Do all you can
with
what you have,
In
the time that you have,
In
the place you are.
Nkosi Johnson
The structure and the mode of
distribution for this version of the State of the Pete has changed a bit this
year. Since I have been working on my blog, the one I have supposedly kept for
over thirteen years, I decided to put the State of the Pete on here so that I
don’t have to haphazardously bombard people with PDF files. I am also not
writing it in LaTex, which started last year. Finally, I have separated my
State of the Pete from the State of the Pete’s Commentaries into two documents.
The two put together has become a very cumbersome essay, and I am quite sure
some people would prefer not to be brought down by my commentary and cynicism
during the holiday season, while others enjoy watching me vent my spleen in public. Regardless, both
letters are on the blog, but in separate articles. So, if you feel up to it, go take the red pill. Finally, in a shameless play
for attention, I would appreciate it if you all would follow the blog on the
page so that I kind of know who is reading the blog. Molto Grazie.
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 and it has evolved into these overly
long tomes. It has become more than just
a letter of update, it is a snapshot of my mind for the year. I recently read
this fitting quote: ”I write to find out what I think”, so this exercise has
been the means for me to gather my disjoint thoughts and summarize the year, as
most humans are wont to do this time of the year.
So here we go.
Hello friends,
A big virtual bear hug for everyone. As we navigate our way through
this extraordinary year of travails and challenges, we need bear hugs more than
ever; the ultimate insult is that we really
can’t bear hug, or hug for that matter. Needless to say, as with everyone else,
I am happy to see the door smack 2020’s butt as it exits. 2020 has accrued
uncountably many negative events, I keep wishing desperately that this were a
bad nightmare from which I will hopefully awaken. No such luck so far.
My mother and I are still living here in rural Ohio. In
addition to the litany of disasters that befallen everyone worldwide, we had also
experienced one major upheaval that has thrown our lives into chaos. My mother fell
at home on the last week of July. She had fractured her pelvis in two places. Fortunately,
the breaks were clean, and the orthopedic surgeon decided against surgery for
her 95-year-old body. She is now staying in a rehabilitation facility that is within a ten-minute
drive from home, where she is still convalescing while also being quarantined
from COVID-19. I was able to talk to her
by phone as I stood outside of her window during the initial few months, but she
has been moved to a private room in mid-October and the windows for that room faces an inner courtyard and not the outside yard,
so I only see her occasionally. We would set a time and she would walk herself
out on her wheelchair so that we can see each other in the foyer of the
facility. I am not allowed to enter the facility because of precautions brought
on by COVID-19.
As of December, her pelvis has healed; even though she was
scheduled to come home in mid-October, she still felt unsure of her gait and her
ability to navigate our little house. We made the difficult decision to keep
her in the rehabilitation facility until she gets stronger, hoping that her
confidence will rise with her strength. I believe that it was a good decision.
The new timetable is to bring her home in mid-January. One fortuitous
unintended consequence of her stay in the rehabilitation facility is that because
she is staying in the facility, she just received a vaccine shot for COVID-19
on the last week of December 2020. Our timetable thus revolves around the
timing of the vaccine shot.
Our interaction with the Medicare system has been
satisfactory. The bills have been paid, substantial bills; the rest have been
paid by the Medicare supplement that my parents had bought many years ago. Of
course, on the day that Medicare decided that mom is well enough to leave in
mid-October, all the cost reverted to us. All I can say it: I am a big
cheerleader for Universal Healthcare. It is this up close and personal view of
the American healthcare system that threw me unreservedly towards a single
payer system, being one of those who are
edging inexorably towards old age certainly enforced my conviction.
As for mom, she hates the food at the facility, they were
worried about her weight as it dropped quickly, yet when we send her takeout
Chinese food, she complains bitterly about how inconvenient it is for her to
deal with the intrusion on her routine, so I have stopped trying to give her additional
taste treats, although she doesn’t really complain that much when I drop off
steamed chicken feet dim sum. I am taking that as a hint.
