Oluwadi
Investigating the Overlooked
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What
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Analysis
Oluwadi
Investigating the Overlooked
My mother taught literature, and she lived what she taught. She did not only assign the book. She made me look at the life the book was about. She also handed me a computer she could not operate.
Those two facts are the argument of this piece.
I have a hard-science degree and a math minor. I am going to make the liberal arts argument anyway, because I learned it by watching her.
The point of a good education is not the fields. It is the connections between them: multi-fluency, and the habit of synthesis. A discipline is a place to stand. An education is the practice of having stood in more than one. Nothing, wherever it came from, is alone.
The short form says this in under 500 words. This is the full walk: the evidence, the people, what it costs, and where I am likely to be wrong.
An engineer has no stake in the liberal arts. That is why the argument is worth hearing from one.
Abstraction is the great tool of engineering, and it hides the layer beneath it. It fails at the boundary between fields, where the thing you stopped looking at turns out to matter. My degree is in computer engineering, not computer science, and the difference is the point: a pointer bug is a physical fact about a stack, and someone who never looked underneath will not find it. My program taught the layer below the code, the transistors and the gates, and a computer science program typically stops above it. An electrical engineer knows the machine, and a computer scientist writes the code. A computer engineer is trained to do both, and that seam is the one this piece is about.
I also took fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, and, for my math minor, topology. That is not a résumé line. It is the logic of the argument. The physics and the mathematics under one field are the same ones under the next, so a person trained on the layer below can follow what happens in the layer above. Microfluidics exists because some samples are too small for the usual tools. A large sample can be spun in a centrifuge to separate its parts. A very small one, a drop of blood or a few cells, cannot, so the separating has to be done by the flow itself, in channels, and at that scale viscosity and friction decide how the fluid moves, which is physics and mathematics. The biologist or chemist knows what the sample is, and the engineer knows how it moves, and the device does not work without both. A colleague with a doctorate from Rice taught me that, at the lunch table. I can reason about one without ever having held a pipette. It does not make me a chemist or a biologist. The people who were filled in the rest. I had the best teachers, and they came from every field.
For fourteen years I worked at a technology venture firm whose work ran from mapping software to microfluidics, and the work was at the seams between them. It was an odd place, in the tradition of Bell Labs and the Institute for Advanced Study: hire smart people from different fields, let them bounce off one another, and trust that something will come out. The people I worked with there were a biologist, a chemist with a bent toward biology, a materials scientist, an electrical engineer, a computational linguist, a cellular-communications expert and two cybersecurity experts, and they ate lunch together. That table was the seam. The woman who hired me had come up through telecommunications engineering, and she read what I could do, not what was on paper, and later she handed me her title. I was hired as technical staff, and many of those people were my peers. Later I managed a group of disciplines that had nothing to do with computers. That is what the seams look like. I cannot document that work, and the argument does not depend on it. What follows can be checked.
My wife is a mechanical engineer who works on fluids in nuclear plants. In her field an error costs lives, and the work is checked against outcomes every day. She is the test of this argument, because the field tests her, and she and I can talk across our fields for the same reason.
Here is what it looks like at work. An AI rack weighs about 3,000 pounds and draws about 120 kilowatts. Hold those two facts, structure and electricity, and a third appears: the floor. Then the cooling, which needs plumbing, which needs a different kind of building. Then where such buildings already exist: a shipyard, built to carry ships, in a cold place. Then the people who can wire and pipe it, and the money, which is time to power and not the shell. Then the politics of a state pausing large data centers.
No single field asks whether a shipyard town could hold an AI data center. A structural engineer does not price power. An investor does not ask what a floor carries. The question only exists for someone fluent on both sides of each seam.
I sail the Delaware and the coast from Atlantic City to Block Island and Martha's Vineyard. I grew up next to the ocean. I have walked the shipyards at Bath, Philadelphia and Norfolk, and I have worked with the Naval Oceanographic Office as a contractor. I know water, and I know those yards, by work and not abstraction.
For an investor the practical rule is simple. The weak assumption in a plan usually sits at a seam where no one on the team is fluent on both sides. That is where I look first.
A Turing machine reads a symbol, consults its current state, writes a symbol, moves, and changes state. It does not know what came before. History survives only as the state it is in now.
That is also how I remember. Thirty years after reading a book, I keep the feeling. The feeling is the state. The particulars are the tape, and getting them back is work: you go back to the page. A person who confuses the two will tell you, fluently and with confidence, a book that is not the one on the shelf.
