The road to wisdom

There is a dental clinic in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, called Dente Feliz. Literally Happy Tooth. Maputo, which used to be called Lourenço Marques, is a typical Portuguese city, with wide tree-lined avenues, and even a house built by Gustave Eiffel. Only it’s in Africa. Full of colour, music, and tropical flavours. You can see it on TV, but you can’t get the heat, or the fragance – you need to be there.

In 2003, 100 bucks would get you 2.3 million meticais (and change)

Luckily, I didn’t frequent the Happy Tooth the few times I went to Maputo, but I did frequent the Costa do Sol seafood restaurant which overlooks Maputo Bay, and the Africa Bar, known locally as AB (pronounced abbey). Perhaps it was those various excesses that led to the removal on Sunday of a wisdom tooth, which results in some downtime today; although I was expecting it to bleed more profusely than the Greek economy, so far, I haven’t needed intervention by the European Commission. As for any subject, there is endless stuff on the web about wisdom teeth. My favourite so far is an article in a Shanghai paper, with diet suggestions at various stages:

‘”Reinforcing kidney energy while the gum is still inflamed is useless; on the contrary, reinforcing foods usually accelerate blood circulation and may aggravate the inflammation and gum bleeding,” Li says. For inflammation, Dr Li recommends “cold” (yin energy) food that dispels pathogenic heat. This includes chrysanthemum tea, cucumber and celery. After the inflammation and pain are gone, eat kidney-reinforcing foods like gouqi (wolfberries), pigeon and walnuts.’

So next time you’re in town, do cityhall a favour and grab a pigeon for the road. Well, I was very surprised with the service I got: I found the place on the internet, checked for horror stories and the like, and decided to wing it. The young lady who treated me came into Lisbon just for me from about 40 miles away, and always had a smile on her face. I did too, up to a certain point. As far as I can tell, she did everything right, and a quick look at US costs puts extraction at between $ 150-350. Mine was at the low end of that, including all the nice drugs you get that make your tongue feel like a giant avocado, the commute, and the emergency Sunday service. Wow!

It reassured me, although somewhat painfully, that Portugal is a very different country from the days of my pre-revolutionary youth. Some things work, some don’t, but there is always a solution in the confusion. In this country it’s known as the art of “desenrasca”, another word, which like Fado, has no translation. Densenrascar (the verb) is the difference between just making things happen or failing dismally. A combination of fixit, luck, adrenalin, and the shared stakeholder understanding of last minute urgency. Markets take note.

As an added bonus, as of yesterday I entered a program called Wisdom Weight Watchers, which aims to help me lose a few pounds through a judicious combination of pureed soup and alcohol interdiction. There are still two of these pesky teeth left, and my doctor suggested I get rid of those in due course. I thought she was just trigger happy, but apparently as you age the little sods fuse to the bone, determined to go with you to the grave. So, food for thought, if you excuse the (double) pun. And since I will spend the whole of next week in northern Italy, that’s ideal. A regular Italian meal, as you peruse the menu while crunching grissini (my jaw hurts just thinking of that) will lure you in gently with antipasti, followed by a primo piatto, usually pasta or risotto, a secondo piatto, meat or fish, dessert and perhaps cheese. It is difficult to put that away without a few glasses of Italian red, an espresso to counteract the effect, and of course a grappa as a dual digestive and sleeping draught. Incidentally, wisdomweightwatchers.com is available, if you feel that orthodontics and obesity form a compelling business venture.

The current state of play is that I yesterday lost one third of my remaining wisdom, which probably explains the mental wanderings in this post – either that or the nice pills I get to take. But nevertheless a few words of toothless wisdom about the economy, to wrap up: the financial markets have been pounding Spain and Portugal, carried away after pounding Greece to the consistency of well chewed moussaka (sounds like my dinner).  The Spanish can take care of themselves, but I leave a couple of historical notes for your consideration:

Julius Caesar had a parting thought about Lusitania, well nigh two thousand years ago: “who are these people who will not be governed and will not govern themselves?” This was said with some irritation, but I suspect with a hint of admiration. Over the period of the Punic Wars, Viriato was only one of many.

Before the Romans, Phoenicians and Greeks. Since them, Portugal has waved goodbye to Visigoths, Moors, Crusaders, and Spain (on several occasions). And in between it opened up the West to globalisation. Not even Napoleon managed to stay for long. I wonder if a few short sports will fare any better. Even if you wear a funny hat, if you can’t pronounce “desenrasca”, do yourself a favour: don’t bet the ranch.