In addition to her fall, mom has had a very bad 2020. She
had lost two of her own younger sisters in China this year, and she lost her
bestest friend since childhood in July. Aunt June has been a part of our family,
and we as a part of her family, ever since I can remember. She and mom have
been as close, if not closer, than sisters. They went to grade school together
and their lives were intertwined since before the marriages and children came
along. They were there for each other during each other’s best and worst times.
I consider Aunt June my other mom and I consider her daughters as my sister. It
was particularly heart wrenching to watch her slowly let go of life over the
last week of her life. Mom was already in the rehab center, so she was unable
to reach out to say goodbye to her best lifelong friend. I was crushed, but mom
seemed to have handled the sadness with stoicism. I marvel at my mother.
On my personal front, far too many people had succumbed in
2020. Some due to COVID, most did not. One person that I will miss is Dr. Dale Ray, the graduate coordinator at the
School of ECE when I first entered Georgia Tech. He was the gatekeeper for all
the gradual students. He was very straight forward administrator. He was the
one who had to help me clean up the messes I made of my graduate career, and he
did it with efficiency, but he was never unkind, even as I messed up. Two
stories that comes to mind is that he always typed his own letters to the
graduate students or to the faculty, he always added DCR:mtf in the place where
the typist initials are required in the body of the letter. MTF was short for
My Two Finger. The second story involves my finding out that he had an office
on the fourth floor of the Van Leer building, I was up there waiting for my
advisor when I spied him and his office. The office was a large one and the
most impressive part was that every square foot of the office was covered with
books, folders, notebooks, and general clutter. The only exposed part of the
floor was a narrow trail that led from
the door to a desk at the end of the office where Dr. Ray sat, ruminating. I
decided that he wasn’t such a bad guy after all after witnessing that, it seems
we were similar with regard to the issue of organization and tidiness. Long
after I graduated from Tech, we somehow became Facebook friends, and I would
like to think that we became real friends. He always made comments on my
postings and made digs at some of my religious comments, as he is a deeply
religious man. He passed away a few days past Christmas after having suffered a
stroke around Thanksgiving and then was diagnosed to have COVID. He passed away
alone in the COVID ward in Grady Memorial Hospital, without his dear wife
Barbara and family by his side.
I spent these last months, as with everyone else in the
world, hunkered down at home. The unintended consequence of being a functional
introvert is that the lockdown has not affected my routines significantly. My
days have been uneventful and pleasant because it is the kind of life I am used
to; I did my teaching and my IEEE work at home, either in the basement or on
the dining room table. I had resurrected my stereo system, so I am
rediscovering much of my musical collection.
Damn, I had really good taste when I was young! My lectures at the University of Dayton were
all on Zoom, even though I went in to lecture in a room for a couple of months.
As it happened, my in-class students would rather listen to me talk on Zoom,
and since I had to broadcast these lectures on Zoom, anyway, they all took the stay-at-home
option most of the time. It wasn’t until I had to lecture to an empty room for
the third time that I finally got it, so I cancelled all live in-person
lectures.
I will admit that there have been a few moments of angst and
being affected by the enforced solitude, but my friends have generously talked
me through the morass of emotional over-reaction due to a dearth of social
contact, some have simply told me to pull my head out of my butt get over it.
Each tactic, when applied in a timely and appropriate manner helped immensely.
The two biggest destabilizing influences were the instability associated with
the November elections and my overactive imagination playing tricks on me. The
first resolved itself in favor of my preference, and the other involved my
learning to live in the moment rather than speculating and talking myself into
imaginary scenarios. Being mindful is as advertised. I want to thank all my
friends who had sensed my struggles and have reached out to make sure I was right
in the head. Outside of the fact that I was rarely, if ever, right in the head
to start, I thank you sincerely for your help. I am one of the stubborn ones
who doesn’t know when to ask for help, but through persistent phone calls, text
messages, and Whatsapp messages, they got me right in the head. I am looking
forward to passing the love forward, or reciprocating in kind if you want when
you want.
