Let a supercomputer be my Judge!

The baffling decision by a tribunal of the southern Italian city of L’Aquila, condemning to 6 years in jail for involuntary manslaughter a group of scientists, accused to have failed to forecast an earthquake – the news went around the world, rightly covering the Italian legal system with ridicule – had been reversed yesterday in appeal.

The team of scientists called ‘Commission Great Risks’ had met on March 31, 2009, five days before the earthquake which killed 309 people, to evaluate data about a series of light tremors which were recorded by seismographs. They then assured the population, not officially but at a personal level, that all was all right, to stay calm and don’t panic. They were accused of ‘false assurances’ a crime which do not appear in any legal code of any country.

This sentence of absolution has been met with disbelief by the relatives of the victims and even by politicians. Politicians are those who should have taken care of the safety of the buildings which had collapsed and instruct all the citizens on what they should do if there would be an earthquake, like they do in Japan with schoolchildren. While it is understandable the airing of grief by the victims’ relatives and a little bit less is the indignation of those politicians while speaking to the press. It has always been easier to ‘kill the astrologer’ than planning properly for an emergency.

According to Italy’s justice system there is a first degree, then the appeal and then the losers will try the Court of Cassation. Because of this, theoretically, the scientists Bernardo De Bernardinis, Giulio Selvaggi, Franco Barberi, Enzo Boschi, Mauro Dolce, Claudio Eva, Michele Calvi may still end up in jail for this supposed crime. Only De Bernardis, a local head of the ‘Civil Protection unit’ received a suspended sentence of two years. The city of L’Aquila is historically prone to earthquakes.

The judges who had condemned the accused in the first place had clearly bent to popular pressure, which bring back to my mind my pet idea about how to pass sentences. We should take out judgement for complex cases from human judges and entrust the judgment to supercomputers. All sentences, commas, debate, counter debates should be loaded into a supercomputer and then we should ask for a sentence. In a fraction of a second – not months and years – we should get the judgment with the motivations together with the mitigating or aggravating factors. Then such judgment should be scrutinized by a team of wise men detached from the place and the people involved, holding the power to accept it or object to it. Thus no 2003 Space Odyssey and no Big Brother effect would be called into play. I do believe that this is possible and, after the initial glitches, will be good for us all. All mistakes due to human weakness, laziness, false impressions, emotions would be avoided.

 

 

Is math boring?

Mathematic may be a boring subject, but often it is so just because some teachers don’t know the thrilling history hiding behind the numbers, or they don’t know how to tell to their students. Take for instance the claim made by the Greek mathematician Proclus (410 -485) that politicians and rich landlords were cheating common people, not familiar with geometry and math, by convincing them that plots of land with a longer perimeter translates into a larger area. Just think of a flat 100 feet long and 10 feet wide. It has a longer perimeter than a flat of, say, 50 feet long and 40 feet wide. In fact the first has a perimeter of 220 feet, the second 180 feet but the surface of the first will be 1.000 square feet, while the second will be 2000.

In prehistory the most advanced mathematicians were the Sumerians. There are surviving baked clay tablets, some dating four thousand years before Christ, which are mainly concerned about “real estate” problems. In fact they were not yet able to handle square roots, for that we have to get to the Egyptian, the Chinese and the Greeks, but they knew how to handle simple quadratic linear equations.

There is a famous book by Muhammad Ibn Musa, the Kithab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah, where the second word shows the origin of the term algebra. The Arabs saved some of the old inventions for the modern world, transmitting them down to the mathematicians of the Renaissance.

