Newsletter Archive

This August marks two meaningful milestones – one year of Becoming Polymathic and a completed first draft of my novel Forward, A Madison Story, which was finished on Wednesday, August 7, 2024. By no means are these ventures complete, but as I’ve stated previously, it’s important to reflect upon these intermittent markers to not lose…

If you were to type the title of this piece into a search engine, the results would be a series of triggered bloggers and columnists bloviating about how the cost of a four-year degree has made it undesirable. I’m not here to further disturb them; that topic is an entire history in of itself. I’m…

Writing is exploring. Sometimes it’s easy and predictable, sometimes it’s misguided and unsuccessful, and sometimes, rarely, it’s unexpectedly fruitful. This week’s piece falls under that last category. What started as an article about celebrity obsession saved to my bookmarks last year has evolved into a deep dive into parasocial interactions, vagal tone, and how modern…

Like many of you, I took a break the past few weeks. Though not much was produced, it was far from unproductive. In fact, these times often yield many great ideas for current and future pursuits, and this break was no exception. During idea generation periods, it’s important to not discriminate where inspiration comes from;…

The fifth and final edition of the History of Time series begins a mere decade after the International Meridian Conference. Little did they know at the time, but the contributions of Henri Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie, and Ernest Rutherford to the discovery of radioactivity would set the stage for the final standardization of our…

In contrast to the History of Time Series’ first four parts, this installment will only cover 200 years. We begin in the year 1676 with the first efforts to standardize global time. Greenwich and Global Time After some effective persuasion from John Flamsteed, King Charles II initiated construction of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, completing it…

In past pieces we’ve demonstrated the iterative nature of human evolution; the notion it is not our ideas which constrain our advancement, but rather the limitations of existing technology. The adoption of the mechanical clock, the focus of this History of Time piece, is consistent with this idea. The Iterative Evolution of Material and Water…

We left off last week’s piece at five million, or 0.005 billion years ago when the first human ancestors appeared. Then, we did hypothetical math using collectively adopted timekeeping units to demonstrate the enormity of deep time. This week, we jump forward another 4.998 million, or 0.004998 billion, years to the year 2000 BCE. This…

A common “ism” I’ve adopted in my adulthood is “at the highest level”; and by adulthood, I mean when I took my first consulting job. The hyperbolic variation whose usage has increased recently is “at the highest of high levels”. Those who’ve read Becoming Polymathic for a while are probably fed up with these two…

Time perception is possibly the most important function our brain performs. It’s an action which without, society would not function with any order. Time dictates how long we’re required to work, how long industrial processes take to manufacture essential items, and, most importantly, how early you need to leave to beat traffic and enjoy happy…