I have not been completely slothful this year, I still work
for my IEEE Industry Application Society as the paper submission portal
administrator, I taught a class: Introduction to Electrical Energy at the
University of Dayton, I am the chair of the IEEE Smart Grid, and by virtue of
that last volunteer position I was rewarded with yet another time-consuming voluntary
position of Educator in Chief for Smart Grid for the IEEE ad hoc Lifelong
Learning Committee. Note that the importance of the position is inversely
related to how important the title sounds.
The adjunct teaching gig I have had for a few years, teaching
the same class in the Fall. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, the
pandemic threw in a few wrinkles. University of Dayton went full on virtual in
the Spring. I wasn’t teaching then, thankfully; but in talking to some of the
faculty who did, it was rescued from being total chaos because UD had the
foresight to create an eLearning office many years ago. While the transition,
in three days, wasn’t completely smooth, it was much better than it could have
been. UD thus created websites in the Learning Management Centers for each
course and nicely forced us all to get online and create our course template
and lesson plans online for the Fall. I honestly believe that this saved my fat
butt from certain disaster. The course went relatively smoothly although it
wasn’t planned efficiently or effectively. I will be making changes in how I
will teach this class next semester. I learned quite a bit about online
teaching from the experience. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
As most of you know, my other outlet for my pedagogical nature
has been coaching junior volleyball, that season became irreparably disrupted
because of the pandemic. I had the only 17’s team, an important age because
many of these players are still looking for a playing opportunity in college.
My team was pretty loaded with talent if height challenged overall. We were ironing out the early season kinks and
just when we all thought we can hit reset on the season and start anew, COVID
hit. We managed a few Zoom sessions as we stayed away from the gym, working
productively with my friend, the Mental Game Guru Dan Mickle, on the mental
game. We had to eventually pull the plug
on the season as all our tournaments got cancelled. It was a disappointment for
the players and the teams, but for me, it was an opportunity and a coaching
experience denied. As we wrapped up the season, the hurt and disappointment in
my player’s voices cut at me. They still had their high school seasons to play
but the chance to create memories with this particular group of players had been
denied.
The annual geekfest that I have always participated in was
converted to a virtual conference in a period of three months. The conference
was supposed to be held in the city of Detroit during late September, we held
the virtual conference at the same time block. The result was not as dire as we
all had expected. We were able to meet up synchronously and asynchronously and
accomplish everything that we would usually accomplish, except for the most important
part: the social and fellowship portion of the conference, which is the raison
d’être
for the conference in everyone’s minds. Since we are practical engineers, we
made do with what was presented to us, we improvised, adapted, and overcame,
but we did all kvetch mightily. I chaired a panel session on fear of failure in
the engineering realm and organized another session on System Engineering.
The annual volleyball coach’s convention was also held
virtually. I was not sure about the turnout seeing as many colleges had started
to cut budgets, and worst of all, cutting programs. I wondered about whether
the coaches were willing or able to pay the registration fees for the virtual
conference since so many colleges were not going to pay as they had before. I
was also thinking about the number of coaches I know who are getting out of the
coaching game, taking the pandemic as a sign to move on from their passions.
The American Volleyball Coaches Association pulled out all
the stops and gathered a stellar group of presenters to present at many
outstanding sessions, while also promising
extraordinary access to many famous coaches, but if you can’t pay, you
can’t pay. I hope that the financial impact does not affect the organization.
2020
being the year that it was, I don’t want to dwell on all the negatives that had
happened this year, that would be the easy way. To be honest, the optimists in
me stepped into the void more often than not this year. Partly because it had
to step up or else I would have collapsed into a despondent heap of sobbing
protoplasm; and partly because I have overcome some of my inborn cynicism. As
Alain De Botton so sagely observed: “Cynics are merely idealists with
unusually high standards.” I want to believe I am one of those idealists,
but I have been able to tamper my expectations and ameliorated my standards to
more reachable dimensions because I had come to realize that, to paraphrase Dr.
Bob Rotella: “Life is not a game of perfect.”
