The history of where you live

Every place has a history, since time passes relentlessly and leaves in its wake an infinity of stories many of which are only known locally and do not bother the world at large. Naturally there are places where a lot happens, and they become part of the world historical heritage. Many history books catalogue these places and people everywhere study these and research events to remember for future generations. Big cities like London, Paris or Delhi have a lot of well document history and a lot of it makes fascinating reading. Other places even if they are smaller become famous through some event that thrusts their history to become of worldwide interest. Events such as a natural disaster, a president getting killed or a world war being sparked usually makes a place unforgettable.

I have lived and traveled through  many places whose history is generally considered interesting. Delhi, for example, where I grew up, has seen centuries of occupiers, invading armies and massacres on a regular basis. Another place I have known is London which also has had a long and colourful past which includes people like Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and all the Kings and Queens and miserable stories like the plague, the fire and all the killings in the Tower.

However there are an infinite number of places which remain out of the limelight but create a history, which often remains unwritten and this gets either forgotten or passed from generation to generation by word of mouth. How many among my friends would have known anything about Kumasi or Maracaibo, places where I lived for significant periods. I have not seen too many books about the history of these but they had their periods worth documenting. Kumasi was (and is) the capital of the Ashantis who were a force to be reckoned with and rich because of the gold that was to be found in the region. And Maracaibo, well maybe the less said about this one the better.A bit like the wild west which had little to be proud of until oil was discovered in the region.

The place where I have now come to live in Spain (Laredo) has a rich history since it was established by Romans when this part of the world was part of the Roman Empire. However few people outside of this region would have heard of any of it or much less bothered to read about it anywhere. I knew that some books had been written about it but had not yet fully familiarized myself with many periods of the story of this place.

So when an organisation which brings together the 'friends of the heritage' of the town invited me to attend a launch of a new book about an aspect of the history that I did not know about, I decided to accept, and it turned out to be fascinating and I was not disappointed.The book appeared to document the work and times of a series of 'governors' appointed by the King, who were known as 'corregidores' or correctors. They existed in pre-democracy times between the 16th and the early nineteenth century, and their function was to administer justice and represent the King in the region, often with a ceremonial 'baston' with which he was allowed to beat people who misbehaved.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this town of a small population was the capital of the region until it was considered more suitable to move the capital to Santander at the beginning of the Nineteenth century.

Now this book may seem to be not too exciting a project, but if we see it through the eyes of the local population, it could be very interesting. And here is the thing I wanted to get down to..that the history of a place is always interesting for the people of that place. Like people, every place has a story and we only need to be in that place to make it worth discovering that story.

It is the history of our world.

Tuesday 13th December

Unlike most of the English speaking world that trembles if the 13th of a month falls on a Friday, the Spanish speaking world reserves such dread if it happens on a Tuesday. As it happens this December 13th did fall on a Tuesday, today!
I happened to be accompanying a couple of ladies (one of whom was Marisol) around Bilbao today and the thirteenth did have its effect. First the strap of Marisol's handbag ripped unexpectedly and the bag rolled to the ground. Having to carry the bag under her arm as a result was no fun either.
Later I was nearly run down by a car as I tried to cross a road. Lets not give too much importance to the fact that I did not wait for the light which would have stopped the traffic for me to cross the road.
There were other happenings today too, like the strong winds all over Northern Spain (and England) and five meter high waves on the beach, however they were not all bad. We found good bargains and had fun shopping. We made it home without any further mishaps which must be enough of a reason to celebrate.
Later I learnt that our local soccer team 'Racing' of Santander won a close game, when its more normal for them to lose.
So I am not at all sure we can justify the fear that the thirteenth can conjure up, even more so on a Tuesday.
Now its after midnight and its neither Tuesday or the 13th any more!

just google it

So it happened, I gave the talk on Information Technology to a group of intellectuals in Santander and one of the points I made was that now-a-days people use search engines as an extension of their memories. I had a picture of a young man with a laptop in his hands to show how one can be talking to friends and at the same time using the computer to help with his memory. I mentioned someone I know who could easily have been the young man in the picture.
And I did something along these lines myself the other day. I was reading my e-book, a Kindle from Amazon, and in one of the pauses a random picture appeared on the screen, which was obviously a page from an old book, with some text which was difficult to read and sounded like latin. It went something like:
Izbriu grit cratuerbum guerbumerat abudomgos
It was an intriguing image and I decided it was worth spending a few minutes looking for what this might be.
So I googled it
A few entries in the list that appeared as a result showed that this same intrigue had attracted other users of the Kindle. No body had come up with a satisfactory answer. One responder had suggested that the text may well be a 'Lorem Ipsum'. This was beginning to sound like a mystery..what was this Lorem Ipsum?
Next search showed that Lorem Ipsum was randomly generated placeholder text that publishers often use to display possible fonts and use as examples.
Not satisfied with this I looked further down the list and found a blog on which someone suggested that they had found the same image on a page in an old book of Gospels and described it as follows 

'This is confirmed as a page of Lindisfarne's Gospels: It's on page 30 of the British Library's online edition of this book'

What is confusing is that the text does not appear to mean anything in Latin! Its obviously nonsense text which is what Lorem Ipsum is supposed to be.