The land of beer and chocolate

Contrary to what you commonly hear in Paris and London, I don’t find Brussels a boring city. That’s not to say the people are the most exciting in the world, but at least they show civility and lack arrogance, which is a welcome break for the visitor. Additionally, you can eat and drink very well, though not particularly cheaply.

In the mid 1990’s, the head of a Belgian multinational in Portugal let me know that historically the northern part of Belgium, i.e. the Flemish area, favoured Bordeaux wine: due to the centuries of warfare in the lowlands, wine from Burgundy could not get through, and the naval route supplied Antwerp. The Walloon part, extending to the Liège region in the south, prefers Burgundy, which was transported by road from northern France. This is apparently reflected in the wine lists of Belgian restaurants from the two areas – this could be a promising research topic, and I wonder if it’s true.

I was struck by the similarities between Brussels, which like it or not is the de facto capital of the European Union, and Washington DC. In both, government buildings are overburdened with security, and there is a federal feel about them and what goes on within. I have been involved in some work which brings together all 25 countries that now integrate the Union, and I am amazed to be seeing this in my lifetime. After I spoke, a young lady approached me over coffee and told me how unusual it was to see someone from her country leading a discussion in Brussels. She works for an NGO, lives in Brussels, and told me with a hint of concern that she was a lobbyist. It pains me greatly that delegates from Portugal rarely have anything to say during the decision-making processes that are the building blocks of this 500 million strong experiment, and wonder why we cannot send our best to help shape the decisions that hold the future of our children.

Although I prefer wine, Belgium does have an amazing profusion of beers, including trappist monk offerings that range up to triple strength. Yeast is responsible for the fermentation of sugars into alcohol, and special strains are needed to resist the high strength of alcohol they themselves produce. If ever there was an example of a community drinking itself to death, yeasts are it. And each beer is served in its own unique glass, to highlight character. Monks tended to focus historically on brewing beer and spirits, such as the green liquor Chartreuse.

Nuns, on the other hand, were in medieval times experts at manufacturing sweets, particularly puddings, always with a profusion of eggs – no huge cholesterol concerns. In Portugal, the so called doces conventuais are some of the most delicious desserts in the world.

Travel always adds some strange and puzzling facts to my arsenal. This time I found out about an exclusively Swedish practice called snus – pronounced snooze. Wikipedia states that it is also used in Norway, but I was assured by the Swedish gal who turned me onto it that this is not the case. Snus apparently derives originally from snuff, and I was taught to place a pastille under my upper lip and hold it there. I wasn’t very successful, probably laughing and talking too much at the time, but the pure nicotine the tab contains shoots into the bloodstream straight through the mucus membrane. Reminded me of my first cigarette in my early teens.

This stuff is illegal in the European Union, but apparently Sweden has an exemption. Experienced “snoozers” like my Swedish friend show no external evidence of snoozing - we were playing games trying to find which side of her upper lip she was snoozing on, a bit like the pea and nutshell trick. So they get the nicotine buzz without worrying about the smoking ban. Downside? Someone mentioned mouth cancer at the time. I had a quick surf, and apparently there is potentially an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence for other kinds. The lung cancer rate is greatly decreased when compared to smoking, and the net is rife with contradictory analyses between health groups and big tobacco, which seems to see this as a good product alternative to cigarettes – partly I suspect due to the smoking ban. A quick search for snus and USA shows it is on the up. Caveat Emptor.

Another idiosynchrasy in comparison to Portugal is the universal permission to bring pets into restaurants and hotels. Of course many countries allow pets in hotel rooms. That said, I had never seen the picture below. It left me wondering what courses of action the chambermaid might resort to.

Ping! Seatbelt signs are on, and we are approaching the promised land, taxiing in over the great estuary from which Vasco da Gama’s ships sailed to Calicut.

Scurvy dogs

Tomorrow I start the usual diaspora, and this year promises to be busier than most. It’ll take me to various parts of Europe, sub-saharan Africa, back to the Far East, and to the Americas. Next week is just a short hop to Belgium, but for some fairly complex discussions. Other journeys will bring new ideas, and some will show up here. As Abraham the astronomer says in The India Road, “ideas are the fuel of life”. And ideas can start from a trivial observation, such as the fact that dogs don’t eat fruit. My own dog exhibits a preference for rice and chicken, which might be partly due to African roots, since her mother is a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Or in a politically correct world, is that Zimbabwean Zigzag? In any case it got me wondering about the expression “scurvy dogs”, a well worn insult used by pirates of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion, and made popular in many a cartoon and children’s book.

