who are good
at what they do and who are so generous as to share their insights on Twitter,
this is the one aspect of Twitter that I will miss the most when it finally
immolates. I cannot tell you just how many great mathematicians, physicists, engineers,
writers, artists, historians, journalists, amongst many others, populated
Twitter in intellectually robust communities. Many of these people have left
for other platforms because of the toxicity and vitriol that now permeates
Twitter. The massive exodus and scattering to the winds of those people is what
I regret, it also means that there are proportionally more trolls, right wing
conspiracy theorists, misogynists, and dentally challenged red hat wearers
swimming in the Twitter muck.
I
joined Bluesky, just like everyone else, the platform benefitted the most from
the Twitter exodus. It grew a million subscribers in one day, the day after
November 5. I had great hopes for it; while it is still early in its initial
incarnation, it has not lived up to my expectations because the intellectual
community that on Twitter has not materialized. Bluesky is far better in that respect
than Threads, Meta’s response to the immolation of Twitter, but Zuckerburg, yet
another self-absorbed reactionary bastard, has limited the amount of political
and controversial content on Threads. After a promising start, Threads has
de-evolved into a repository of either tear-jerking feel-good stories on how
great people can be, or the polar opposite, angry indictments of people having
been done wrong and the coup de grace payback for the wrong doers, which I
suppose, contributes to the artificially sweetened environment.
Stephen
Strogatz and Mark Cuban are on Bluesky and Stephen King is on Threads, or the
other way around, they all actively respond to postings.
My
volleyball activities this year have been limited to watching a lot of Olympic
and college volleyball, and writing about volleyball, using the ideal and
imaginary team that I coach with my mind’s eye. I had not coached in a few
years since I cannot travel overnight to tournaments, and I sorely miss it.
This
Olympics had me glued to the television and laptop. I saw as many men’s and
women’s volleyball as I could fit in a day, and I also indulged in my
once-every-four-years obsession with Team Handball, Table Tennis, Fencing,
Archery, and anything else that captures my attention. The surreal opening
ceremony was spectacular, very French. Of course, the American conservative
tight-ass’s completely tone deaf reaction was pathetic and hilarious at the
same time. The French made this a culturally French Olympics and they exceeded
expectations. Our French friends then superseded that performance with the ceremony
celebrating the unveiling of the five-year long restoration of the Notre Dame
Cathedral.
The
volleyball itself was superb, as expected from the best of the best at the
pinnacle event of the volleyball calendar. The USA women played as good of a
match as anyone against the Italians in the finals, but alas, the Italians were
unstoppable, and the USA WNT proudly came home with a silver. The sad irony is
that Paula Egonu, the transcendent Opposite for Italy was harassed after she
went on home, even after her incredible performance, because she is black.
Racists are everywhere, but especially egregious in sports.
The
USA men’s team performed spectacularly well. They went home with a bronze. As
the announcers discussed both team’s chances in the Olympic competition prior
to the Olympics, no one knew how the USA teams would perform. The bronze and
silver medal were more than acceptable for me, but the entitled USA volleyball
audience were calling for the head of the coaches, Speraw and Kiraly, not
knowing just how hard it is to even medal at the Olympics. The joke is on them because Speraw is now the
CEO of the USAV and in a complete turnabout, Kiraly is now head coaching the
men’s team. The head coaching slot for the women’s team sits empty. We shall
see who they get.
During
the Olympics, the social media platforms were going into overdrive with the
incessant noises and drivel. I managed to avoid most of it. Even the television
coverage was too noisy. Even as I enjoyed some of the irony with Snoop Dogg and
Martha Stewart, I suffered from overexposure fatigue.
I
had written about four blog posts during the Olympics, but this one was my
favorite. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-fan-life-player-retirements
The
college volleyball season ended spectacularly, in a final four for the ages. It
was the first time going into the finals that a woman head coach is guaranteed
to win the NCAA championship. There have been women coaches who have won the
national championships in the AIAW, back when the NCAA wasn’t interested in
women’s sports because it didn’t generate enough revenue. The Penn State team
gave a bravura performance in blue-collar fashion to wrest the championship
from a handicapped Louisville team. It was exciting as hell, and we finally had
a final that went beyond three games. The injury to Louisville’s stellar leaser
Anna DeBeer was a difference maker, but the Cardinal went down swinging.