Now this made a lot more sense and I could go back to worrying about more normal things!

Storing money in troubled times

Whatever happened to those days when it was safe to keep money in the bank.
Admittedly in troubled times having any money at all is a luxury, but there are those who end up with the money and have to make tough decisions about where to keep it. The pensioners are also a population who should have a sum of money which represents their life savings that needs to be put somewhere.

In these times of low interest rates, troubled banks, sliding property values, debt ridden economies, a sinking  stock market and worthless bonds where does one keep his/her money? A financial commentator, one of those who always appear to have figured everything in situations such as these, came on the TV recently and said that the Euro was going to sink and that everyone in Europe were going to lose their savings!

Now, I am not as knowledgeable as this guy, but I would guess that you cannot use a word like 'everyone' in a situation like this, as there are always a set of people who seem to have 'insider' knowledge and manage to rescue their cash before its too late, including I might add, the commentator in this case. I will not ever forget one day when my boss where I worked in Venezuela, asked me if I had a lot of money in local bank. It must have been Wednesday or Thursday, because on the Friday Venezuela had to remove the link of its currency from the US dollar, a move that immediately reduced the value of the 'Bolivar' to half of its value the previous day. It then continued to slide so that after only a couple of months it had touched one fifth. Lucky for me I did not have much money in 'Bolivars'.

Now what did my boss know that I did not? However let us leave that to one side and get back to my original question, which is where should we keep our money, assuming we have some. I dont think we should rush out to buy Greek government bonds or those of Italy or Spain because of the risk associated with them. Banks are an option, however only a small amount is guaranteed to be safe in case of failure of the institution. However lately many countries have opted for rescuing ailing banks in fear of a collapse of the entire financial system teetering because of the heavy debts.

I am rightly confused and no longer laughing at the suggestion to keep all your money in cash under the bed!

Where are we headed with all this technology?

A local group of artists and intellectuals, which meets every month in a Santander restaurant, asked me to contribute a talk. Apparantly everyone who attends the meetings of this group takes turns to present a talk on a topic of their choice, apart from occasionally inviting other deserving individuals who come to present interesting talks from time to time.

What could I talk about? I cannot claim to be an expert in many things, although I do have many interests. Arts, photography, music and mathematics fascinate me, but I could not do justice to any of these fields. After careful thought I considered travel, but what could one tell anyone about travel? Dont forget to take your passport and remember to get the required vaccinations and those sort of things or perhaps share ones travel photos? No, that would not appeal enough to anyone.

Finally, it appeared there was only one possibility and that was to present a summary of my experiences with computer technologies through the years of my working life. However if I thought that once I had found a topic that the rest was going to be easy, then I was wrong. I found that it was going to be hard to pin down. Unfortunately the pace of change in the realm of Information technologies meant that I would be chasing a moving goalpost.

To reduce the chance of missing the mark I decided to build the presentation around past, present and the future of IT from one point of view - mine. This had the advantage that if I only covered some areas of this vast field then I could hide behind my personal point of view.

The start was easy and I could spark some interest with my first encounter with a 'computer', a term I had not yet come across at the time, in the jungles of Africa. Not many people in Santander would have heard of Kumasi, and even less have any first hand experience of having been there. The current state of technology most would be familiar with. We are all using or walking around with a quantity of gadgets that would have been mind boggling a few years ago. I still remember 1995, when I was invited topresent some work I was doing at the time, at an international conference in San Jose in California. I was amazed to find that every advertisement in the local newspaper carried an email address with which anyone could contact the company advertising. At the time this was still only occasional in the UK press.

Much more interesting is the question proposed by this post, ie where is all this technology going in future. The members of the discussion group in Santander deserve a proposed future of technology that gives them the opportunity to sink their teeth in a discussion. Latest research is exploring bacterial processors, Quantum mechanics and new materials for molecular level storage. All that promises ever faster and unlimited storage using a minimal of energy.

However that still leaves a hole in the imaginative and visionary view of the state we might be in after another twenty or fifty years. I am tending towards a state in which the Information technology environment will be not dissimilar from the way that nature itself handles and processes information. This environment would have holographic storage systems interconnected by 'quantum' links and processing by biological processors. Sounds like science fiction but this is more or less what nature does. Cells contain all the information in each one of them, neural links connect all the cells in our biological processor - brain.

So that is the possible future and I hope this enthuses the audience and let the discussion begin..

What is your number?

