no more books from overseas

At least until the Dollar comes back from its trip into the stratosphere.

pisoteando dioses

Ayer fuimos a la exposición Un Día en Mongolia que se puede ver en el Kiosco Alfonso. La barroca y exuberante imaginería del arte religioso me llamó la atención. Algunas pinturas mostraban una gigantesca criatura de piel negra y ojos furiosos enarbolando una espada en llamas. Al parecer se trataba de un ser legendario defensor de las enseñanzas budistas. Evidenciando una cierta falta de ecumenismo, la criatura pisoteaba los cuerpos postrados de dioses hindúes, los cuales parecían ostensible y comprensiblemente incómodos. Uno de los dioses pisoteados era Ganesha (lo reconocí por la trompa, además hay una figura suya en el restaurante indio que hay cerca de la estación de trenes).

También había expuestos vestimentas e instrumentos tradicionales del chamán, lo que me recuerda que tengo que leer algún día el libro de Mircea Eliade sobre el tema. Un chamán famoso fue Teb-Tengri, que subía y bajaba del cielo en un caballo blanco y disputó a Gengis Khan el control de la horda mongola, pagando el desafío con su vida.

Otra cosa que me llamó la atención fue una especie de cerrojo que usaba como llaves unas láminas metálicas rectangulares de diseño abstracto. Tenían un aspecto incongruentemente moderno, ¡casi parecían tarjetas perforadas! Me gustaría tener un cerrojo parecido.

Por cierto, la biblioteca González Garcés tiene un ejemplar de La Historia Secreta de los Mongoles (editorial Miraguano) con extenso aparato crítico y abundantes anotaciones. Recomendado a los que quieran profundizar en el tema.

they're still there, somewhere

In his book Throwim' Way Leg, naturalist Tim Flannery mentions the resistance of New Guineans to the idea that species may go extinct under the pressure of excessive hunting. When faced with the fact that a certain animal is no more to be found in a certain zone, they simply point in the general direction of a nearby village and say "there are still plenty of them over there" (of course, inhabitants of that village would say the same, pointing in the reverse direction). Alternatively, they explain the absence by saying that the animal only shows itself to very virtuous hunters, who have undertaken exacting and complicated purification ceremonies.

This refusal to consider the possibility of extinction reminds me of Thomas Jefferson. In his Notes on the State of Virginia [1781], he wrote:

The bones of the Mammoth which have been found in America, are as large as those found in the old world. It may be asked, why I insert the Mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? Such is the oeconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. To add to this, the traditionary testimony of the Indians, that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America, would be adding the light of a taper to that of the meridian sun. Those parts still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.

forty-three interpreters

From Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony:

This light tissue, which crackles under the fingers with the noise of sparks, is the famous yellow linen brought by the merchants from Bactriana. They required no less than forty-three interpreters during their voyage.

"forty-three interpreters". What a wonderful way of conveying distance, spatial as well as cultural!

With modern advances in transportation, the hold products brought from far-away places had on our imagination has waned. What has succeeded it? The thrill of the early adopter. Farness in space substituted by closeness in time as a source of fascination.

Vaguely related:

• The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics.
• This podcast on EconTalk about the book A Splendid Exchange.

Maybe This Explains the Financial Crisis

There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

—R. A. Lafferty: About a secret crocodile.

we have a certain air

A girl in a pub once said the following to a co-worker of mine:

"I bet I can figure out what are you studying without you telling me. Let me see, let me see... it's Computer Science, isn't it?"

She was right.

Years ago, I was in a supermarket queue waiting my turn to buy fish when, completely out of the blue, an elderly lady addressed me so:

"You are an engineer, aren't you?"

Yeah, I was. But I wasn't doing any particularly engineer-y thing at the moment; I was just looking at fish.

These diviners are sometimes capable of even subtler distinctions, truly astonishing feats of discernment. At a recent company dinner, a guest claimed to be able to sort out the members of the R&D department from among the members of the Engineering department, without any previous knowledge and just by looking at them.

Apparently, she was right most of the time.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

“They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”

One way they did this, Mr. Berman said, was to make sure the computer models looked at several years of trading history instead of just the last few months. The most important models calculate a measure known as Value at Risk — the amount of money you might lose in the worst plausible situation. They try to figure out what that worst case is by looking at how volatile markets have been in the past.

But since the markets were placid for several years (as mortgage bankers busily lent money to anyone with a pulse), the computers were slow to say that risk had increased as defaults started to rise.

It was like a weather forecaster in Houston last weekend talking about the onset of Hurricane Ike by giving the average wind speed for the previous month.

(Saul Hansell at the New York Times' Bits Blog: How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers)

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" [...] I am not able rightly to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

(Charles Babbage, quoted in the Wikipedia page for Garbage In, Garbage Out. The original source of the quote is Babbage's Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which can be found at Google Books. Note also that the second reference mentions the survey essay Computer Applications in Particular Industries: Securities [1981].)

inscrutability a plus

The current Connatic is Oman Ursht, sixteenth in the Idite succession: a man of ordinary and undistinguished appearance. In portraits and on public occasions he wears a severe black uniform with a black casque, in order to project an image of inflexible authority, and this is how he is known to the folk of Alastor Cluster. In private Oman Ursht is a calm and reasonable man, who tends to under- rather than over-administrate. He ponders all aspects of his conduct, knowing well that his slightest act a gesture, a word, a symbolic nuance might start off an avalanche of unpredictable consequences: hence his effort to create the image of a man rigid, terse and unemotional.

