State of the Pete 2026

 

pwung@earthlink.net http://PolymathToBe.blogspot.com,

https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/

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無為 Wu-Wei "inexertion", "inaction", or "effortless action"

Joan Didion I write entirely 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.

Curiosity A desire to know or learn. An object that arouses interest, as by being novel or extraordinary.

Thomas Hobbes Hell is truth seen too late.

Polymathy Learning in many fields; encyclopedic knowledge.

Louise Penny Things are strongest where they are broken.

                                                                                 January 2026

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 how my life was progressing would be clearer if I collected all that I had written on each the cards and put them in 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 the crowd 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 the habit of many people 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.” We will see how this works out this year.

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 2025 proved to be a great one for you and your family. My mother and I are still living in Bucolic Tipp City Ohio.

2025 has been an eventful year for us.

First and foremost, my mother turned one hundred in early October of this year, in case you have not noticed my increased posting on social media around October, which is the birthdate; she was born on the date of the Mid-Autumn festival on the lunar calendar. It was an event that I could not  foresee. It was an exciting landmark for both of us, although I had to remind mom that she was crossing past the century mark. As you can see in the photos, she is doing well. The big smile with the cake is one of my favorite pictures of her. The cake came once again from Leaguer Bakery here in Dayton. It is a Taiwanese bakery, something that I never thought would ever exist here in a small midwestern city such as Dayton, but here it was. This was the fourth or fifth birthday cake that I had asked them to make for us.

The second picture is of her and the bouquets and plants that she received from relatives and friends. She was quite overwhelmed by the attention. Birthday dinner was from Shen’s, our favorite and closest Chinese restaurant to us, mom is not keen on leaving the house, so we did takeout.

Since her birthday was actually on a Monday, I arranged for the family and friends to join a Zoom call. I had split the people interested in calling into groups. Each group got roughly thirty minutes on Zoom. She loved it, even though she was confused by all the faces on the screen and she couldn’t keep track of the voices and the pictures; she mostly pointed out how everyone had changed in appearance since she had not seen many of the in years. She slept quite well that night because of the excitement. Thank you all very much for having taken the time to call in. We had people from Taiwan, Hawaii, Findlay, St. Louis, Boston, Atlanta, California, Florida, and all points in between.

Mom is doing quite well for a centenarian; certain physical parts have quit working, but the same could be said for me, a sexagenarian. Her blood pressure is better than mine, but then again, she doesn’t keep up with the news of what is being done in our country. She does suffer from Sundowning on certain nights; as the days have gotten shorter, her symptoms are more obvious in the Winter months. Regardless, life is good for us here.

I found earlier this year that the IEEE Industry Applications Society — my home society since gradual school — was honoring me with the distinguished service award. It was an unexpected and much appreciated honor. Working for the IEEE has always been a responsibility and duty that had been drummed into my consciousness by my father, it was never stated but always implied. I had written down all of my thoughts in the blog version of my acceptance speech in my Substack; the link is below. If you had not read it yet, you must have been off my social media because I had posted it everywhere — the human ego at work. The speech that I gave during the ceremony was not completely extemporaneous but I had also tried to edit my thoughts in the interest of the time, I failed miserably in my attempt to stay within the time limit, but I decided to speak my piece because who knows when I was going to have a chance to thank those people who had mentored me and made such an impact in my life as well as expound on the importance of taking volunteering seriously and performing honorably by telling my story.

https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/acceptance-speech-for-the-2025-distinguished

The photos are from the awards ceremony, the middle one is of my good friend Ayman EL-Refaie presenting me with the plaque, and the last picture is of my two closest friends, Ayman and Andy Knight along with a newfound friend Mohammad at Fogo de Chao post prandial. You can’t see it, but I had some serious meat sweats going on due to the copious amount of beef and lamb picanha we consumed that night. There can never be too much picanha, you can put that down in stone. 

The award was presented at the 2025 edition of the Energy Conversion Conference and Exhibition (ECCE). This is a conference that I have been volunteered to organize since its inception in 2009. Andy figured out that I had missed six years of the conference between the pandemic and taking care of my mother. It was great to go back to the conference, even if it was for just a few days. Seeing and talking with my old cohorts was the true highlight of the trip. I truly miss geeking out with the best of the best in machines and drives and catching up with their lives and their work, although they all seem so old, I don’t know why.

The trip itself was a source of stress and trepidation. I had not left mom for an extended amount of time for six years. Fortunately, I have some very good friends who came to my rescue. They came and stayed with mom for four days while I was in Philadelphia, the site of the meeting. I was nervous about telling my mom about the trip, but she was completely relaxed as soon as she saw these friends and had a chance to interact with them on the first day; so much so that she simply waved at me nonchalantly when I left for the airport. When I called to find out how she was doing during the trip, she couldn’t be bothered to talk to me as she was having too much fun having a slumber party. And I was worried.

Since I had not traveled for such a long time, and the changes that had wrought in the travel protocol, I was quite nervous and being an anal retentive, I planned, packed, replanned, and repacked innumerable times. Since I was not checking any baggage, I decided to only bring one pair of shoes, my dress shoes. A greater mistake could not have been made. It turned out that I walked over five miles on the first day of the trip, walking through the airports and the streets of Philadelphia. My dawgs were a hurtin’. The trip was smooth otherwise, just the pains caused by my chronic knucklehead overthinking.

On a serious note, a friend passed away unexpectedly in the middle of the Summer. Jim Wall was someone I met a few years ago at Ghostlight Coffee (Now Wayne and Clover Coffee Shop) here in the South Park neighborhood of Dayton about six or seven years ago. Our coffee klatch bunch bonded over coffee and conversation, and we met up as a group three days a week, those days that I was teaching at the University of Dayton. Our extended group is diverse, but Jim and I were at the opposite ends of the spectrum in more ways than one. He was a staunch conservative free marketeer, he had built his business up from scratch, he was a firm believer in American mythology of the rugged individual loner, and he worshipped the people I despised: Jamie Diamond, Jack Welch, and other corporate parasites, he worked out religiously until he had to give it up for fear of hurting himself, and he was a devoted booster of all things Dayton — especially the Dayton Ballet.  We had certain areas in common: we both had a strong disregard for the modern day McMBA-from-a-box, we both loved to eat, although we liked to eat different things, we were both big fans of underdogs, we both couldn’t stand self-promoting blowhards, and we both had idealized visions of how the world should work, even though we couldn’t agree on the same vision. He always cared for the interest of the various people we met in the coffee shop, no matter who they were, he had a heart of gold, the demeanor of a tough guy, but was a softie deep down inside. Jim had turned ninety-three this year and he had been showing signs of slowing down physically and mentally. I had been picking him up to go to the coffee klatch for our regular meetings, his kids would come and take him home after the appointed hour, until one day his son called to say to hold off on the coffee klatch because Jim had fallen off the last few steps of his stairs. He succumbed a few weeks later. He is deeply missed by all who knew him from the coffee klatch. I miss the irascible old man for many reasons, but mostly for his bluntness and no BS attitude.