…as in: “Hoist that scurvy dog from the yardarm!”

Many expressions have parallels in various languages, and many insults too, such as those which focus on uncertain paternity. But other words and expressions are particular to one country. An oyster, for instance, is variously called ostra in Spain and Portugal, huître in France, auster in German and ostrica in Italy. In all the words you can see a common thread. I’d easily spot it on a menu and order a dozen immediately! But what about ameijoa, almeja, palourde, venusmuscheln, and vongole? Well, they all mean clam, itself a very different word from the others (the German word means Venus mussel).

…So scurvy dog, the insult of pirates, why? Do dogs get scurvy? Clearly not, and neither do most vertebrates. A short hop on the net reveals that most mammals synthesize their own vitamin C in the liver, whereas for instance reptiles exclusively use the kidney. Only the primates, and in particular most monkeys and all anthropoid apes (yup, that’s us!) have no capacity to manufacture this vitamin, essencial for prevention of scurvy. So it seems that if dogs were adept at naval construction, they would have had great success in long voyages of maritime discovery, were it not for the fact that they lack the opposable thumb required for hoisting the mainsail or loading the hold with kegs of spices.

No similar expression to “scurvy dog” exists in other languages, to my knowledge, and I can only imagine the dog in the insult contracts from sea dog, which does occur with variations elsewhere, the Portuguese version being lobo do mar, or sea wolf.

But today is for celebration, since the very last issues for the Portuguese edition of The India Road are being resolved. The local edition has a preface to it, written by the foremost living expert on the Portuguese voyages of discovery. He makes the point that in the XVth and XVIth centuries Portugal revolutionized the western view of the world. My reason for writing the book in the first place was to tell that story in a way which might appeal broadly to those who speak and read English, and who are taught through a historical looking glass that places Columbus as the centerpiece of the age of maritime discovery. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The paradigm shift brought about by the Portuguese in that epic period revolved around the methods used to develop and apply science to navigation, and the discovery of new routes which showed an understanding of global wind and current patterns. For a small country, with a chronic shortage of people for such a monumental task as the eastern adventure, two other factors were paramount: the first was the insight that a clear political agreement with the elephant in the room, otherwise known as Spain, was required; this was done through two treaties, Alcáçovas in 1479 and particularly Tordesillas in 1494. This last treaty, signed the year before the death of the Perfect Prince, divided the unexplored world between Portugal and Spain along a meridian line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. After ratification by the pope (who was Spanish, and close to Isabella of Castille), the French king was so incensed that he demanded to see the clause in the testament of Adam excluding him from the division.

There is no expression in Portuguese which mirrors the English blood is thicker than water, but the final factor was of course the enthusiastic development of mixed communities everywhere the mariners established themselves. In India, and probably other places, special dispensations were issued to sailors by the priesthood allowing for second marriages (essentially polygamy), and the evidence is clear to this day.

The photograph above is from 1960, and shows my mother and brother on the balcony of a fourth floor apartment in Lisbon. The street below is called Rodrigo da Fonseca, named after a XIXth  century Portuguese politician. The recently defeated candidate to the Sri Lankan presidential election is called Sarath Fonseka.

The earth is shaking

November 1st, 1755. All Saints Day. At 9.30am the earth rocked for ten minutes, a quasi-perfect nine on the Richter scale. A gigantic quake destroyed all of downtown Lisbon, in the wake of which a massive tsunami flooded the valley between the hillsides of Bairro Alto and Alfama, both celebrated in The India Road. That valley is today the main avenue of Lisbon, the Av. da Liberdade. It is to the city what Fifth Avenue is to New York, or the Bund to Shanghai. After the twenty meter tidal wave came a raging blaze, sparked by the candles and lanterns used for rescue and vigil, the fires lit for cooking, care, and confort.

The epicenter was southwest of Sagres, where Henry the Navigator is famed to have built his school of navigation. The quake was much more severe in the Algarve, and, as I have previously noted in these pages, the tsunami wave travelled all the way up the Guadalquivir river to Seville and damaged the Torre del Oro.

As you may have guessed, I’m concerned today with the repetition of history. Back in the mid-eighteenth century news travelled pretty slowly, and international aid was non-existent. I’ve been in two major earthquakes, both of which did relatively little damage.