The same machine settles a point about credit. The idea that instructions are data, that the program lives in the same store as what it works on, goes back to Turing's 1936 universal machine. The architecture is named for von Neumann, who in 1945 formalized and spread it, after the stored-program design of Eckert and Mauchly was largely complete. Credit the idea to Turing and the name to the man who carried it. Do not hand the whole of it to one of them.
A second lineage runs beside the machine with state. Alonzo Church, working at the same time, built the lambda calculus, in which everything is a function, and Turing showed that the two compute the same things. The two traditions still divide programming. One runs through the languages close to the hardware: assembly, C, the machines that have state. The other runs through the languages where every call is a function: Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, Scala.
I have written in most of the major families. Assembly on three processors (6502, 68000 and x86). C, with K&R still on my desk. Multithreaded C++, in production. Fortran and COBOL. Ruby, with a touch of Python. Haskell, Clojure and Scala. Smalltalk, Lisp and Forth as footnotes. I say "most of the major families" and not "all" because the claim is only worth making if it can be checked.
The lineage has a person at the start who did not live to see it work. Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and then the Analytical Engine. Ada Lovelace, in notes published in 1843, set out a method for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers and saw that it might act on more than numbers. The machine was not built in his day. The metalwork of the time could not hold the tolerances the design needed. The idea came before the hardware, and the hardware needed the century to catch up. In 1990 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling published a novel called The Difference Engine, set in a Victorian England where Babbage's machine had worked.
The programming language Ada is named for her. It was inspired by Pascal among other languages, and it is used where failure is expensive, in avionics and in defense systems. I learned it as a relative of Pascal. By the time I reached college I had read Wirth and read about Ada, so I skipped the introductory class and came in only for the test.
The thread has one more turn that I find hard to leave out. In the early 1990s I wrote the contract and royalty systems at Penguin Books, the royalty system in multithreaded C++. I doubt any of it still runs. The standard biography of Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, is now published in paperback under the Penguin Books imprint. I own a copy. Nothing is alone.
Edwin Abbott's Flatland, published in 1884, is the story of a two-dimensional world. A sphere that passes through it appears as a circle that grows and then shrinks. Its narrator, a Square, is also taken to Lineland, a world of one dimension, and cannot make its king understand that there is a second.
The lesson is about position. One standpoint, however deep, has a horizon, and from inside it you cannot see what you are missing. The way past it is to have stood somewhere else.
That is the second thing breadth gives you, and it is harder to name. Knowing is a position. You understand a thing differently from where you have stood.
My great-grandmother's brother was good with numbers. He worked out that the man who owned the land had been shorting the families who worked it, and he presented the figures. In that place and decade, that was a death sentence for a black man. He was run out. He went north and ran an oil-delivery business.
He was not alone in going north. Millions of African Americans left the South in what is called the Great Migration. And he was not the only family caught in that ledger. Tenant farming and sharecropping held poor white families too, in the same arithmetic, for different reasons. My family's habit, from the farm to the move north, is the same one in every case: look at what is required, and learn it. Show up. Look around. Learn what is necessary.
My mother and my uncle both speak Spanish. They did not study their way to it. They picked up what they needed. I think of that as the whole method.
My examples are people and books, and I want to say plainly that I reach for types, not individuals. The library is vastly wider than the names I pull from it. Any of them is a stand-in for a position.
Method. Socrates asked questions, and Aristotle sorted the answers into kinds. One taught the world how to doubt and the other how to classify. In ninth grade I skipped lunch to sit in the school library, and in that one year I read Les Misérables, Dante's Inferno, Plato's Apology and Aristotle. Each gave the others the context it assumed: Hugo's law with no room for mercy, Dante's justice with a price on every sin, Socrates on trial for questioning a city's answers, and Aristotle sorting what was left. A hard book fails when it stands alone. It works when something around it supplies what it takes for granted, and that year the shelf did. Years later I read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which argues that stories across cultures share one shape: a departure, a descent, a return changed. I already knew the shape. The ninth-grade shelf had taught it to me before I had the name. I did not find the habit in the library. I brought it there from the home of a literature teacher.
Science meeting the state. Bohr and Einstein argued about what physics could know. Einstein signed the 1939 letter to the president that helped start the American bomb. The people who understood most about what the weapon could do were the ones with the least say over whether it was used.
The memoir of the cage. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, 1969.
The poem of fragments. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, 1922, a poem built out of other people's lines.