As I alluded to before, my coffee shop mainstay had changed names and ownership. The new name is Wayne and Clover’s Coffee Shop, named after the intersection where the shop resides. The new owners are not strangers; they are coffee klatch participants of long standing. When they noticed the original owner struggle, they stepped up to the plate. It is all good, they brought in different and innovative ideas for the space and the business, it is exciting to see the new developments.

My daily routine rotates between taking care of mom, teaching, reading, writing, practicing quite a bit of omphaloskepsis, occasionally exercising, and generally existing happily. I never thought of it as taking early retirement, although the oncoming freight train that is the age of sixty-five is making me realize that my status can be interpreted as retirement, even though it doesn’t feel like it. Famous last words.

One salient feature of my life now that is usually attributed to being retired is that I am finding joy in my daily routines. I am quite grateful to not have to live with the corporate imposed stress and pressures. I even wrote about it recently. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/ruminations-work-life-balance

I always knew I love sharing knowledge, so being a pedagogue is a natural extension of that focus in life for me. After having aught for over six years, I can definitely say that this is my density, to paraphrase George McFly.

I am once again teaching two courses in the Fall and two in the Spring. Two of the courses are taught live at the University of Dayton and two courses are taught virtually at Marquette University. Both universities have been impacted by the demographic cliff fall off — the hard drop in college age student enrollment. Both schools are scrambling to make up for the deficit in income: layoffs, forced retirements, consolidation of departments and schools to reduce overhead, which ends up creating reductions in the courses offered because they don’t have enough faculty to teach those courses. While I understand that these solutions are both dire and necessary, I wonder how an early warning shot eighteen years prior to the event was not enough. Our proclivity to kick the can down the road as well as the short-term focus on profitability is where I have my finger pointed.

One might think that I would be bored with teaching the same classes every semester, but that would assume that the subjects and the makeup of individual students remain static from year to year; fortunately for me, that is never true.

Electric power is a part of the greater energy usage challenge, further constrained by the human efforts to slow down global warming and to deal with the very pragmatic problem of operating the electric power system at a profit, no matter how thin the profit is. The topic is further complicated and — by implication — enriched by the need to meet the myriads of physical constraints associated with the interconnected electric grid. The integration of new technologies into the grid means new and unknown challenges. All this is to say that I am trying to keep up with the technology, sifting out the facts from the hype.

The students are the most interesting wild card in my teaching gig. This year’s students are not much different from last year’s students, but different enough so that I am both exasperated and entertained by them. Instead of trying to fit square pegs into round holes — which I have done and will probably inadvertently continue to do — I have tried mightily to adjust my teaching to their proclivities. It is a full-time job, except it does not pay that way. It certainly makes my life very interesting. It doesn’t take away my hatred of grading assignments, but then again, I am the one who continues to assign them. My experiment in forcing the students to think and have opinions has seen a modicum of success. Most are drug along for the ride, some revel in the exercise, even though I try to challenge their opinions with requiring them to back it up with non-AI proof. My tactics are not always welcomed; the best I can say it that they don’t hate it. To paraphrase Elvis Costello: Oh, I know it don't thrill them; I hope it don't kill them.

One of the side topics that I have had to jump into with both feet is the subject of using artificial intelligence for the classroom. As I take an accounting of the flood of commercial Large Language Model (LLM) bots that are available, I try not to be a Luddite but it is difficult to not be critical of the type of products that are foisted upon the general public as the miracle solution for all that ails humankind. I became even more skeptical after researching just a little bit, digging just below the surface through the book by Melanie Mitchell (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2025/08/book-review-artificial-intelligence.html) ,  Gary Marcus, and the writing of other AI pioneers on Substack who are skeptics of the ability of LLMs to someday achieve Artificial General Intelligence. I found it reassuring that as commercial LLMs begin to show their deficiencies, more cognoscenti in the area have agreed with that assessment, unfortunately more smoke is being blown up on people’s arses by those people who have much skin invested in the game.

I usually assign a semester ending project presentation in each of my classes, so I needed to anticipate the students in my class using LLMs blindly and without thinking critically. I started to ask the students to annotate their AI search prompts as a part of the assignment and as a check on whether they are thinking critically — yes, I actually ask undergraduates to think critically, it is a rather unique idea. Additionally, a part of the assignment is for them to verify all the information that they had retrieved from LLMs as a double check on the verity of the information. Not surprisingly, any of them have found that the LLM result are so full of hallucinations that is was better to just do the research themselves, which is what I had hoped.

I found it interesting that neither university that I teach at had a written and vetted policy regarding the use of AI, even though they both had asked that all the faculty state our own personal AI policies in our syllabus. As a result, I was scrambling and using the scorched earth strategy and scrambling to collect AI usage policies from different universities to kluge some semblance of an AI policy. After doing a bit of digging, I found that the existing policies that I was able to collect fell into three buckets: don’t do it or we will flunk you; use it all you want, it is the wave of the future; or the administration buries their collective heads in the sand. The vast majority of the universities that I sampled took the last stance. I ended up mixing and matching recommendations that I found on Substack from professors who did not bury their collective heads into the sand and kluged a policy just for my own use. I ended up sending it up the chain of command of the university bureaucracy for their approval. They tell me they will take it into consideration and may use it to create their own policy. I am just a little shocked.