In November 1875 the USS Gettysburg discovered a bank and a series of seamounts in the Atlantic, 120 nautical miles southwest of Sagres. The area, named Gorringe in honor of the captain, is a cauldron of seismic activity. On February 28th 1969, almost 40 years ago to the day, the good captain’s ridge erupted in anger, delivering to Lisbon a quake of magnitude 7.3 on the Richter scale. For me it was a revelation. When I got to school a few hours later, the class bully, who went by the apt name of Bloodworth, was crying his eyes out in fright. It was one of my enduring life lessons: courage comes in different shapes and forms.

Just last month, Capt. Henry Honychurch Gorringe did it again: a week before Christmas, Lisbon rocked to the tune of a Richter grade 6.1 symphony. I woke up violently just before 01.40 am. Not from the tremor, but just after, from my daughter calling from London wondering if things were ok. Facebook and Twitter had done their work, and people in faraway lands were calling relatives and friends in Portugal within minutes.

Since the tragedy last week in Haiti, the social networking platforms have once again surprised many people, providing very fast reactions and connections, posting pictures of the missing and the found, and illustrating that even if from day to day they can seem banal, in times of crisis they can form a key bridge between the helpless and the helpful. The internet itself lives up to the dreams of its founders, and of DARPA, which funded it as a post-nuclear communications system, designed to survive the wasted ruins of the infamous Mutually Assured Destruction. With an acronym of MAD, how can we not see echoes of Dr. Strangelove lurking in the shadows… 

The earthquake in Haiti is one of many that took place over the last decade, hitting across all continents. As an example, Kashmir in 2005, Sichuan, 2008, and Haiti last Tuesday, have at least three things in common: they were all high on the Richter scale, between 7 and 8; they all resulted in widespread destruction of buildings; and consequently, they all had fatalities ranging in the 50,000 to 100,000 range (Haiti is still counting).

A quick look at the major quakes of the XXIst century shows a bipolar picture. Tragedies like L’Aquila killed 300 people. Other tremors, though higher up the scale, killed very few. The ones I experienced in Portugal were victimless.

Risk maps can be (and are) drawn up, using geological data such as proximity to fault lines, monitoring of seismic activity, and probabilities based on past events (Gansu, in China, had three enormous earthquakes between 1920 and 1932, with a combined death toll of 310,000). Those maps can be combined with human geography: population and construction density, time of day and year, holidays, all these and more will play a part. If an earthquake hits Lisbon between 6pm and 8pm on a regular working day, most office blocks will be empty or emptying, and most apartments and houses will not be at full capacity. A lot less people are vulnerable in cars and buses.

How can we predict earthquakes? As the Jewish astronomer José Vizinho from The India Road would say: we can’t.  Yet. What we can predict, with the excellent tools provided by materials science, is the level of casualties to be expected per region and quake strength. All these natural disasters with a huge human toll have one thoroughly unnatural element as a root cause: the tragedy brought about by shoddy building. It is the combination of corruption and fraud, leading to mortally dangerous building materials - concrete with insufficient steelwork, or masquerading as a sandcastle. When the piled bricks of poverty give away to multi-story deathtraps, signed off by dubious inspections, it comes as no surprise that at the first strong gust the house of cards comes tumbling down.

In Haiti, it didn’t just bring down the peons, the face cards came crashing down too, when it brought down the presidential palace.

Historical fusion

In this first post of 2010 it’s time to return to history. Not that some of the last few comments are without historical relevance, but this one focuses on the fusion of old and new. I’ve spent some time over Christmas reviewing the Portuguese translation of The India Road. I’ve written about that previously, but I got a chance in early December to review the full text. The whole thing took longer than expected, and now some final copy-editing is underway. Publication is due in early spring.

Apart from the experience of writing, which is a huge enjoyment, and the joys of vicarious living, I was really lucky to do this at a time when technology is breaking through barriers on various fronts in the book world, and that’s where the fusion part comes in.  First, the editorial world is now a bubbling cauldron: traditional publishing is going up against internet solutions provided by the likes of Amazon and Scribd, analog printing (aka the book) is vying with e-book platforms, so we are in a primeval soup of literary mayhem.

The editorial world, and I think to some extent literary agents, appears to many as a kind of traditional London club which zealously guards membership. I understand that well, having published extensively in academic journals. Currently, there is a parallel drive in academia for “open source” journals, publishing directly on the internet. There is no distribution overhead for printed matter, and there is an avidity for publication that aches to be satisfied.