The
stories flew in the aftermath of the championship because the Penn State story
was an improbable one. The Penn State head coach played on the first National
Championship team for Penn State in 1999, giving us a great story arc. She had
also been diagnosed with breast cancer in September of this year, yet she never
missed a practice. When the press interviewed the players, there seemed to be extra
sparks in their eyes when they spoke of their leader, they were on a mission.
Excuse me, someone is cutting onions right now.
Even
prior to the championship, the tournament was the most competitive in recent
memory, and the season itself was spectacular. The regional matches leading up
to the final four were mostly competitive and made for great television. The
fact that the finals were broadcast on ABC makes the future of my favorite
sport brighter than ever. I am very happy.
As
I write this, we are in the middle of the college bowl season. Illinois won the
so-called Cheez-Whiz Citrus bowl, beating a South Carolina team that was ranked
above the Illini. The Yellow Jackets lost to Vanderbilt Commodores in the
Birmingham Bowl, it might as well have been called the GPA bowl. Losing to a
football team named after Lionel Richie’s former band seems less than awe
inspiring.
The
trials and tribulations of Boeing had given me much to reflect upon, about my
own engineering experiences in industry and about the philosophy that I have
developed through my career as an engineer. In observing the debate about what
happened at Boeing, I wrote a few essays about what I think the problem was. Of
course, my opinions are subjective and based on the reportage from others. I
also extrapolated my own experiences in electric machines and drives industry
to the airplane industry. I figured that if the MBA clones can pretend that all
engineering companies are the same regardless of the product, I can spew venom
on all MBAs in the same way. Here are the links to my essays on Boeing and its
once great engineering culture. Hint: I was not happy, the vitriol flowed.
https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/engineering-life-boeings-ceo-in-front
https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/engineering-life-opinion-on-the-bloomberg
As
you are aware, a soap box topic for me is the accountancy approach to reading —
religiously tracking the number of books and pages read throughout a calendar
year while turning something I enjoy into a competition. I will always resist
turning an activity which gives me respites from living in modern society into
just unnecessary stress. I don’t know
how others can track books and page and enjoy the practice. To each their own.
I
don’t know how many books I read this year. It was both enough, and not too
much. I read mostly nonfiction books these days, I don’t have much interest or
patience to dip into the many fiction genres. Although my not-so-secret
pleasure in fiction is reading mysteries. I religiously follow Louise Penny,
Martin Walker, and Ian Rankin’s series. I am now working through books by my most
recent favorite mystery author, Michael Connelly, he replaced the recently
deceased Peter Robinson in my must-read pantheon of writers. My friend Lee sent
me a box full of books as he and his wife were getting ready to move, so now I
have a box full of Carl Hiaasen and Jamie Lee Burke books to read.
I
have had a habit of writing book reviews for myself, I usually throw them out into
the ether by posting them in my Blogspot blog, and occasionally on the Substack
blog. I also post the links to my reviews on Good Reads, Storygraph,
and LibraryThing. Writing book reviews gives me closure on the book and is
a good summary to return to when I don’t remember what I had thought about the
book — a very important practice as I age, what I was thinking at that point in
time, and perhaps giving me a perspective on my past self through re-reading the
book review.