As an only child, reading has always been my refuge from loneliness, I have developed the habit of reading whenever I had nothing to do or if I ever felt lonely; that habit has evolved into a serious addiction, but of course you all knew that. I read multiple books in parallel; I have boxes of books that serve as my ad hoc To Be Read (TBR) stashes — just in case I am caught short of reading material — the spirit of Umberto Eco lives within me. Yet I have not stopped buying more books, mostly from small independent online book sellers. I don’t know if it amounts to a hill of beans worth of difference to their bottom-line, but it makes me feel better. I buy physical books, eBooks never appealed to me, personal esthetics. This is why I always schlepp a selection of books when I travel, to prevent boredom.

At this time in my reading journey, I have more non-fiction books in my rotation than fiction. The fiction books I read are almost all mysteries, not many of the literary fiction genre, whatever that is. Mysteries  are easy to get through, and they don’t need much mental acuity or engagement; just put the brain on cruise and go. I spent much of this year reading through the stash of Michael Connelly collection I bought last year; I am at a point with Connelly where I am getting caught up. I also blew through Louise Penny’s latest; it was a fantastic read. I am also reading Ian Rankin’s latest. Since I am running out of series, I decided to look through some of the other series that I had paused previously, one never stopping reading a good series, one just tap the brake a bit for a short respite.

I dug back into Zen and the Are of Motorcycle Maintenance this year for the third of fourth time, but the first time in the last couple of decades, even though I refer to ZMM as one of the books that fundamentally changed my life. The latest reading revealed parts of the book that I did not remember, but those parts intersected nicely with some of the topics that I have been learning about, so far it has been a successful re-reading. ZMM also pulled me back into my collection on Taoism. Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, etc.

My non-fiction TBR is broad and since I am under no pressure to “finish” studying a subject, I am indulging on going down some rabbit holes to satisfy my curiosity. I am of the belief that learning never ends even as my best learning days have receded. I have amateurishly diagnosed myself with the affliction of  — consciously and unconsciously — making up for the liberal arts education that I had not obtained since I sacrificed that liberal art education as an undergrad to focus on engineering, even though there are still quite a bit of technical content in my non-fiction reading TBR pile. Most of the books are on broad topics in philosophy, history, mathematics, neurosciences, music, pedagogy and learning sciences, amongst many other topics. I suspect that there is a bit of latent ADHD in my neural make up; whereas many other men are enthralled with shiny things, I am enthralled with the “shiny” subjects. Many of the subjects are connected and cross coupled, for example, the subject of neurosciences — a big subject area — encompasses philosophy, physiology, psychiatry, anatomy, AI, causality, systems thinking, and even bits of electrical engineering. My rabbit holes tend to be open ended because many of the subjects are unresolved and new. This gives me an opportunity to riff , abstract, and generalize to my heart’s content.

One of the pleasant surprises is that my interest in the workings of the brain coincides with the interest area of one of my good friends from undergraduate. The difference is that he comes at it from the anatomical perspective and I am coming at it from a more philosophical side. In addition, the son of another friend of my undergraduate days is doing his doctorate in psychology and is well read in the subject, so it is a nice triumvirate, even though my TBR list on the subject has expanded considerably with recommendation from those two.

In a DUH moment, I realized that most of my non-fiction readings are focused on the stories and histories of those who advanced the boundaries of the subjects that I am reading about; I am particularly drawn to the historical narratives of how developments were made. I do occasionally read the original sources —they are a struggle to read — but I tell myself that they are worthwhile obstacles to overcome. Doing a bit more amateur self-analysis, this is why I was not so great at the development part of my engineering work, as I was more interested in the research part.

A recently discovered book titled: Everyday I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum posited that reading and writing should be considered as one task, as both reading and writing are inextricably coupled even though most shy away from the writing portion of the equation. The concept resonated with me immediately and it is clearly aligned with the Joan Didion quote that I have listed above: “I write entirely 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.” The “process” becomes: read everything I can on a subject, summarize what I had read, leave it alone to marinade to give myself time to abstract and generalize, and then write my thoughts and impressions in my own words to find out what I really think. This is why I started my blogs, even though I didn’t realize it when I started it. The blogspot address is where I put my book reviews and, for the time being, the State of the Pete since I want to keep it kind of private for my friends and family. I joined Substack a few years ago and that is the place where I aim for broader distribution. I like to think that between Heather Cox Richardson and I, we have over a million readers on Substack.

It takes me a long time to gather my scattered thoughts and formulate a central theme for an essay, what comes out is never the same as what I started with; the result is that the writing turns out differently from what I had in mind in the beginning, that is beauty and serendipity of the discovery process and not having to work to a schedule so that I can putz. Those of you who know me also know that this laissez-faire attitude towards writing is  highly ironic since I am regimented and inflexible because I am an engineer, those engineering traits will always rise to the surface, but not as often as when I was younger. An unintended consequence is that there are many unfinished writing files on my computer, but I am not on the clock. My so-called “writing process” allows me to indulge in both reading and writing habits simultaneously. It also is true to my habit of chasing my intellectual shiny thing, I can focus on the newest ideas until I run out of steam, then I go back and think about it days and weeks after I get started.

My friends convinced me to accept an assignment to help organize and write some articles on the history of the IEEE Industry Application Society. These friends conspired to make me believe that this task came from me certainly knew what they were doing since I have been quite excitedly researching some topics for it. My friends know me well.

I had abandoned the legacy media outlets, television, newsprint, news sites, etc. The litany of the usual suspects in the legacy media bending at the knees is unending, the latest being CBS. It is a shame because I quite enjoyed CBS Sunday Morning. I just hope that Steve Hartman’s pieces aren’t corrupted by Bari Weiss and her corporate overlord: Larry Ellison. I still maintain an electronic subscription to the New York Times, but only to maintain access to the Strands and Spelling Bee games, and the By the Book column in the Sunday NYT Book Review section. I am addicted to all three.

My search for uncompromised and truthful news sources has now become more time consuming, but it is worth the effort, even though I fall for slop all the time, both AI and non-AI slop. The social media empires are as, if not more corrupt, than the legacy media. Finding reliable news sources is time and effort sink in the modern era because we must test for the veracity of each source by putting each news source to the test. As it turns out, my writing outlet, Substack, has so far been surprisingly useful. The main reason is that many of the legacy media journalist refugees have switched to Substack, many of them are proven and are known quantities. I subscribe for free and I sample what they put out for cheap bastards like me; it is FAFO in the best sense of the phrase. I grudgingly pay for a subscription if it is worthwhile. Currently I am paying for Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Jay Kuo, David Epstein, Andy Borowitz, and a handful of non-news related subjects.