Like publishers, mainstream academics tend to sniff at the tendency,  which seems to open the gates of the Holy Grail. And established authors are proud of the barrier to entry, aware of the difficulties they themselves once faced, when on the other side of the high fence. There is one key difference between academic and mainstream publications. Although bad scientific papers do occasionally get through triage, the peer-review mechanism stops the majority at the gate. But bad books can get through easily, as long as they can sell. This is “fixed” by ghost-writing and other tricks, but the subject matter is often not fixable. Think biographies of Lady Di, and so on. Because the emphasis is on making money, both good and bad get through, as long as the public is there. Which makes an argument for the direct publishing mechanism, since the editorial triage is as much about quality as about potential revenue – in other words, except for a few, publishing houses are not keepers of the Holy Grail.

It seems to me that people feel empowered by all the new tools: YouTube, FaceBook, SMS, and everything else which is springing up everywhere. The dusty world of top-down control is fading fast, and although reviews get read, there is less and less time for punditry. The new marketing weapon is viral, electronic word of mouth. In olden times, word of mouth was limited to the number of pairs of ears you came in contact with, so culture, phobias, and prejudice propagated slowly and at a local scale. Inertia works on both what moves and on what stands still, which meant that established ideas were also slow to change. A bit like the human life journey, where there is a generational struggle between the parent with entrenched old ideas (father knows best) and the adolescent bursting with new directions (you just don’t understand).

Now word of mouth is word of mail, word of Twitter, word of web, word of mobile. A quick look, and everyone makes their own decision. Advertising is on its head. No longer the province of corporate B2B, it sits more and more with C2B2C. Ebay, web ads, and other techniques (of which spam is one of the more sinister examples) have allowed individuals to target other individuals, and radically changed the decision process which drives shopping.

The editing tools that allow the writing of a book, and the research tools on technical aspects, geography, history and everything else you need, are all in place, and getting better every day. The receiving platforms for your product are ever broader, and will increasingly overlap rather than gripe at each other. And you can market better and better at the individual level. Truly a brave new world.

With that in mind, the www.theindiaroad.com website has been redone, to help captivate the public who trawls the web, unsure of the fish that swim within, but eager for a taste of some undiscovered species.

The climate of change

This morning a ten billion dollar bond bailout was anounced for Dubai, to deal with the real estate collapse there. Friday saw the English Prime Minister Brown and French President Sarkozy pledge ten billion dollars in efforts to contain global warming. The cash to bail out Dubai (should it change its name to Don’t Buy?) is coming in steadily, but the pledges dealing with climate change at COP15 are the subject of acrimonious discussion, mayhem in the streets, and much political finessse.

The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had already complained bitterly that the bank bailout packages put together by various governments after the colapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008 were far better funded and quicker to assemble than collective measures to reduce CO2 emissions.

Why is the climate change discussion then apparently so challenging?

First, as David Suzuki pointed out in a lecture decades ago, we have an old mind for an old world. This makes us much less sensitive to large scale tragedy on the other side of the planet than to a kid being shot two blocks away. The immense daily death toll from hunger, disease, and war, scything across all ages, leaves the west relatively unmoved. Ordinary citizens have a perception that shifts in weather and climate exist, are impossible to predict with any certainty, and serious concern starts only when lives and property are directly threatened.

 In this case, governments reflect the concerns of citizens in their walk, if not in their talk. If a decision was taken to cut electricity supply for half an hour a day, or television for two hours a day, or to support a growth by two or three points in unemployment due to  a less efficient industry, at the next election the people would vote with their feet. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of this grass-roots view was the peak in oil prices over 2007-2008. The good citizens of Western Europe and the US, confronted with a golden opportunity to limit the use of cars, and make a substantial reduction in carbon emissions, spent instead most of their energy complaining about the high fuel costs. Now that gas prices are way down, not many protests are heard that this encourages profligate pollution.

Marketing hype has also painted everything green. The marketing has moved much faster than the science, and glided in on the wings of western desire for moral solace. Using less resources is a great thing, but as with the TV example (or internet, or many other things) people are only willing to abdicate to a certain degree – the limit to their compromise is the compromise of their lifestyle. If the case was made that cigarettes significantly contribute to global warming (they don’t) would you stop smoking? How about if you were diagnosed with early stage lung cancer? We go where our wind blows us (there’s a vegetarian bovine methane joke in there somewhere).