One of the best positives that I derived comes from my
teaching experience at University of Dayton. My student’s altruism and idealism have surprised and inspired
me. Their resolute devotion to making this world better than they encountered
it was initially stunning to my cynical soul, but then I realized that their
agenda is pretty simple and pure: they sincerely believed that they will make a
difference in a world where we, their elders, have mucked things up. I told
them of my admiration of their pureness of purpose and altruism in class during
a lecture and they seemed to be stunned
by my admission because the millennials are gun shy about the message that
their elders have sent them. It was interesting to observe because they all
seemed to relax their countenance considerably as our discussions became less
confrontational. This class is made up of seniors, even though it is a junior
level elective. My class covers the existing electric energy system: how we
generate electric power, how we have operated the complex national grid, how this business mode has managed to serve
needs of the consumer reliably and economically. The major area of discussion
is the generation technology as we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of
the traditional hydro, thermal, and nuclear technologies. We delved into the
sustainable energy sources like solar, wind, fuel cell, and micro-hydro. We also
discussed the future, like the Smart Grid and other new technologies that are
becoming reality.
When I was an undergrad, somewhere in the Pleistocene era,
the motivation of my contemporaries was to go for the brass ring, i.e. to get a
well-paying job. We weren’t complete Philistines, we also had our youthful
moments of idealism, but eventually our
idealism took a distant second place to our survival instincts, which partially
explains why we find our society in the present
predicament. I am not naïve enough to believe that all of my millennial
students will somehow manage to maintain their idealism throughout their lifetime,
especially since there are no guarantees that they would sustain this idealism
through their first year working in the real world, particularly in an economy
that we are witnessing right now. But, and that is a pretty large BUT for me to
use; in my observation of their motivation and their mindset, I have confidence
that many of them will retain much more of their idealism than my
generation. These students have put
their skins in the game, they are committed to a better world, one where global
warming is not only a reality but a direct challenge to their generation. It is
interesting that one of the lessons that I preach to them is the pragmatic
realities of all the technologies that we are using or will use in our future, they
seem undaunted by the realities that I showed them. Indeed, they are still
resolute in doing the right thing. As one of the more outspoken student said to
me at the end of the semester: “You just blew up my assumptions about our
energy future, but that’s not going to stop me.” I was heartened by his boast,
and quietly hoping that he holds true to his convictions. This is #WhyITeach.
One of the unintended positive consequences that happened during
the pandemic in Dayton is that I met the acquaintance of a group of friends
that stimulates my need for knowledge and provided intelligent conversations.
They also helped challenge my biases and beliefs, our coffee klatch is intense
and challenging. It all started as a part of my daily routine on the days that
I teach. I go to my favorite coffee shop in Dayton to get my coffee, I usually stay
in the coffee shop to read, write, spilling my guts to my journal, and try to
be productive before the beginning of my class. In my foray into the downtown
coffee shop scene, I met these three men of varying backgrounds, temperament,
and interests.
One was the president of the Greater Dayton Rowing Club; he
has not succeeded in getting my fat ass into a boat, even though he tried. Jim
is a self-made man, a plain talking, tough acting eighty something who puts up
with no BS. Dennis was the dean of the University of Dayton law school, now
retired; he had written a book based on the true-life adventures of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur nuns during the second
world war in Belgium. He is also a first-class history buff, and of course a
skilled and insightful debater. The third man, Dan, works at the Wright
Patterson Air Force Base, working on databases and the complicated processes
that makes the base run. He is also one of the best problem solvers I know, it
shames me to hear him talk about his trouble shooting and problem-solving
prowess, always practical, and always highly creative, he is a hundred times
the engineer than I am. We started out just chatting during our time at the
coffee shop, but when the shop stopped indoor service because of the pandemic,
we started sitting outside in picnic tables and chatted some more: The coffee
klatch became a ritual for us, we would
sit and converse for about ninety minutes to two hours. The topics would range
all over the map. They would have to listen to me talking about volleyball,
learning theory, the books I am reading, or electrical engineering. The amazing
part is that they seemed to enjoy it. As the weather became colder, we would
congregate in Dennis’ garage after we collected our coffees and go at it.