The novel of the outsider. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger, 1951, narrated by a boy who stands outside everything he is supposed to belong to.
I could have reached for any of the three to say what I wanted to say about positions, and any would have worked. That is the claim. Nothing is alone, so any part of the library connects to any other.
While drafting this piece I credited a famous book to the wrong author. I had the idea right and the name wrong.
I said that Flatland was Eliot's. It was Abbott's. I knew the book, and I knew the feeling of the book, a one-dimensional world and a sphere that cannot be seen. What I did not hold was the label. The feeling and the particulars are two separate things stored in two separate places.
The same thing happened with the stored-program idea. I credited it to von Neumann alone, and the record corrected me.
It is the cheapest and most common failure in the kind of breadth I am arguing for. Breadth runs fast and loose. A false analogy feels exactly like an insight, and a mistaken label feels exactly like a memory. The discipline is simple, and it is not optional: keep the connection and check the label before you publish it.
The people who joined fields were not tidy people, and the record does not let me pretend otherwise.
Turing. In 1936 he described the machine that defined what a computer can compute. In 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency, because of who he loved, and sentenced to a year of hormone treatment. He was found dead on 8 June 1954. The inquest ruled it a suicide, though the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. The British government apologized in 2009 and he was pardoned in 2013.
Oppenheimer. He led the Los Alamos laboratory. A 1954 security hearing ran from 12 April to 6 May. His clearance was revoked by a 2–1 panel vote on 27 May and finalized by the Atomic Energy Commission, 4–1, on 29 June. In 2022 the Secretary of Energy vacated that decision as the product of a flawed process.
Von Neumann, the contrast. He served on the Atomic Energy Commission from 15 March 1955 to 8 February 1957, under President Eisenhower, and on the Manhattan Project developed the mathematics behind the implosion lenses. He is in this section because the same era handled one of its great synthesizers differently than the others. I will not say more than the record does about why.
Hamilton. He was the first Treasury Secretary, from 1789 to 1795. His plan produced the Bank of the United States in 1791. The House voted 34–28 on 26 July 1790 to assume the states' war debts, as part of the Compromise of 1790, and Congress authorized $21.5 million of them. In 1797, when he was accused of misusing public money, he published what is called the Reynolds Pamphlet, admitting an affair in order to prove that the charge of financial wrongdoing was false.
I make one rule from these. The work was true, and the person had troubles, and both are facts, and neither cancels the other. It is the same failure Osparna looks for in overlooked founders: judging someone by the one fact that is easiest to hold against them. Judge the whole. I keep personal detail to the documented record and I do not use verdict words.
Washington, Lincoln and Hamilton sit in my library next to Aristotle and Bohr, because all three had a gift and a constraint, and the story is what each did with the constraint.
This section is my reading, not a sourced finding.
Hamilton, restraint. The easy path in 1797 was to say nothing. He wrote the pamphlet. He chose to be accurate even though it cost him in public, and he knew it would.
Washington, the one who goes home. He served two terms and left office in 1797. His farewell address warned about faction and about foreign entanglements, and Hamilton had a large hand in drafting it. The pattern I read in it: do not be a king. Serve, and go home.
Lincoln, the one who holds. In 1858 he told his party that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In 1863 he dedicated the cemetery at Gettysburg in a speech of about two minutes. The war he fought tore families apart, and the border states fought on both sides of single families. Manassas, the site of two major battles, is within driving distance of where I live, and the ground still has its name. His job was to hold a country that was breaking, and he did it at a cost nobody should call small.
What they share is not temperament. It is restraint, and I mean the active kind, self-command. I was taught early not to talk, and my later work selected for discretion, so I recognize it when I see it. It is a form of skill, and it is the one the three of them used at the point where each had the power to do something else.
I have read the Bible cover to cover, more than once, starting when I was about thirteen. I have read the Quran cover to cover, more than once.
My Torah is in Hebrew with an English translation. My Quran is in Arabic with an English translation. My Bible is the King James. A Catholic Bible is not the same book. It carries more books than mine, and the Lord's Prayer in it ends sooner. The ending in mine, "For thine is the kingdom," is a doxology that later manuscripts add and the earliest do not carry.
The three books share a father in Abraham. The Quran gives Jesus and Mary honored places in its own telling. It calls Jesus a prophet and a messenger, and its word "muslim" means one who submits, which it applies to earlier prophets and to Jesus's disciples. The traditions part ways on who Jesus was. The Quran denies that he is the son of God and denies the crucifixion. The books sit on the same shelf all the same, and I read them that way. I have argued these books with people I consider family, and I have knelt on their prayer rugs.