Speaking of wind, I heard James Lovelock (of Gaia, and less well-known, gas chromatography fame) explain recently that windpower was totally uncompetitive from an economic point of view. And the nuclear discussion is back on the table. Since I come from a generation which grew up with “Atomkraft, nein danke” stickers on the back of VW Beetles, it raises a smile.

Supermarket users are delighted to carry a reusable bag, proudly advertising their environmental credentials, rather than using plastic bags - in parallel they happily buy plastic garbage bags for waste disposal. I prefer to use plastic bags for shopping and re-use them for garbage. I don’t personally understand how I harm the environment that way. There’s always a shortage of plastic bags in the house, so I suspect I am plastic neutral.

In other words, there’s a lot of lip service, but I’m not sure how far real action, which puts its hand deep into your pocket will go. In Michael Lewis’s excellent book “The New New Thing”, a fascinating story of Jim Clark (of Netscape, not Formula 1 fame), the entrepreneur makes an analogy to a breakfast of eggs and bacon. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. 

Finally a note about the science. There has been a good deal of controversy recently, with rather suspect timing, about scientific “cheating”. The first point is that climate predictions are made using climate models. Weather models don’t work, and “cheating” is done using something called data assimilation. That means that if today you predict the weather in five days time, you improve your forecast tomorrow by updating the model with the real data. Since you have errors every day, your four-day forecast tomorrow will be better than your five-day forecast today.

Climate models make long-term forecasts, using variables considered to be the best for prediction. It is natural that these models have inbuilt uncertainty. It seems reasonable that some people fervently believe them and some don’t. We are, for instance, completely unable to predict when the next El Niño will happen. Those cycles are every seven(ish) years, but not always(ish).

The other huge challenge is that the consequences of change for ecosystems are impossible to predict – think dinosaurs and small hairless mammals (aka humans). Incidentally, one of the theories on dinosaur extinction that was around when I was at school was death by constipation. The animals had been bunged up by the change in diet from ferns to flowering plants. Apparently, this is still being discussed. If true, it certainly redefines the Big Bang.

Are there glaciers melting? Of course. Should we reduce carbon emissions? Of course. Saving resources is always a good thing. But we are all sorcerers’ apprentices with respect to effects. Climate oscillations are exactly that, and setting a target cap of two degrees centigrade does not mean the planet will tamely take two steps and then straighten up and fly right. This is not like a fever which subsides to return you to a stable body temperature. It oscillates. The warming and cooling of the economy is a good metaphor. Let’s see how Dubai deals with this change in climate, and whether it changes its name to Do Sell.

The New Inquisition

Every once in a while countries, just like people, go through a confidence crisis. In our globalised world, bad news moves very rapidly: following the colapse of Lehman Bros. just over a year ago, the economic house of cards came tumbling down. All it took was a blast of ill wind from Wall Street, and in the true spirit of chaos theory, the flutter of the butterfly wing duly caused a global hurricane.

Now the US appears to be recovering, there are promising signs in the EU, but the UK seems to be an exception to the rule. China, flush with cash from exports and double digit growth, simply boosted public works, which are in any case a huge internal market, and stimulated consumption. Now it waits, knowing that the old rules still apply when it comes to the relative role of social pressures in east and west. Mao once said that “the killing of one US soldier was a tragedy, whereas the death of one million Chinese was a statistic”, which put the Korean war into perspective.

That comment is of great relevance in Afghanistan, as President Obama prepares to unveil a plan which will boost the US presence there. An article in the English Spectator magazine a couple of weeks back quoted a Taliban fighter as saying that more soldiers only mean more targets. My father used to tell a similar story: Before the start of the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm visited Switzerland, where he was treated to a demonstration of superb marksmanship by the armed forces.

Impressed, he asked “What would happen if you were invaded by a force twice the size of the Swiss army?”

“Each of our soldiers would have to shoot twice.”

The Prussians never invaded Switzerland. Of course, all that neutral banking policy can’t have done any harm either.

In Portugal, the world recession hit on top of an already fragile economy. Just as in the aftermath of the events told in The India Road, and the decades that followed, the country has shut in on itself. EU convergence subsidies have moved east, to the former Iron Curtain nations that have recently joined the Union. By 2013 those subsidies which have been paid for a couple of decades to Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain will end. The country is going through a huge confidence crisis, and in the process, wealth creation is being targeted. As a consequence, those who are able to build businesses and create jobs, the only way to earn our way out of recession, are more and more reticent to do so. Many of the very best are going abroad, a new diaspora.