Dennis even gave the group a name: The Garage Gang. The reason we met in the
garage is that this was the only place where we can be socially distanced, with
the garage door open to ensure some air flow.
Truthfully, these meetings saved my sanity to a large degree as I was
isolating myself voluntarily from most social interactions. It made me converse
with real people other than the voices inside my head.
As a result of the conversations, I was asked to take part
in the mock trial preparation for the University of Dayton team, Dennis was the
advisor for the team. I played the expert witness role in their preparation.
The technical details were not difficult to grasp, but I was asked to be a
strong witness during a trial. It was great fun, I put on my Hans Püttgen (my PhD advisor,
for those who know him) mien, and toyed with the poor law students. Another new
experience and a good one at that. I have been asked to be the witness this
year as well, except this time I am to play a PhD electrical engineer
specializing in electric power. I guess I can fake it.
My volleyball life was also revived as our club decided to
venture into the wild unknowns that awaits us in the club volleyball scene.
Many larger club tournaments have changed the nature of their existence,
accommodating the demands of social distancing and safety procedures. I am
coaching a region 16’s team this year in deference to my need to stay local to
take care of my mom. This is yet another challenge that I am looking forward to
tackling. It will make me polish and refine my teaching and coaching skills as
well as putting my coaching beliefs and philosophy to the test. The team seems
to be a group of introverts, coupled with an introvert coach, that should be
interesting.
I decided to restart my long dormant blog during my extended
stay at home. It really is not a restart, I had always maintained the blog, but
I rarely posted, mainly because I was too distracted. As I sat home listlessly
awaiting for inspiration to creep up on me, it hit me with Thor’s Hammer
instead. I usually write the occasional book reviews with short essays on
topics that grabbed my wandering attention, but the forced idleness causes the
writing to burst forth, I am not sure if any of it is any good, or if it is
reaching hearts and minds, but I must at least try. I also need the practice.
This annual missive to my friends is a part of the reason
why I felt a certain level of competence in writing. So it is that I also thought that I needed to work on practicing
writing. I am writing mostly in essay form as I had studied the essay form many
years ago. Another source of motivation comes from reading about Michel De Montaigne’s essay
writing in Sarah Bakewell’s book
I posted 40 essays in 2020, a modest improvement over the 25
essays I wrote in 2019. A lot of essays about volleyball of course, but some
observations and some book reviews. I am enjoying the exercise and I am sensing
that the exercise is working: I have become clearer in my thinking. Here is the link to the blog itself, feel free
to peruse at your leisure and do let me know if I am just full of myself. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/
One result of the enforced isolation is that I eventually
got around to using the Neflix and paying for Disney+. Disney+ is of course to
watch Hamilton, which was a transcendent experience. I have always been a
history nut; while I knew the story between Hamilton and Burr through my AP US
History class (Thanks Mr. Holsteen!), I was not familiar with the minutiae of the revolutionary war. I do understand that
dramatic license was taken with the story in order to present a unified play, I
was still educated.
I rarely binge watch anything on Netflix, other than shows
about chefs and travel. One particular favorite this year was Midnight Diner,
a not so recent Japanese television series about a diner that opens at
midnight, serving the denizens of the night. Each show was around 30 minutes
long and focused on the people who lived on the fringes of normal society and
behaved on the fringes of acceptable behavior. I believe I mentioned it before,
there are two series on Netflix and both are worthy of a watch. https://www.netflix.com/title/80113037
On the recommendation of my friend Becky, I decided to binge
watch the Queen’s Gambit. It is apparently all the rage this year. It
also seems to have spurred many girls and women to take up the challenge of
playing chess, which is always a good development. I thoroughly enjoyed the
series, the story telling, and the ethos created by the film making. I, of
course, was able to retrieve the title of the mathematics PhD thesis of the main
protagonist’s mother: “Monomial Representation and Symmetric Presentation”, I
have no idea what the complete means but the two parts of the title does mean
something in group theory, a subject that I had always had interest in
studying. And no I have not delved deeply into it.
I did not pursue the chess angle at all. I don’t know why.