My mother, a Christian married to a Jew, once met a Muslim kid I had brought home. She gave me a yes or a no, and she never said what she saw. I never asked. That is the test: I trust the measurement and do not need the reasoning. That was Abraham in one house.
Abraham said yes to God at the potential cost of his son, and all three books carry the story. Some verdicts you take on the record of the one who gave them, and I took my mother's.
Each of the three was put together by editors who chose what to keep, and each leaves gaps that the others fill. That is one reason I read all three. No single account is the whole record, and the gaps show up when you stand in a second place.
Mary Magdalene is the clearest case I know. The Gospels name her as a follower of Jesus and as the first witness of the resurrection, and none of them calls her a prostitute. That label came later, from a homily by Pope Gregory in 591 that merged her with other women in the Gospels, and the Catholic Church dropped the identification in 1969. A library of early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 shows how wide the early field was, and scholars still argue over what the choosing did to the place of women.
"Christian" is too wide a word. I have been to Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Catholic, Presbyterian and Latter-day Saint services, and they share less than the word suggests. I went to Catholic schools for five years and studied church history. My Bible was a gift from a Pentecostal minister. I have walked the catacombs. I am not a tourist here. As a teenager I put a Catholic argument to a Baptist minister, and he did not enjoy it.
Even inside the word, the details are specific. The Episcopal Church names two sacraments as primary, baptism and the Eucharist, and treats five other rites as means of grace that are not necessary for every person. Its priests may marry. Orthodox churches ordain married men. The Latin Church made clerical celibacy the rule only in the eleventh century, and it was not so from the start. I had the theme right and some of the dates wrong when I first said this, which is the point of section 6, and I checked the label. I could have said Anglican, or Eastern Orthodox, or the others. I live in America and named the ones I know from the pew.
The man who taught me chemistry gave me the Desiderata, and he was a Jesuit. The Jesuits helped reform the calendar in 1582, and they still staff the Vatican's observatory. Pascal, a mathematician, held that reason and the heart are different orders, each with its own kind of truth, and that neither reaches the other. The Jesuit who taught me chemistry lived that way. That is why I can hold the Gospels and the math at once. They operate in different worlds.
Each world has its own test for what counts as true, and the two tests are not the same equation. The founders built that separation into the country: no religious test for office, in Article VI, and no establishment of religion, in the First Amendment, which Jefferson in 1802 called a wall of separation between church and state. Each world is kept from ruling the other, and one person can live in both. That is why the arrangement holds: the agnostic, the atheist and the devout can sit at one table and build a country, because none of them is asked to pass the others' test.
Three songs sit next to each other on my shelf. Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," recorded live at Folsom in January 1968. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," from 1984. And Donnie McClurkin's "We Fall Down." A Baptist-raised country singer, a Jewish songwriter and a gospel singer. Three traditions, one human experience. We fall. What matters is what comes next.
Washington went home. Lincoln held the country. Hamilton told the truth. Cash sang for prisoners. In every case the answer to a fall is the same: the next thing a person does.
Three habits come out of this.
Ask who on the team is fluent on both sides of each seam. A weak plan hides at the boundary, and nobody notices it because nobody is standing there.
Treat a fluent, fast answer as a hypothesis, and check the label. Fluency feels like knowing, and the two are different.
Weigh the whole person, and not the one fact that is easiest to hold against them.
Nothing is alone. Show up. Look around. Learn what is necessary. Serve. Go home.
I run Osparna, a diligence firm that also makes early investments, and I run large AI models on my own hardware. This was drafted with Claude, made by Anthropic; where I say "I," the judgment is mine, not a source's.
Back to the short version: Nothing Is Alone
Sources: In-Q-Tel, announcement of its strategic investment in Keyhole; Britannica, Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing; Wikipedia, Ada (programming language) and Desiderata; National Archives, Founders Online, Hamilton and Madison papers (Madison 01-13-02-0205, Hamilton 01-21-02-0138-0001, Hamilton 01-20-02-0197); Library of Congress, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic; The Episcopal Church, glossary; Britannica, celibacy and the Great Migration. Much of the career material in section 2 is the author's own account and cannot be sourced; the argument does not depend on it. Dates and figures not listed above are from the author's recollection and should be checked against a primary source.