In a recession, when people are short of money, jobs, and hope, discussions often arise about the relative merits of tax policy changes and public sector cuts, as a means to boost the economy. The perception in most people’s minds is that a few high salaries make an enormous difference.

At 230, Portugal already has the lowest number of MPs per capita of any country in Western Europe. Even if each one had a monthly salary of 10,000 € (they don’t, even MEPs only make two-thirds of that), making them work for free would redistribute an extra twenty cents a month to every person in the country. Or, to put it another way, if one in three people in Portugal work, each wage-earner contributes sixty cents a month to the parliamentary pay packet. Except that tax brackets scale to wealth, so poorer people pay less anyhow. Those on minimum wage pay nothing.

What kills this once-great nation is petty jealousy, the same thing that led to the Jews being denounced and persecuted by the inquisition. Here is an excerpt from The India Road on that very theme, from texts which are 500 years old:

The edicts of the Inquisition allowed a good citizen to denounce a Jewish family. All property would be confiscated, with a proportion reverting to the snitch.

… If they light candles on a Friday evening
If they wear bright clothing on a Saturday
If they eat celery during Easter Week …

The list went on; the sweep was so broad that a small neighbors’ quarrel
could easily become damning “evidence.” 

Of course there are moral issues about salaries, and it makes no sense to distribute large bonuses to a CEO who is responsible for sinking his company. But the same people who clamour for reductions at that level are quite happy to pay the salaries of the Portuguese soccer superstars. Even when, as we recently saw in the World Cup qualifiers, the team only made it by the skin of its teeth.

The Gooey Duck

I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest for about a week, and am spending one day in Vancouver, prior to heading east tomorrow on the long trek back to Europe. Of course it doesn’t compare, but like the Portuguese sailors, I’m looking forward to home.

And yes, I know Vancouver is beautiful, and that one day is nowhere near long enough. But life is the art of the possible.

I’ve been looking at shellfish farms in the Willapa Bay and Puget Sound area, and keeping an eye out for other interesting things. The Portuguese explorer Cabrillo never made it to Puget Sound, and in fact the explorers sailing up the Californian coast under the Spanish flag found the upper section of the coast rather barren, and took a fair old beating, with nowhere inshore to shelter. Cabrillo and others completely missed the entrance to S. Francisco Bay. Incidentally, there is plenty of debate about Cabrillo’s nationality, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. I’m not sure it’s that important, particularly when his achievements are compared with those of the mariners in The India Road, but I did mention in an earlier post that the Spanish Archivo General de las Indias in Seville refers Cabrillo as being from Portugal – and the Spanish are pretty parsimonious about giving away their explorers.

Logging has been a major industry in the northwest, and in certain areas, the pulp mills had a devastating impact on water quality, for instance by discharging chlorine used for bleaching. One small bay I visited yesterday was practically dead for decades because of this. The mill was closed in 1957, and the bay took years to recover. In the long social process, the oystermen and timber people were often at odds, with their disagreements spilling onto the schoolyard where their kids would get into fights due to the reigning animosity.

Nowadays, three million pounds of clams are produced in one section of the bay alone, and the water filtration provided by the animals is an invaluable service in cleaning the bay. A clam will filter about half a liter of water every hour, and at a weight of ten grams or less each, those 1300 tons of clams will get through a million cubic meters of water every day. In US units, that’s over 250 million gallons!

This area of the Pacific is home to a rather impressive bivalve, who goes by the name of geoduck (gooey duck). It is scarcely known in Europe, and I first saw it (and ate it) in China.

Due to its phallic nature, interesting colour scheme, and large proportions, the Chinese unsurprisingly rate it as an aphrodisiac, and consume it with much enthusiasm. The export market over there is huge (sorry), and the animals are about five or six years old when they’re harvested and sold. But they can live for over a hundred years, so they can be bequeathed over several generations, and you may find that you’ve inherited grandpa’s favourite gooeyduck. The Chinese are not able to grow them locally yet, so I guess it’s currently a case of ecological penis-envy.

Speaking of competition, a book was published (in Portuguese) in mid-October romancing the life of the spy, Pero da Covilha, and I am due to attend the launch of another book in Lisbon next week, called “A Spy in the Discoveries”. Once again, this is in Portuguese, whereas my objective was to tell my story to an Anglo-Saxon audience. But the Portuguese translation of my book is going very well, and I am hopeful there will be a version published in time for Christmas.