And I dont mean the phone or other more important numbers. I refer to the latest news on the earth's population. People who are responsible for such things 'reliably' inform us that we are likely to pass the 7 billion mark one of these days. Intrigued about this I looked up the Google search on this and came across a website that tells you your 'possible' number in the overall population on this earth.
So I put in my DOB and came up with this message

When you were born, you were the:
2,492,563,696th person alive on Earth 
75,536,789,785th person to have lived since history began

Very interesting I said to myself, while thinking that perhaps the current interest in the number of inhabitants appeared to be aimed at making us think that the population was too large to sustain given the current food production, and the poverty that affects many of the world's countries.

For a little diversion I began to play with these numbers in my thoughts and on the Internet. If everyone who enters my DOB into the program gets the same numbers then obviously they are meaningless. The program never even asked the simple extension of the time of day. I only have others memories to rely on for this but the difference of 65000 that the program produced for a day later suggests that my number could be wrong by upto this number.

Another interesting number related view was suggested by a radio program, where the speaker suggested that if we were to put the entire population (7 Billions) in a square where every person had a square metre of space then that square would measure about 84 Kilometres in each direction. Looking at it this way, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Earth population was not very big at all! However when you walk around some the big cities of this world (and we did just that recently in London) it appears that the Earth far more densely populated than that.

Looking at this the other way around, I calculated if the entire land mass was divided equally then each one of us might have a square about 100 meters by 100 meters.

So, we are getting more and more, where I was 2.5 billionth at birth, now I am 7 billionth of the population.

Now consider this..How much money exists in the world and what is the total GDP (Gross Product value) in the world? This is not totally unrelated as I thought it would be interesting to see how much money on average each one of us could have if we divided it equally, something that the rich people of this world would no doubt object to.

Perhaps the closest estimate to how much money exists in the world was released in January 2009 by Mike Hewitt, editor of the economics blog DollarDaze.com. Hewitt tracked the reporting of 73 currencies from central banks and financial ministries in 90 countries, which cover the money used by 84.1 percent of the world's population. The countries tracked represent 96.7 percent of the world gross domestic product -- the market value of the world's economies combined. Hewitt found that in October 2008, these countries had notes and coins equaling $3.94 trillion in U.S. dollars in circulation [source: Hewitt].

If we were divide the cash in this world equally each person would have 560 Dollars

On the other hand money supply, which is the actual money people have which lies in bank accounts and investments etc is a much larger number. In the US alone this (known as M3) is ten times more than their cash number (M0). If the same is roughly true of the rest of the world then the total money held in the world bank accounts, cash and stocks etc must be something like $39 trillions.

If we divide this equally then each one of us would have about 5600 Dollars

And the world GDP can be approximated, based on China's GDP (about 6Trillion) being about 10% of the world. Which means that the world's total is around 60 Trillions.

Which means that we produce on average about 8600 dollars worth of goods per person every year. Nice to know.

And where does all this lead us?

Nowhere. And now we all have a lot more useless numbers in our heads.
As Pat mcGoohan says in The Prisoner 'I am not a number, I am a human being'. Or was it 'I am free man'? I am forgetting...and it was a long time ago.

Signed (#2,492,563,696 or possibly 2,492,628,700 as I was born around midnight)

Where is one from?

Where are you from? - I often get asked this question, and its not an unreasonable one if you are confronted by someone who looks like me. I suppose people expect me to say that I am from either a muslim country or possibly India. In Spain there are few people who wear a turban so usually people here have no clue of my origins. However they are more than surprised or possibly annoyed when I reply 'That is an interesting question'.

Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised when a particularly knowledgable person asks me if I am a Sikh and hence imply that I am from India. As many of my friends would confirm, this is nearer to the truth. However the problem is that I am not sure if I can honestly say that I am from India. I may have Indian origins, but that 'from' thing is more complicated. I have not lived in India for 45 years, and although parents and brother live in India, I have few other friends whose whereabouts make me feel particularly Indian.

I have lived in England for the last 20 plus years, but do I feel English? I would have to confess that this is not the case either. I lived in Africa and South America for significant periods, but I dont feel particularly from those places either. It begins to emerge that its not too clear where I am from, and so its difficult to offer a simple reply to the original inquiry.

Just the other day we (Marisol and I) walked into a Tourist Information office in Santander to ask for a map or some brochure. After attending to our request the agent behind the counter asked where we were from. She expected a 'tourist' answer and when we said we were from Laredo which is a few miles down the A8 highway, she looked disappointed. Marisol sensed this and immediately said that we had come from England and this brightened the look on the agent's face.

Similarly I was often asked the same 'from' question when I used to travel to places like China, US, Italy or a host of countries during my working life and I always assumed that they wanted to know where I worked, which would be England. HoweverI usually felt that if I said 'India' then I would get a better response.

So where is one from..where they have lived all their life..where they were born, or where they currently live. Variously I could say that I am from England, India or Spain. None of these answers are satisfactory so I end up saying that 'I am from everywhere and nowhere'. This does have an exotic ring to it, as it sounds a bit like a Zen master giving clues to one of his monks about a Koan. 'How interesting' is often the response from the interested party, and this has the advantage of engaging in further conversation which may or may not be desirable depending on their 'personality'.