Here
are some of the books that I have reviewed this year. There were only two reviews
of fiction books, one was my re-read of The Glass Bead Game
The
second fiction book is Crossing to Safety
Rick
Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
These
next two books were surprising book reviews for me. As my form factor indicates,
I am a foodie, some would call me a glutton, but no matter. Even as I am an inveterate
eater, I never had a yen to read cookbooks, that changed with these two
selections. To classify them as cookbooks is to underappreciate the story
telling that goes on in both books. The first is The Pat Conroy Cookbook:
Recipes of My Life
I
became a Pat Conroy reader when I lived in Atlanta, the movie Prince of Tides
came out then and that was my first Pat Conroy book. It was a revelation
because I never realized that people actually wrote like this. Conroy’s voice is
imbued with the southern ethos that I lived and experienced while living in
Atlanta; I have been a Conroy fan ever since. So much of a fan that I actually
read his cookbook; but this book, as with all books by the great southern
writers, told great stories about the south and southern characters with a
southern pacing and sensibility. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/book-review-the-pat-conroy-cookbook
I
had bought Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Peppers: A Sweet-Sour
Memoir of Eating in China
My
To Be Read stack now occupies several boxes in my living room. There are the ubiquitous
stacks of mystery novels sitting around for when the mood strikes me, usually
when I am bored, or I am mentally exhausted from reading nonfiction books. I
also have boxes of books dedicated to my self-designed regimen of Polymathic
training. Of course, there is also the distinct possibility that any bright and
shiny new topic may flit onto my radar screen, seducing me to enter into its orbit,
luring me far away from reading my teetering TBR stacks.
The
longest reading project atop my TBR list is the biography of Leonardo da
Vinci
An
opportunity for the new year came from my subscriptions to Vashik Armenikus’ Genius
and Ink Substack, it is a chance for me to dig into Dante’s Divine
Comedy through a guided read along https://substack.com/@armenikus/p-153173634.
I decided to take the plunge. I had never had the slightest interest in reading
14th century Italian narrative poems before this, and I doubt that
this is going to be a habit for the rest of my life, but The Divine Comedy
is a celebrated trilogy in western literature and is oft mentioned in the
Leonardo biography, as well as in a number of other books that I am reading. It
was a perfect storm. It starts the second week of January. Wish me luck.
Since
I taught only one class in the Fall, I had some time to ponder, always a
dangerous thing for me to delve into. The phrase seeing through the cloud of
red dust has been in my memory since I was reading the Chinese wu-xia (武俠) novels.
People are always seeing through the cloud of red dust and entering monkhood. I
am not going that far, but I did think it was a fitting metaphor for how I
perceive the societal realities as I experienced them. My perceptions have
changed considerably ever since my perspective had changed, and I feel that I
am seeing through many different clouds of red dust. This essay truly
challenged me to write down what I really think, it helped me to frame and
structure my memories of the past. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/ruminations-seeing-through-the-clouds
Now,
to the elephant in the room. Those who know me will immediately understand what
I am referring to. The less said the better as I am still attempting to process
all of the ramifications. I am cycling between the first four stages of
mourning, shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and
bargaining, and depression.
I
have not been able to get to the last three stages: the upward turn, reconstruction
and working through, and acceptance and hope yet. It might happen in
about four years, but hopefully in two years.
I
am still trying to process the broader meanings of the results. One of the
first decisions I made was to cut myself off from the traditional media outlets
because of their obsequiousness during the election and their failure as
disseminators of objective truth. I dropped the Washington Post after
Bezos put his tail between his legs, but I still subscribe to the New York
Times mainly for the Spelling Bee and Strands puzzles, as
well as the By The Book columns. I now find my news through my Substack
connection as some of the best journalists formerly from the traditional news
outlets have struck out on their own as independents. I also skim through The
Atlantic, Associate Press, Al Jazeera, Reuters, BBC, and various other
international news outlets to get the up to the minute reportage, but not
without assiduously sifting through morass of verbosity in search of falsehoods.
As
many of us have experienced, the uncertainties are real, the feelings of insecurities
are real. My head is on a swivel when I go out now because I now know that I
cannot trust every person that are around me, people that I once thought I
could trust, all because I don’t look like them; because half the people in
this country did not hesitate in supporting a racist who based his appeal on his
willingness to do harm to people like me; they voted with their greed. These
are the same people who have absolutely zero empathy for anyone who fails to
fall into the cruelly narrow niche that they deem to be normal. It is not “just
politics”, as some of the callous and entitled former acquaintance wantonly put
it. My life and the place where I had thought I had a home is now more than
threatened. My ease of existence now sits under an existential sword of Damocles
and will do so for the next four years.