I suppose I need to finish on-topic, or I’ll be accused of misrepresentation. Life has its wonderful little ways, and as luck would have it, there is a state college at Olympia which has the gooeyduck as a mascot for their athletics department. What could be more appropriate, particularly when confronted with the stirring lyrics of the Geoduck Fight Song ?

The older we are, the better we were…

The quote appears in a book by Victor Niederhoffer, interestingly titled “the education of a speculator”. I spent ten minutes on Amazon doing a cross-search to remember the author’s name – I used to have a copy of the book, but it seems to have vanished. Perhaps the recession destroyed it, who knows? As soon as I found a finance book by an author called Victor, loud bells rang, and it took me a few seconds to get the rest. I’m amazed at the power of the brain to dredge up information from years ago with only a little help, and I’m amazed at the brain itself. One of these days I’ll write about that.

At a table behind me at lunch were two men in their seventies, one of whom had lived a part of his life in Africa, I would guess Angola or Mozambique. In Portugal, it’s relatively easy to find people of that generation who had a similar experience.

They were discussing with some gusto the failings of the young generation, ranging from the inability to read (said one), and count (added the other), to the lack of knowledge about geography and politics. Among the foremost causes was the usual suspect, the computer.

I suppose it is that capacity of successive generations to forget the evils of their time which allows people to pass this kind of judgement. It explains why folks always seem to think the weather was better in their youth, or how schooldays can ever be classified as “the best days of your life”. It is that dilution of collective memory that starts new wars and wins elections for the incumbent.

Portugal, and the world as whole, is a far better place now than it was fifty years ago. Much of Eastern Europe was then under oppressive regimes, with no freedom of speech or thought. Portugal was about to embark on a fifteen year colonial war, which would ultimately topple the regime. The illiteracy rate in 1900 was 79%, and in 1980 it was still 18%. In 2003 it had fallen to 7%. Most of the kids who were contemporaries of those restaurant pundits could neither read nor write, let alone count.

Yes, it’s true that kids could know more, and that videobite news leaves little room for thought, leading to an immediacy which is often unsuited to the real world. Reflection is a good thing, but lots of activities favoured by youngsters promote that. Any child who likes games needs to think of a winning strategy, whether it’s soccer, chess or the latest esoteric offering on Wii. Surely Guitar Hero is better than air guitar…

And as for chess, don’t ever elect a president who can’t play it! Sometime last year, it struck me as a cool idea that a chess game might be played by three people against each other. Like most of my “good” ideas, this was not new, but I read a comment on it stating “normal chess isn’t difficult enough for ya?” which sums it up.

The other thing older people don’t get is the value of experience which is factored in the comparisons. Donald Knuth is quoted as saying that he believes it is important to teach a range of materials, including the things that don’t work. I subscribe. Kids only find out what works after getting hit on the head with what doesn’t. That’s reflection.

Barriers to entry

Today is the best day of my life. For all of us, this is an undeniable fact, since other, potentially (I don’t know yet) better days, have gone, and the rest are not yet here. Anyhow, it could be the last. I often wonder when I see all these young men and women getting killed, about how they felt that morning, which turned out to be their last.

Whenever I see people who are a good deal older than me it’s very simple to see myself at that stage, looking back at how I am now with a measure of longing, if not envy. For that reason alone, today always has to be the best day in my life. One of the golden rules is to not spend your time worrying about what tomorrow might bring.

The India Road is now well into its translation into Portuguese, so I have been revisting various parts of the book, checking meanings and interpretations, suggesting words, and in some cases finding mistakes. The translation is like another copy edit, and the guy who is doing the job is first-class.

Latin languages are more convoluted than English, and texts tend to become longer and more intricate. The India Road is based on an amazing story, fraught with difficulty and complexity, jumping across astronomy, oceanography, navigation, politics, and commerce. The aim of the book is to tell it in as simple a way as possible, adding plenty of human emotion, to break down barriers to entry – we have our work cut out trying to keep the translation simple.

Apparently it’s not so easy to find people who will translate a text into the author’s native language – the writer often succumbs to the temptation of micromanagement, and the translator can’t do his or her job. I hate micromanagement, it completely stifles initiative. In an academic context it suffocates faster than cyanide.

The problem is that it’s much easier to browbeat youngsters into that mindset than empower them to think, dream and soar. In Portugal, and many other countries, their educators often prefer it, particularly if they are not confident in their own knowledge; a thinking student will quickly expose a gap a mile wide. But in the end, these are severe barriers to entry for many young people, robbing them of the right balance of knowledge, imagination, self-confidence, and humility that can lead them up the yellow brick road.