The freebie subscriptions have been great investments for my money. It is a treasure trove of expert knowledge on AI, especially knowledge that runs contrary to the echo chamber of the LLM cheerleaders that permeates throughout social media. Substack also has little pockets of knowledge on esoteric subjects that would take me a long time to unearth, so esoteric that most of the people who write do so for free, like me. I am quite happy with Substack, so far. As we all know, the status quo can change on a dime. Apropos of nothing, Dolly Parton is also on Substack.

I have presence on Threads and Bluesky as well; but they are just meh, too much AI slop.

Threads is the National Enquirer of social media, people and bots generating click baits. The gist of the postings range between the extremes of AI generated infuriating stories of people being done wrong or inspirational stories of people rewarded for doing right. If you want to waste time, go there. It’s no surprise since the site belongs to Meta, the Facebook parent company. Bluesky is lefty heaven, lots of groupthink that leans to the left. Ironically, it started out as a skunk project for the former Twitter, but when Voldemort took Twitter over, he let it get spun off by the project lead, a young American Chinese woman. Their membership blew up after the November election from people abandoning the former Twitter.

Even the stodgy web site LinkedIn is suffering from AI slop overload, although it is still an excellent resource for my research for certain kinds of technical material for my class, because there are some amazing and legitimate sources on the site. For example, I learned more about the Iberian Peninsula blackout, information that is verified and cite the actual official investigations. Many of the recent postings are becoming unreadable and poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect. A salient account is Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz’s take on the foibles of modern corporate life.

My two alma maters were both in minor bowl games, even though both flirted with being included in the College Football Playoffs. Illinois dropped out early and Georgia Tech was able to hold out a bit longer before losing enough games to knock them out. They both had decent seasons, won enough to keep the fanbase happy since neither university had ever been football powerhouses, even though Georgia Tech had won a National Championship when I was in gradual school.

Women’s College Volleyball had an amazing season, ending with Texas A&M winning the national championship. It was especially thrilling for all the fans of the underdogs when they beat the can’t lose Nebraska team, who had run through their opponents like a buzzsaw. Texas A&M played nearly flawless volleyball to win the Natty. It was a banner year for the sport as the television ratings, attendance, and national media attention reached record levels, even an uneventful three game final match didn’t the viewership. Being a fan of two middle of the road college athletic programs, my Pavlovian reaction to my teams winning and losing carried over to my expectations of women’s college volleyball, which is: how badly can we fuck this up? We, the sport, didn’t.

One of my friends is a TAMU alum, she is ecstatic because two of TAMU’s teams were in the running for the national crown. She also had the Pavlovian defensive reaction: don’t fuck this up. Volleyball did not.

My volleyball activities had been curtailed for the last few years; since I cannot leave my mom by herself, I did not coach club for the duration. I miss it, partly because this has been what I had always done, partly because I miss the look of accomplishment on the player’s faces. And partly because I miss having a laboratory for experimenting what I had learned. I try to stay current with conversing with coaches at all levels, track the teams during the college volleyball season, and write about what I think regarding coaching. It isn’t the same, obviously, but it must be for now.

In my absence, the club volleyball world has gone through some dramatic and unwelcomed transformation. My friends in club coaching have all had the same thought: it is time to quit coaching, go through their minds. The era of big money and private equity is amongst us. The small non-corporate clubs are getting smaller because they have a tough time competing with the big dogs. All of this is driven by snowplow parents’ desires, fanned by clubs filling them with mythologies. The topic could take another ten pages, so I will spare you. It stopped being about the players, the families, or heaven forbid, the sport anymore. It is about the bottom line, the quarterly earnings statement. Everything that I hate about modern business practices. Youth sport by MBA.

One opportunity that had been granted to me this year was that I was asked to on the Master Coaches Roundtable in May alongside some legendary coaches who are the hosts. Here is the clip. https://vimeo.com/1082035677 I was honored to be asked and enjoyed conversing with these legends whose coaching careers I had followed from afar. It was enjoyable and quite an ego boost.

The landscape of collegiate sports has changed dramatically and quickly. This year’s House settlement initiated a sea change that will completely destroy the collegiate athletics model to which we are accustomed. The horse is now out of the barn, and it will never be the same again, for better or worse. I suspect for worse. I wrote about that with as much detail as I can gather if you are curious. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-fan-life-house-settlement

Music and reading has always been my refuge against loneliness as an only child, although my musical listening life has been less than revolutionary this year, I did discover a few new artists that I am intrigued by. I mostly get my music from watching Rick Beato’s YouTube interviews. Chris Thile entered my radar after listening to his interview with Beato and figured out that he is a dork, like me. His previous recordings with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyers further intrigued me, the mandolin is a seeming anomaly as a classical instrument. I listened to Beato’s interview with Allison Krauss and gained further appreciation of her and Union Station specifically, and bluegrass music in general. Beato also interviewed Pat Metheny, probably my favorite jazz artist, and I dorked out on the interview. They delved deeper into the musical rabbit hole than I was able to follow, but I was mesmerized. Language is inadequate to convey the depth of their conversation. Which once again drove me back to trying to be an autodidact on the subject of the relationship between mathematics and music theory. A glutton for punishment I am.

Miscellanea: The new Pope is from Chicago, a White Sox fan, although even he couldn’t help the hapless White Sox this season, he saved all of his magic for Da Bears. Jokic and Wembanyama are the future of basketball. They are both European trained, hmmm. These are dark days for the Cardinals and Blues; it is hard to be patient. Shohei Ohtani is a generation talent, but I know I, for one, was cheering mightily for the Blue Jays to win it all. Saban, Calipari, and Pitino having the balls to complain about the college sports landscape takes hypocrisy to the max and complete lack of self-awareness. They created it, and they are also the loudest complainants. SMDH.