It
has affected how I feel and act around people who I know to be antagonistic to
my existence. Consciously and subconsciously, a protective distance has become
necessary, not for physical safety, but for psychological safety. I have begun
to classify my relationships. There have always been acquaintances and friends,
based upon emotional connection. There is a third classification: acquaintances
who I suspect. It is not a happy decision to do so, but it is what it is, a
survival mechanism.
It
has affected my outlook on the future. I have become even more cynical and
skeptical than before, if that is possible. Where I once thought the evil doers
were in the minority and do not speak for the benevolent whole, I now know
there are as many of them as there are of us, and I need to not just stay away
from them but to resist and oppose them and their malevolence.
As
I said, I am still processing all the ramifications of the election on our
collective future. I started to employ Memento Mori, a Latin phrase
meaning “remember you must die,” a concept embedded in Stoicism.
It is a tool to cultivate a balanced perspective on life. The Stoics believed
in focusing on what's within our control and accepting what is not, including
death. The idea is to constantly reflect on the inevitability of mortality, while
mentally diminishing the impact of external circumstances so that we can
prioritize our actions and thoughts around what truly matters. I have been trying
to do this since November, to imagine the worst that can happen and learning to
accept that perceived worst reality in hopes that the actual reality will not
be as dire. It helps, a little itty-bitty bit; not enough to assuage my
existential dread but enough to keep me from becoming despondent. Having a
vivid imagination is not necessarily a good thing in this case.
I
had just returned to my written meditation recently because I could not prevent
the vitriol from oozing onto the pages of my personal journal and I did not
want that bitterness be recorded for posterity. One of the books that I
am reading talks about the history of notebooks, The Notebook: The History
of Thinking on Paper
One
positive that came from this crisis is my friends, those who are also in pain
but who talked me off the ledge the day after even though they too were in pain
even more than I was. Indeed, they had more skin in the game than I did, they
were far more committed in action than I was. This demonstrated to me that even
as my choice in acquaintances is suspect, my choice in true friends is
impeccable. It was good to realign our perspectives and be reassured of my choices
in friends, those who I can depend on and trust. A true friend is the rarest of
gems.
So
that is the long and drawn-out self-indulgent part. I am glad you decided to
follow me on my inner journey of discovery this year, such as it is.
My
parting thought has to do with the mathematical, not surprising. This meme below showed
up on my timeline on New Year’s Day and it appealed to my mathematical sense of
aesthetics. If we are to believe that numbers have meaning, the beauty of the
number 2025 should portend great things for the year. Or Not.
I
bid you peace and a reminder to try to do these ten things every day. It doesn’t
matter if you succeed with every single one, it matters that you persist in trying
to do every single one, because in this case Yoda is wrong, there is Try. It is
yet another part of my self-care and effort to be more equanimous.
·
Learn something new
·
Teach someone
·
Be inspired
·
Be vulnerable
·
Be moved to tears
·
Be kind and generous
·
Experience beauty
·
Experience the unfamiliar
·
Experience the uncomfortable
·
Love unconditionally
Forever
yours
Pete
References
Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of
Thinking on Paper. Windsor, Ontario: Bibliosis, 2023.
Conroy, Pat. The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of
My Life. NYC: Nan A. Talese, 2004.
Dunlop, Fuchsia. Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper:
A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. NYC: W W Norton, 2009.
Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game. NYC: Holt
Paperbacks, 1998.
Isaacson, Walter. Leonrardo ds Vinci. NYC:
Simon and Schuster, 2017.
Rick Rubin, Neil Strauss. The Creative Act: A Way
of Being. New York City: Penguin Press, 2023.
Stegner, Wallace. Crossing to Safety. NYC:
Penguin Books, 1987.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic
Guide to Writing Non-Fiction 25th Anniversary Edition. NYC: Harper
Collins, 2001.
—. Writing To Learn. NYC: Harper Perrenial,
1993.