Another side dabble I indulged in was my long-time interest
in origami. I did fold a few things in the extended stay at home, nothing
extensive, just followed directions on a few designs, most in modular origami.
One of my favorite finds on the intraweb is the daily Letters
from an American https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
from Heather Cox Richardson. She is a history professor at Boston College and her
specialization is on political history. She had inadvertently tapped into an
audience that was hungry for news content balanced with a historical
perspective when she started writing about the background of the Mueller
investigation and the Ukrainian connection. Her letters have been focused on
the present administration and their shenanigans, but she broadened quickly
into many topics. Here is a NYT article on her accidental fame. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
She saved my sanity during the long political season by telling
stories from history that paralleled the present narrative. She stoked my long-time
inner love of political history and she made history come alive, treating history
as something more than a recitation of facts. She made history relevant in the
face of the present crisis. I am not alone in that regard; she has a little
more than a million followers on Facebook and 350,000 people directly receive
her email. A million followers, on written articles about history and current
events. Astounding.
As a sidenote, one of the books I have been reading by Nicholas
Carr
Another positive and sanity preserving product resulting
from the extended social isolation has been the tongue in cheek yet very real Some
Good News site on YouTube. The SGN “Network” is the brainchild of John Krasinski
from The Office fame. He initially produced one every week, having
famous people dropping in casually while also highlighting all that is good
that has gone on during the shutdown. He, in the best sense of populism, shed
light on the great things that we, the regular folks, have been doing to keep
the kindness and generosity flowing. It is a marvel if you have not seen it.
Here is another burden on your cognitive load. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOe_y6KKvS3PdIfb9q9pGug
As I said, I took some of my audio equipment to be fixed. It
was astounding to me that there was only one shop that still exists to fix high
fidelity equipment in a town that is the
size of Dayton; people have moved on to lower bandwidth musical equipment for
the convenience. The guy who owns the shop is a guy who is about a decade older
than I am and we had a good old time talking about the bands that we had seen
and the various piece of high-fidelity audio equipment that he had worked on.
He had work on a number of Nakamichi Dragons, that was a great conversation.
Indeed, my own listening habits have changed, but I have not
given up on my vinyl records and CDs. One of the joys of rediscovery came when
I found some old mix tapes in boxes buried in my basement, I was able to get my
cassette deck working and relive my mix tape days.
I am not a complete luddite, I do stream, on a limited
basis. I listen to music on my laptop through the SiriusXM app and a couple of
other streaming services. Mostly I listen to the usual suspects: Classic Vinyl,
E Street Radio, Deep Tracks, Tom Petty Radio, etc. I start the morning with
Symphony Hall, a gentle awakening to the day, and I migrate to the jazz and
soft jazz stations. I still change channels when Kenny G comes on.
We had lost so many musicians during the pandemic, the one
that struck the hardest personally was the passing of John Prine. He was a part
of memories of my undergrad days, Prine and Steve Goodman were both Chicago
based, and they would occasionally gig in Champaign-Urbana. It was a part of
the singer/songwriter wave that caught me in its wake. John Prine wrote some
very insightful and painful lyrics, which was kind of rare for that time. He
was also hilariously irreverent, which made him immensely popular in a college
town. The fact that his death was preventable if someone competent was the
leader of the country make me boil with anger. Indeed, 330,000 people might
still be alive if the 2016 election had not been stolen. Of course, life goes
on, but one notable tidbit of news that came out months after Prine’s passing
involved Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires returning their CMA card because the
CMA did not see fit to memorialize Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker during their
award show. Country being country I suppose.
Another favorite is Neal Peart, the drummer for Rush. This one
hit me almost as hard as when Chris Squire passed on in 2015. Both were the
foundation of their bands and both were virtuoso musicians whose influence cuts
across all the corporate radio defined genres.
Eddie Van Halen’s passing was a shocker, even though I never
much cared for the band Van Halen, I too was one of the many teenage boys who
marveled at his guitar pyrotechnics, having played air guitar religiously
during an Eddie Van Halen solo. Of course, all the teenage boys of those days
were so jealous that he married Valerie Bertinelli. Admit it.