You all know how I feel about our societal and cultural reality today, so less that is said, the better. What I can say is that I am seeing more people moving or having moved to somewhere else. I never thought I would see the day that this would even make a ripple in the societal fabric, but it is happening. Indivisible and 50501, along with the millions who dared to protest, to show up, and who understood, better than the politicians, what our democracy represents and how fragile it all is kept my hopes alive for a better tomorrow. The progressive wing of the left won huge victories in the elections, and the centrists victors in the elections liberally borrowed the themes espoused by the progressive and won. These successes happened despite the roadblocks thrown at them by the centrists. Democracy is uncertain and the participants need to never take their mandate from the people for granted, which is seemingly what the centrists have done. The mantra is: steer the third and middle path, win first, and then deal with that pesky vision and governance thing later. The election results showed that the electorate is wise to their duplicity and are not having any of their BS. The powers-that-be on the left had traded their principles for certainty, which is why there is a fissure on the minority side. The conservatives had gone through this a few decades ago, they opted for certainty over principles as well, which is why we are where we are. The problem is that we are beyond academic debate, we are at a stage where we can lose our democracy.

Getting off the soapbox and packing my frustrations away. This will take forever to verbalize and debate.

 Thank you for listening/reading. To paraphrase Elvis Costello once again: Oh, I know it don't thrill you; I hope it don't kill you.

I bid you and your families peace and all that is good with the world.

Here are my ten things to try to do every day. It doesn’t matter if you succeed with every single one, it matters that you try to do every single one, because in this case Yoda is wrong, there is Try, and Try makes all the difference in the world.

·       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

Book Review-Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans By Melanie Mitchell

Ever since the explosion and proliferation of Chatbots in the AI sector, the superlatives and attacks on the idea of using AI have also proliferated. The fictional content of the announcements in social media and specialty media has been mind numbing. I had reached a point of not knowing what I could or could not believe.

I realized that what I needed was not what many are offering, their opinions disguised as informative articles on what AI entails, but a primer on the technologies that the articles are throwing out for public consumption. Many, like me, have become inured to the media content without ever understanding the technology, nor had I ever dug into the granularities which is fundamental to the technologies. I also desired a concise and precise history of how this revolution came about, which is my usual modus operandi when investigating a topic that was new to me. Although one cannot exist in the technology world without having been exposed to AI.

I had fortunately come upon Melanie Mitchell’s book in my endless wanderings in the vast spaces of the bookstore websites. This, was what I needed and wanted. It also didn’t hurt that Mitchell’s credentials are impeccable as far as the AI world is concerned. She did her PhD with the renowned Douglas Hofstadter of the University of Michigan and the authors of Gödel, Escher, Bach. She has created her own AI system as a part of her research. Finally, she has joint appointments at Portland State and the Santa Fe Institute.  

This book gave me everything I wanted; it demystified and explained all the buzzwords presently flying about in conversations about AI. She did so in chronological order, starting with the 1956 workshop organized by John McCarthy, who coined the misleading term Artificial Intelligence,  and held in Dartmouth. She laid out the evolution of AI, diving deep enough into the methods and algorithms of such topics as Symbolic AI, sub-symbolic AI, expert systems, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet), Deep Learning, Machine Learning, back propagation, large language model (LLM), reinforcement learning, etc.

She also introduced the readers to historical figures like John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon and discussed their contributions to the area. She also contemporary figures like Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, and their recent contributions to the burgeoning field.

I particularly like the way she interposed history with concise but highly understandable explanations of how the technology evolved and developed, it gave the book a multi-dimensional appeal as each dimension reinforced the other dimensions without seeming chaotic and disorganized. On the contrary, the organization of the book was perfect for a relative novice to gain not only information and knowledge but also insight and understanding. I would highly recommend this book for those who are curious about this thing called AI and wish to be informed, and for those who are curious about the history of the technology and the people who are the historical innovators.

 

Book Review-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

One of my reading committee members recommended this book to me as I was getting his signature for my thesis. He knew my interest in the philosophy of science and told me that I HAD to read this book because it makes clear how scientific advancements evolve along with the process of scientific discoveries.  Not long after that encounter, I bought the book with the greatest of intentions.

It sat in a prominent place in my bookshelf for years. It travelled with me across the country from job to job, city to city. It was always on my To Be Read list and prominent in my psyche. I finally got around to sit down to reading it as I entered the latter part of my engineering career. In some ways, I thought that since I was participating in the evolving scientific process as an engineer, I was creating the structure of the scientific revolution. It wasn’t until after I became more experienced that I sensed the rhythm of the evolution of science and engineering that I realized that this book should have been read long ago. It was also during that period that I became aware that the structure that Kuhn describes happens to everything that goes through both evolutionary and revolutionary changes, which is just about everything.

As Kuhn lays out the steps of his structure, emphasizes that the step to a revolution is benignly unspectacular, until the exceptions to the rule stack up, where our scientific dogmas from accumulated historical perceptions are increasing violated by reality. Kuhn takes a fine scalpel to our accepted beliefs that make up the normal sciences. Kuhn terms these accepted beliefs paradigms. They are more than just beliefs however; these are conjectures and derived knowledge that had been determined to be true through empirical verification. Kuhn is very careful with his argument, as a practiced philosopher does. He steps through his structure in fine granularity, and he tries to anticipate objections, using salient scientific history of ideas to illustrate his assertions. This is not just a philosophical treatise but also a review of scientific history that frames his structure, most notably the Copernican revolution as compared to the Ptolemaic ideas. One hundred and seventy-three pages devoted to outlining his structure, but mostly to convince the reader, through examples and logic, that this structure is not just a whimsical edifice, fragile and delicate. Instead, Kuhn worked diligently to convince the reader of the reality of the structure.

The ubiquity of Kuhn’s idea is something that took me by surprise. This is proof that he has been successful in convincing the world of his idea. As I was reading the book, my thoughts were not: this is revolutionary. My thoughts were: of course, that is the way it has always been and should be. Which proved to me that Kuhn’s ideas were such common sense that no one had objected to his proposal, or that Kuhn’s ideas had been so seamlessly integrated into our perspectives that it has been tightly woven into how we perceive scientific ideas. The phrase “paradigm shift”  has so seamlessly been appropriated into our vocabulary that it is an anchor phrase when discussing changing long held beliefs; it is so accepted that many humorously and sarcastically skewers the uninformed user of the term.