—Jack Vance: Trullion.

Because of the powerful leverage of the Federal Reserve System, public statements by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board are scrutinized by bankers and investors for clues as to whether "the Fed" is likely to tighten the money supply or ease up. An unguarded statement by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, or a statement that is misnconstrued by financiers, can set off a panic in Wall Street that causes stock prices to plummet. [...] Given such drastic repercussions, which can affect financial markets around the world, Federal Reserve Board chairmen over the years have learned to speak in highly guarded and Delphic terms that often leave listeners puzzled as to what they really mean.

—Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell.

Medieval Spain

• James F. Powers: A society organized for war. The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000-1284.
• Bernard F. Reilly: The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109-1126 .

Both of these books are mentioned in José Luis Villacañas Berlanga's La Formación de los Reinos Hispánicos.

economic podcasts

Here. They have helped me understand a little better the subprime debacle. These ones look good too.

The following book from the Internet Archive also looks interesting:

• Money, Banking And Credit In Mediaeval Bruges [1948]

Edit. And the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

genius, or chance?

Skeptics of EMH argue that there exists a small number of investors who have outperformed the market over long periods of time, in a way which is difficult to attribute to luck, including Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Bill Miller. [...] Adherents to a stronger form of the EMH argue that the hypothesis does not preclude - indeed it predicts - the existence of unusually successful investors or funds occurring through chance.

—Wikipedia page for Efficient-market hypothesis.

During the “Manhattan project” (the making of nuclear bomb), Fermi asked Gen. Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a “great” general [1]. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that considering that opposing forces for most battles are roughly equal in strength, the chance of winning one battle is 1⁄2 and the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/2^5 = 1/32 . “So you are right General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius.” The existence of military genius was also questioned on basic philosophical grounds by Tolstoy [2].

—This paper on arXiv.

Almanzor en Galicia

Luego, el golpe de gracia en 997, Santiago de Compostela. El relato que de esta incursión hace Ibn Idhari, sobre otro texto del gran Ibn Hayyan, que ahora se puede leer con facilidad en el trabajo de Martínez Díez, resulta un óptimo documento para apreciar la mentalidad de aquella gente islámica, su extrañeza al adentrarse por primera vez en la tierra desconocida de Galicia, la lucha contra las selvas y los ríos, una naturaleza por completo extraña que hace a los guías perderse una y otra vez, y fuerza a los ingenieros a intervenr con el hierro abriendo caminos. Por un instante, el lector se sorprende pensando en los primeros viajeros en medio de las selvas de América.

—José Luis Villacañas Berlanga: La formación de los Reinos Hispánicos.

frequented routes

Varhely is conspicuous for its dirt even among Wallachian villages, yet once it was a royal town. It is built on the site of the famous Sarmisegethusa, the capital of ancient Dacia. In Trajan's second expedition against Decebalus, King of the Dacians, he came from Orsova on the Danube by the same route that forms the highroad of this day--the same I had traversed in my way hither. It is curious to reflect how nation succeeding nation tread in each other's footsteps, through the self-same valley, beneath the shadow of the old hills. Here they have trudged, old Dacian gold-seekers, returning from the daily labours of washing the auriferous sands of the mountain streams; here, too, have tramped victorious Roman soldiers--Avars, Tartars, Turks, and other intruders. A long and motley cavalcade has history marshalled along this route for two thousand years and more!

—Andrew F. Crosse: Round About the Carpathians.

Valleys, passes, and gorges which have served many times throughout history as routes of invasion hold a special fascination. Like the Khyber Pass:

George Molesworth, a member of the British force of 1919, summarised: "Every stone in the Khyber has been soaked in blood."

I would like to know the context of that quote. Was Molesworth just making an hyperbole about the particular war in which he participated, or was he actually referring to all the blood spilled there over the centuries?

In the latter sense, the quote conveys a certain sense of world-weariness, of the oppressive weight of an extended past, that wouldn't be out of place in a piece of Dying Earth fiction.

ways of reading

Devoted to the adquisition of knowledge, he cultivated retirement as a means of facilitating the attainment of his object. His thirst for learning was so intense, that it held him under absolute sway, and he found it necessary at a later period to offer a systematic resistance to its exclusive demands. [...] In taking up a work, he first looked at the table of contents, and when it suggested an idea or fact which seemed to open before him a new path, he read that part of the volume which developed this idea or fact; the rest was overlooked. In this way, he accumulated a rich store of varied erudition.

(from the "Notice of the Author" in Jaime Balme's European civilization : Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their effects on the civilization of Europe [1844])

That kind of impatient, voracious scanning for relevant information while disregarding everything else in the text sounds surprisingly modern. I bet Balmes would have a ball browsing Wikipedia.