Hillard "Sweet Pea" Atkinson was the singer for
Was (Not Was) a band whose short-lived career and recording output blew my mind
in the 1980’s. Snarky and clever lyrics, a big horn sound, and the smooth
vocals of Sweet Pea made me wear out the groove on my copies of Was Not Was vinyl records. My old office mate
Randy turned me on to them.
Julian Bream stood out in my mind because this was the first
classical concert I attended during my undergraduate days. It was in the
Krannert Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Illinois. I had no
idea what I was getting into, I just remembered being mesmerized by the dulcet
tone of his guitar and the simplicity of his stage: it was just him, a chair,
and his little foot stool. He was also the first classical guitarist that I had
seen, and the first non-Spanish classical guitarist I had heard about, where
many of the repertoire was rooted in Spain.
I first heard Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” while
living in Honduras. It was 1972 and that song was the hottest single going. It
was pop-y, hopeful, and tuneful. Of course, we all look at pictures of Johnny
Cash and thought: this can’t be right.
I have been reading a bit while at home. Not as much as I
would like. I indulged in my usual escapist fare: Peter Robinson’s Inspector
Bank’s series, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series, Martin Walker’s Bruno,
Chief of Police series. I had held off on reading more of Camillieri’s
Inspector Montalbano series for some reason and picked up Mauricio De
Giovanni’s Inspector Ricciardi series. The latter is a dark series, to go with
the dark times I suppose. The peculiarity of this police detective, and they
must all have some sort of peculiarity, is that he hears the dead repeating
their last words on earth, and he sets out to solve the mystery of their deaths
and to send their ghosts on their way. Dark enough for you? I found the books
very well written, translated, and plotted. I have stopped reading them for
now, too dark.
On the non-fiction front I have started to divide those
books into various stacks: the compendium stack, the philosophical stack, and the
single subject stack. The compendium stack I can read separate chapters
independently as they are an accumulation of many essays, articles, or
selections from various writers. The philosophical stacks are the most
demanding to read, as I need to pay attention to the minutiae. The single
subject stacks are the ones where I have to be careful and try to read them
frequently or I will lose the thread of the book, these are the books where I
am trying to learn something new.
I have three boxes of books at the foot of my easy chair and
I will read whatever grabs my fancy and read until my short-term (working) memory
is filled with that particular book and then move on. Not particularly
efficient, but I am experimenting with my ability to augment my long-term memory.
This year was the year of dealing with uncertainties, as
such, I read three books dealing with the subject: Ian Stewart’s Do Dice
Play God
If there was one book that inspired me and lifted the black
clouds above my head, it is the book by Francis Su
Stuart Firestein’s Failure on the importance and
meaning of failure in scientific inquiry made a definite impression on me.
Sports? What sports?
Well, that is my life during the pandemic year. Not as
interesting as previous years, but I did manage to keep myself occupied. I am
hoping for a better 2021, although rationally I understand that time keeping by
years is just another human construct and that the uncertainties does not care
that it is a new year. But here is hoping that our mindset, which is indexed to
time, will prevail over the uncertainties that we are coping with.
I wish you all Peace, Health, Good Fortune, and Joy.
Pete
"This is your last chance. After this,
there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in
your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you
stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
The Red Pill:
https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/12/state-of-pete-2020-commentary.html
Works Cited
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live OR A LIfe of
Montaigne. London: Chatto & Windus, an Imprint of Random House, 2010.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., 2010.
Firestein, Stuart. Failure: Why Science Is So
Successful. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Konnikova, Maria. The Biggest Bluff: How I learned
to Pay Attnetion, Master Myself, and Win. London: 4th Estate, 2020.
Spiegelhalter, David. The Art of Statistics:
Learning from Data. London: Pelican Books, 2019.
Stewart, Ian. Do Dice Play God: The Mathematics of
Uncertainty. New York: Profile Books, 2019.
Su, Francis. Mathematics for Human Flourishing.
Yale: Yale University Press, 2020.