Most importantly, Kuhn’s phrases: normal science, anomalies that challenge the paradigm, and the revolutionary overthrow of paradigms are deeply ingrained in our psyche when we think of revolutionary changes in the sciences. It is so ingrained that as I was reading the book I found myself asking: what’s the big deal? But it is a big deal, it formalizes how scientists and technologists abstract the methodologies of their field to create more accurate explanations which are truer to what reality is showing us.

Yet, as I was reading the book, I find myself marveling at the breadths and depths of Kuhn’s explications. He sought not only to convince the scientists, but the philosophers and historians.

I read the Enlarged Second edition of Kuhn’s book. It included an extensive Postscript at the end of the book. The original book was published in 1962, the Second edition was published in 1970. It is somewhat surprising that a treatise such as this would get a second edition so quickly, it indicates that the content of the book is considered to be important enough and had elicited sufficient interest to warrant the second edition. The postscript by Kuhn is his opportunity to address his critics and clarify what he thought needed to be clarified. It is an interesting juxtaposition of his thoughts, a scant eight years apart.

Since the second edition, the third and fourth editions has been published, in 1996 and 2012. The 2012 edition is a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication. Since Thomas S. Kuhn passed away, I suspect that the additions to the fourth edition involve commentaries on the historical significance of Kuhn’s work, there is also a 2020 edition but does not seem to indicate it is a new edition.

I am happy that I finally read this book, a book that can be said to have laid out a framework of scientific advancement in the 20^th century and still have an impact on scientific advancements in the 21st century. It was not an easy read, I read it chapter by chapter, took copious amounts of notes — trying to capture the essence of the abstractions, and then tried to summarize Kuhn’s thoughts in my own words in order to gain better understanding of the powerful ideas.

Book Review-The Club Dumas By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I read a good number of Pérez-Reverte’s books about three decades ago. I kept in my stash of books that I had already read because I enjoyed them so much that I figured I would be re-reading them some day. Two moves and more than thirty years later, it was time. I chose The Club Dumas as the first one I would re-read because I am a fan of The Three Musketeers, which plays a major role in this novel. I did not retain any memories of the plot nor the characters, it was a fresh start. I am a firm believer that every time a book is re-read a fresh and distinct impression on the reader is made since the reader’s perspective and point of view has changed, enough to make new memories and elicit new opinions and feelings. This re-reading campaign is a thought experiment I am conducting on myself to ascertain just how much I had changed in the intervening three decades.

As soon as I started to read, I remembered the beginning and the novel flowed as before. Some of the details were new and surprising.  Pérez-Reverte and his translator was masterful in eliciting in the reader the feeling of  being in the scenes. The technical details of the antique book business and the dives into the rabbit holes of book productions and reproduction were ones that I happily dove into because the story was so well told. I found myself pulled into the story as I followed Luca Corso, the protagonist, through his various adventures.

I had forgotten about the nature of the story and the dips into the supernatural, there were times that I was wondering if I had actually read the book thirty years ago. But I was glued to the story line because the body of the book is a cornucopia of references to classic literary books. The book had my mind spinning and investigating all the references mentioned. It was the best kind of distraction and fakes.  These references kept the plot interesting and the narrative flowing along.

Pérez-Reverte kept two parallel plot lines regarding different books balanced and made the read totally entertaining.

As I understand it, one part of the twin plot lines was used by Roman Polanski in a film titled The Ninth Gate in 1999, I never saw the film but I hear it was very well received, even though Polanski did not follow The Club Dumas very strictly.

Regardless, it was a good read, even though it was not as good as my mind had remembered it. I would recommend it.

Book Review-The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper By Roland Allen

This was a book that, on the surface, would not hook me. Yet, the published book reviews from people I respect tempted me to give it a shot. It was much more than I expected in 20/20 hindsight. I thoroughly enjoyed the history of the simple notebook, its unique history, and the number of intriguing permutations the notebook and  notetaking had manifested throughout human history. The only history not recorded here is whether there was a similar history of Asian notebook tradition that was developed in parallel since Asian language traditions are different from the western ones, that history would certainly be intriguing as well.

The number of diverse stories told in this tome about how the tradition of people writing notes down for personal usage as well as for posterity evolved is proof positive that the need to record our activities, whether it is to remind ourselves or to record for the sake of others that come after us, is strong. An essential undercurrent that I sensed through reading these stories of notetaking people is that they were mostly not motivated by a sense of leaving their legacy; they were, however, more concerned with recording their activities out of a sense of duty to themselves.

The book starts with the very first notebook, an accounting ledger which was created to record the profits and debits of the most mundane but important of human activity: commerce. I must admit that the first few chapters tracking the evolution of the initial accountant’s notebooks were less than exciting, but what kept me going forward were the evolution of the use of notebooks in the home, the history of the zibaldoni, a precursor to the Commonplace Book. I had started keeping my own sets of Commonplace books a few years ago and the history of this practice drew my interest.

The book is full of these distinct little stories about how notetakers, through both necessity and ingenuity, invented the modern version of the notebook for their own needs.

Indeed, this book roughly follows a chronological path of discerning scribes noting their own work and practicing the art of observation assiduously and with discipline in order to directly benefit themselves and indirectly those that follow them. The stories of naturalists, ocean explorers, engineers, scientists, travelers, artists, amongst many others, all noting their observations, summaries, conjectures, and the intricate granularities of their thought process are awe inspiring. The names associated with the stories are both obscure and famous: Leonardo, Newton, Darwin, et, al.

But the stories do not just tell historical vignettes as sideshow entertainment, although they are all very entertaining in their own way. Many of the chapters draw on the inspirational uses that people have deployed their notebooks.

One salient story comes from someone who is working to reconstruct historical global weather patterns through the careful and detailed observations and numerical data accumulated in climate logs throughout history, from ship’s logs to land-based observers. This immense and global  undertaking has allowed climate scientists to accurately create climate models of detail and precision, enough so that they are filling the wide chasms in our understanding of our climactic past.

On a more personal level, there is the practice of  patient diaries, diaries that are kept patiently and carefully by the nurses, doctors, caregivers, families, and many others who were compelled log everything that they deemed important for those patients who were in comas or were unconscious for many reasons. The patients, who awaken from their slumber, treat these books as the history of what they were not able to experience, as a conduit to a past that they did not experience. This was a story that moved me to tears, as the selflessness of the people who put themselves voluntarily to write, in excruciating minute details, of a someone’s journey through the unknown. Sometimes the patients are strangers, sometimes they are loved ones. It is a selfless and generous act of loving one’s fellow human, which is rarely acknowledged, let alone recognized.