Here's an image of the guy:

He looks like a nerd. A Nerd of God, if you will. Drop those clerical garments, give him a t-shirt featuring some hilarious internet catchphrase, and he could pass a a hacker, a proponent of open source, or something of the sort.

fossil thoughts

Blogging is a geological process. Every post you make is like a little bit of sediment deposited by the stream of your thoughts. These sediments accumulate over the months and years; when you browse the archives, you are in fact inspecting ancient strata of your own mind.

In the archives, you may find the fossils of old opinions no longer extant in your mental ecosystem, and wonder at how such misshapen, ungainly mental constructs ever managed to thrive inside your skull.

musical occasions, merry and otherwise

A concert was going on, and I for the first time heard a gipsy band. Music is an instinct with these Hungarian gipsies. They play by ear, and with a marvellous precision, not surpassed by musicians who have been subject to the most careful training. Their principal instruments are the violin, the violoncello, and a sort of zither. The airs they play are most frequently compositions of their own, and are in character quite peculiar, though favourite pieces from Wagner and other composers are also given by them with great effect. I heard on this occasion one of the gipsy airs which made an indelible impression on my mind; it seemed to me the thrilling utterance of a people's history. There was the low wail of sorrow, of troubled passionate grief, stirring the heart to restlessness, then the sense of turmoil and defeat; but upon this breaks suddenly a wild burst of exultation, of rapturous joy--a triumph achieved, which hurries you along with it in resistless sympathy. The excitable Hungarians can literally become intoxicated with this music--and no wonder. You cannot reason upon it, or explain it, but its strains compel you to sensations of despair and joy, of exultation and excitement, as though under the influence of some potent charm.

—Andrew F. Crosse: Round About the Carpathians.

Reminds of a passage from Jack Vance's Trullion which describes a grisly and ritualistic public execution, with emphasis on the accompanying music provided by the gipsy-like Trevanyi:

Oh, the prutanshyr's a wicked place! And to hear the music! Sweet as flowers, strange and hoarse! It strikes through you as if your own nerves were being plucked for tones... Ah well, at any rate, a great pot of boiling oil was prepared, and a traveling-crane stood by. The music began; eight Trevanyi and all their horns and fiddles. How can such stern folk make such sweet music? It chills the bones and churns the bowels and puts the taste of blood in your mouth! Chief Constable Filidice was there, but First Agent Gerence was the executioner. One by one the starmenters were grappled by hooks, then lifted and dipped into the oil, then hung up on a great high frame; and I don't know which was more awful: the howls or the beautiful sad music. The people fell down on their knees; some fell into fits and cried out, for terror or joy I can't tell you; I don't know what to make of it...After about two hours all were dead."

—Jack Vance: Trullion.

Je veux apprendre le français (2)

In my last post, maybe I was too hash when I wrote "singularly bewildering and unproductive experience". Even without knowing what the words mean, the book has many things to recommend it. It produces agreeable sounds when read aloud, as I have already mentioned. The letters are all well arranged on the page, printed in an elegant and easy to read font. Paragraph organization is fine; not too short, not too long, and yet with some variety in size to spice things up.

I like the proper nouns I'm encountering, they have personality. It's a bit problematic to differentiate between places and persons, though. Maybe I'm getting the mountain and Mohammad mixed up, so to speak. That notwithstanding, I find myself getting attached to those characters. When their names do not recur for long stretches of prose, I worry that something bad has happened to them in the plot. Maybe they are even dead! My worst fear is that they are indeed dead, but their names keep reappearing like ghosts because other characters are remembering them. This is unlikely, however: introspective passages of that kind do not abound in science fiction.

Je veux apprendre le français

I'm currently reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time in the original French, and I must say that so far it has been a singularly bewildering and unproductive experience. I think at least part of the reason is that I don't know a word of French.

It does sound like an interesting book, though. And I mean it literally: when I try to pronounce the words in the pages, the sounds are pleasant enough, even if I don't know what they mean. Again, learning the language may make me appreciate the work on more levels. And I'm a sucker for time-travel stories.

To people who have read the work in a language they understand: how does it compare to H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Asimov's The End of Eternity and Barrington J. Bayley's The Fall of Chronopolis?

A survivor of the Spanish Armada

I didn't know about Francisco de Cuellar's account until recently, when an article in a national newspaper brought it to my attention.

The account is available in English at the Internet Archive, and also here. See here for the untranslated Spanish text.

Avram Davidson

Here can be found an evocation of Avram Davidson by someone who knew him personally (spotted at sfsignal). Davidson seemed to be an interesting, if sometimes difficult, personality. His conversion from Judasim to Tenrikyo is somewhat unusual.

I've been meaning to read his works, especially the Peregrine novels, which are set in Late Antiquity. The first one was published in 1971, the same year as Peter Brown's seminal survey The World of Late Antiquity. Interest in that historical epoch was in the air at the time, it seems.

Then there are his Vergil novels. They are not about the historical Vergil, but about the medieval conception of him as a magician and wonder-worker.

And let's not forget his Dr. Esterhazy novels, set in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, the "waning fourth-largest empire in Europe", clearly an imaginary cousin to the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the nineteenth century.

Here is the page about Davidson in the Great SF & F site.