Another story that moved me emotionally is about the act of journaling as a form of self-care;  for those who have had devastatingly traumatic experiences in their lives or for those who are experiencing the trials and tribulations of life as it ebbs and flows through time. The story details the psychological studies conducted with those who have used journaling as a means of healing and those who did not use journaling. The journal writers had shown remarkable emotional progress as they have come to understand their experiences and have learned to resolve the legacies of their trauma through just writing down their observations of their emotional inner life. The practice of writing in journals has been shown to be a healing practice, a means for those who choose to write about their traumas in order to understand those events that have happened to them. It aligns with my personal motto, which I learned from a Joan Didion quote: I write to find out what I think; that quote has been my motivation for many years. The practice of writing, whether it is in a journal or in a blog, has served to realign my personal priorities and has helped me lay out my philosophies and guided my instantaneous thoughts constructively as well as healing me of my emotional wounds.

In the concluding chapter, the author delves into the role that the notebook can play in our future; that of an extension of our mind. This was a subject that had fascinated me, as I had come to learn from many contemporary explorers of our evolving thinking and ways of using external means to bolster our cognitive abilities. While my our boxes of notebooks are just beginning to grow, knowing that others have already accumulated an immense and useful collection of notebooks that they use for their personal, professional, emotional, and intellectual growth was quite the motivation to continuing my notetaking habit. I am beginning to benefit from the copious amount of work that I have already done, and I hope to continue to benefit.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper is one of those books that I will permanently keep close to me in my permanent collection of books that I will reach into so that I can constantly be inspired and renewed by its diverse topics, always reminding me the examples of the persistent notetakers that came before me.

 

 

Book Review-Thinking in Systems: A Primer By Donella Meadows

I had worked in companies that supplied the transportation industries, both aviation and automotive industries, which was where I became acquainted with the idea of systems engineering. There was also a school of Industrial and Systems Engineering at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I was too distracted by my gradual studies to pay any attention to what they were doing at the time. I was curious but never curious enough to dig into the granularities of the idea of systems thinking until later in my engineering career, when I organized a technical session in a conference, the topic was an introductory session on systems engineering. That experience piqued my interest, which is how I came to possess this book by Donella Meadows. It was recommended to me by people in the systems engineering area as a starting point to trying to understand what the idea of systems thinking.

The book sat atop of my To Be Read list until I finally got around to it.  While the book was indeed an excellent primer for someone who is a complete neophyte in the area, the book also left much to be desired. At this point I am not sure whether it is the explanation in the book, my own lack of understanding of the foundations of the area, or whether I was just assuming too much about the subject which left me grasping.

The author split the seven chapters into three parts. Part 1 defines the underlying structures, foundational beliefs, and behavior of systems. Part 2 Digs into the insights from the author’s work in the area, giving us behind the curtains views on what the author believes to be the key insights that she had internalized in her years of practice as a systems thinker, as well as the common pitfalls and false steps that system thinkers tend to fall into in their practice. The author also appeals to our curiosity when she tries to sell the readers on how the pitfalls and false steps can be turned into advantages. Finally, Part 3 is where the author lists the tactical points in a system view where intervention into the system can be made, where the systems thinker can actuate some change by applying leverage to change the trajectory of the system. The last chapter is the sales pitch, this is the chapter where the author makes the argument that if we were perspicacious about the world around us, we can become prescient about how the world will behave if we analogized all that we know to a system, and thinking in systems will clarify how we understand and perceive the world around us.

As an electrical engineer, one of my great downfalls occurred when I was preparing for my doctoral qualifying exams. I failed because my theses is based on the theory and practice automatic control systems. My committee allowed me to bone up on the subject and retake the exam. I made it my mission to understand the subject and I passed the exam the second time around.  Thus, automatic controls concepts, theories, and practice has been at the center of my applied engineering career; indeed, my world view is informed by the automatic controls structure and framework that I had worked so hard to understand. It is my habit, it is actually more of a reflex, to draw connections between whatever I am working on, technical or not, in automatic controls terms. It is therefore natural that I drew the analogy between amorphous and deliberately ambiguous systems thinking concepts that I had read about in this book and the technical and mathematical automatic controls ideas that have become part of my procedural thinking.

After having read Part 1 of this book, it became obvious to me that the idea of system thinking is based on the feedback control paradigm from automatic controls, whether it was obvious to anyone else or not. The ideas presented in the book of stocks, flows, and block diagrams loaned themselves readily to the concepts that are in my mind, which made me jump into analogy mode. The ideas of stabilizing feedback and reinforcing feedback became negative and positive feedback loops. The ideas presented in the book about the importance of time delays became time constants that are inherent to automatic control systems. The descriptions of the intrinsic nonlinearities in systems parallels nicely with how I understand the coupled system plants are modelled in automatic controls. The idea of self-organizing systems is indeed what automatic controls designers seek to do on a local scale with adaptive controls, amongst numerous other  techniques.

After I discovered that the recognized originator of the precursor to Systems Engineering and  Systems Dynamics, was  Jay W. Forrester (Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, 1961), (Forrester, Principles of Systems, 1968), an electrical engineer who had worked on the magnetic core memories, I was more convinced than ever that Forrester had taken the strict and mathematical practice of designing automatic controllers and eased the technical constraints to the ideas used in automatic controls so that can be analogized and applied to creating a perspective that is used to make sense of reality through the lenses of engineering controls theory. Indeed, that is the framework and perspective that I have taken towards learning about system thinking, taking advantage of my existing knowledge and using its heuristics to gain understanding of systems engineering.

My idea of using my prior knowledge in automatic controls fell apart somewhat as I read further into this book. There were major gaps in the analogy that I was drawing between system thinking and automatic controls. In consulting with some people, they pointed out that the basis of automatic control systems is assuming linear behavior, which is not true, nonlinear systems are a very large part of automatic controls writ large. We use techniques to treat nonlinear systems as point wise linearized to simplify the mathematics or we use piecewise linear models, once again to simplify the mathematics, or we go through complicated nonlinear solution methods to solve nonlinear systems.

The author also staked a claim in the book that while engineering controls places prediction and control at the center of its focus, system engineering does not. I can accept that paradigm, but I am confused as to how the system engineers define and identify what they mean as systems? More importantly, since they place such a premium of the value of feedback paths — as they rightly should — how do they identify the feedback loops in the amorphous and ambiguous “plant” or system? One of the lessons I garnered from automatic controls education is that the best laid plans with regard to the controls are often obliterated by the unmodeled dynamics that are hidden and they are always the nasty surprises when they are inadvertently excited by an input. Many test pilots have given their lives because they were flying airplanes that did not respond to calculated controls that failed to take into account the unknown dynamics.

In reading the chapter on traps and pitfalls for system thinking, and the chapter on points of intervention for systems, the idea struck me that both chapters, while valuable, seem to consist of heuristics and ad hoc solutions and observations. They are tools that can be used to resolve issues in designing or resolving system behavior, they are not systematically consistent solutions, which means that there is a possibility that their use might also introduce undesirable bahviors. This is the point where I realized that the author is serious about abandoning the prediction and control purpose of automatic controls. The idea here is to design and identify the system in a piecewise and progressive fashion so that the designers do not fall into the trap of creating system designs based on ever changing system parameters in a model. The system can never be modelled for all time, it is always evolving, which makes sense but quite disconcerting for the controls engineer in me.

Finally, I am curious to understand how Forrester and the systems engineering colleagues went from point A to point B, how the ideas of automatic controls evolved into the systems thinking that Meadows is writing about. I am quite curious, and I would appreciate any advice or resources that I can consult with in order to find a path to those answers. In addition, I wonder if the later concepts that have become integrated into automatic controls have been similarly evolved and broadened into systems engineering; ideas about stability, adaptation, controllability, and observability since Forrester published his work in the 1960’s.

This was a very readable, concise, and well written book. It serves as a good introduction to the idea of system thinking. Unfortunately, it raised more questions in my mind than it answered, although it could be interpreted as being a fortunate event, since it will allow me to dig further into the granularities.

References

Forrester, J. W. (1961). Industrial Dynamics. Waltham MA: Pegasus Communications.

Forrester, J. W. (1968). Principles of Systems. Waltham MA: Pegassus Communications.

 

 

 

Book Review-The Geography of Genius By Eric Weiner

 I became aware of this book when I was reading a list of  Bill Walton’s favorite books after his passing, this title popped off the page. I have been reading and learning about genius and its place in our culture recently and this title had a unique spin on the idea of genius, and what idea means in human consciousness. The idea that a place, at a given time, can play a role in creating a hothouse for original thinkers that nurtures an environment that is conducive to growing creativity seemed intriguing to me.

I had previously read and enjoyed  Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert S. Root-Bernstein (Author), and Michele M. Root-Bernstein. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/01/book-review-sparks-of-genius-by-robert.html Which delved into the kind thinking tools that are employed by creative people as well as the changes in perspective these people employ to open their imagination. I used that reading experience as preparation in anticipation of this reading experience. The central topics are different for the two books, as this book is focused on the seven cities/locations had experienced a golden age of creativity and innovative thinking, writ large as the author had identified: Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley. Vienna had two chapters devoted to it as the golden ages happened at different times and the Viennese golden ages were focused on different areas of genius. The order of the cities roughly follows chronological order.

The author travelled to these cities, stayed there for an extended period of time, met and interviewed people in those cities who are knowledgeable about the histories of the cities as well as the people who created those golden ages. Since the author is a travel writer, his descriptions of the visits to these cities play a key role in his narrative and are a major source of reading enjoyment. His sense of how to document history as well as his ability to spin a yarn all contributed to a most entertaining narrative.

The most important part of the very enjoyable narrative is the author’s ability to stay with the main theme of his mission, which is to find out what qualities each of these cities had that made their golden age possible, the salient reasons why it happened to these cities and not others. A particularly helpful technique that the author uses is to continuously reiterates salient points that he made in the previous chapter, this helps bind the new narrative with the older narrative. It reminds the readers of what they had read previously, it helps the reader  synthesize the contexts of the idea with each new city, to integrate the ideas in their thoughts, and to help the reader compare and contrast the different manifestations of those ideas while never losing the  different flavors  of the concept which are solely attributable to a specific city.

A case in point is his focus on the social aspects of each city and how the social life feeds the creative spirit of the city. Places like: the Agora of Athens, the Hangzhou West Lake, the piazzas of Florence, the clubs of Edinburgh, the addas of Calcutta, the Café’s of Vienna, and so on. The places where people can meet, converse, and argue freely; be seriously challenged in a public setting to properly test their ideas; have an honest exchange of ideas without residual ill will, all under an umbrella of civility. The unique feature present in all the cities is that the group interaction never devolves into groupthink, which is what usually happens in modern day brainstorming sessions. There are many ground rules which make these social group interaction successful, the main difference is that the conversation is not sharply focused on specific subjects and that the purpose of the social interaction is quite dispersed and amorphous, which allows for the participants range broadly or deeply, as they please; whereas the modern day brainstorming sessions are set up for being useless because they are usually convened by people with an agenda to keep the subject narrow and focused. The social interactions described by the author are rarely convened by authorities or people with specific agenda, it is a free flowing free for all about everything and nothing at the same time.

This is just one example of the author’s writing expertise that draws the reader in, as he clearly integrates the common factors from all the cities to give us broad yet well-thought-out conclusions. It was all I could do to keep track of the salient points because there are so many of them. His various impressions about these cities reinforced the broad general observations that he made about the salient elements that caused the creative tensions that brought out the possibilities for each city to have a golden age of creativity.

It was obvious very early on in my reading that if these salient factors that are existent in these cities were implemented artificially in a generic city, golden ages of creativity wouldn’t necessarily blossom in those cities; correlation does not equal causation. I  recognize that these factors the author identified are the serendipitous results of the meeting of minds, those factors, and quite a bit of luck. However, it is always interesting to find out about the intangible factors that serve to incubate a vast amount of intellectual thought from seemingly disparate groups of people who are brought together by circumstance to a geographic location.

I so enjoyed Eric Weiner’s ability to aggregate ideas, his way with words, and his ability to communicate the key lessons from the history that he is writing about that I had purchased a few of his other books to add to my already teetering TBR pile.