The Tuscan algebrists of the fourteen century were convinced that the solution of cubic and quadratic equations was a mission impossible. In fact Luca Pacioli (1445-1517) a friend of Leonardo Da Vinci, in his popular treatise Summa de Arithmetica concluded that there was no possible solution. In spite of such conclusion the brightest mathematical minds of the time struggled to find it. The first to crack it was a mathematician from Bologna, Scipione Dal Ferro (1465-1526). He did not publish his findings but disclosed them to some of his pupils. One of them leaked it out, after his death, to Tartaglia (the stammerer in Italian) from Brescia (1500 – 1557). He boasted aloud about it, claiming to be the inventor. Here enter another odd character: Girolamo Cardano (1501 – 1576?) a physician, astrologer, historian and many more things. His autobiography had been translated in many languages and it is still a classic in his genre. He tried in vain to get the magic formula out of Tartaglia, but without success. He then tried flattery, inviting him to Milan, paying for all his expenses. Tartaglia took the bait and in 1539, perhaps due to generous offerings of fine wine and the introduction to some powerful political figures, he unveiled the secret to Cardano using a poem. He then demanded him not to publish and keep the secret. Few years later Cardan discovered that the real inventor had been Dal Ferro not Tartaglia. Then, together with his gifted student, Ludovico Ferrari (1522-1565) who will die prematurely murdered by his own sister, in 1545 Cardan published in Nuremberg a book which constitutes a milestone in modern algebra, its title is the Ars Magna. Besides the cubic equations also the solution of the quadratic equations is elegantly given there, but it is probably due to Ferrari. He mentioned Tartaglia as the man who disclosed the formula to him but despite that the answer of Tartaglia was red hot rage. A series of public letters ensued, called cartelli full of insults and with a final public showdown in Milan. The European scientific community was holding its breath, waiting for the verdict. Ferrari made mincemeat of poor Tartaglia, who had to back off. After that even the solution of quintic equations seemed close at hand, and all the most brilliant mathematical minds set to work on it. But for three centuries they did not get results.In fact the equations in X3 and X4 could be resolved by a system of scaling down them by one degree but when the same system was applied on the X5, things went wrong.

The first to have understood that there was no standard solution possible was Lagrange (1736 – 1813) from Turin, but was Paolo Ruffini (1765-1822) from Modena, who spent all his life on the quintic and finally proved, in a rather convolute book which went unnoticed, that a solution of X5 by using only additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions and extractions of roots, will never be found. To solve them an elliptic approach was needed, and it is still used today.

The final words on such millennial problem are those of two whiz-kinds. Norwegian Niels Abel (1802-1829) and Frenchman Evariste Galois (1811-1832). Abel died in obscurity, with his diary which went lost but then resurfaced in Florence in 1952. Abel introduced the concept of reduction ad absurdum in algebra, that is, instead of looking for proofs on the solvability it is better to concentrate on the contradictions. To atone with such neglect, in 2002, the Norwegian government created the Abel prize for mathematic, a sort of Nobel.  Also Evariste Galois was a tragic figure: short tempered, a school dropout for having sneered at his math professor, a revolutionary who was shot mysteriously in a dark alley of Paris for unknown reasons. He tackled the problem by using symmetry and creating, out of nowhere, a new branch of algebra, known today as Galois Theory he remains to this day one of the most beautiful minds ever existed.

 

 

 

Was Macau’s Saint Paul Cathedral drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci?

The Cathedral of Saint Paul (Sao Paulo) was built by the Jesuits at the very centre of Macau. The construction drawings were originally drawn by the blessed Carlo Spinola s.j. (1564 – 1622) who was later martyrized in Nagasaki, Japan.

Today this church lays in ruin, after a fire had destroyed the main building during the XIX century. The only standing part is the stone façade—intricately carved and completed only between 1620 and 1667 by exiled Japanese and local craftsmen.

It was always tought that Carlo Spinola took his inspiration for the façade from the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome  (opened in 1584) but we are here putting forward a new, rather borderline, idea: Carlo Spinola may have seen a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci kept at Venice’s Academy (Basilica, Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia 238 v.) and took inspiration from it.

All the documents now in Venice were acquired in 1822 and were coming from the personal collection of Giuseppe Bossi (1777 – 1815). It is not clear how and where Bossi bought them but they were certainly coming from the Mazenta brothers who had somehow get them from Francesco Melzi (1491/93 – 1568/70) a disciple of Leonardo. Melzi took them back from Amboise, France, around 1520, after Leonardo’s death, as his inheritance. His son Orazio stored them away ‘in a neglected attic’ of his villa in Vaprio d’Adda. So neglected that in April 1587 Lelio Gavardi d’Asola a teacher to the Melzi’s children, stole most or all of them to Pisa. Ambrogio and Guido Mazenta convinced him to return them back to Milan but a few they kept, with Orazio’s permission.  In 1590 Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor working for the Spanish Court, purchased the lot from Orazio Melzi and took them to Madrid – save those which the Mazenta brothers had kept.

Venice indeed possess only few of Leonardo Da Vinci’s works but most of them are famous, one is the celebrated  Vitruvian man, second only to Mona Lisa for popularity, expecially after the planetary success of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. In Venice we find also what is perhaps the most mysterious architectural drawning by Leonardo.(1) His sketch of a Basilica.

This sketch for a façade was traditionally assigned to the year 1490 but it is today seen as one of his late works: according to Carlo Pedretti it should be assigned to the years 1513 – 1516. The great Leonardist Heyderreicht saw in it: ‘A firmly Gothic construction, only apparently belonging to the Renaissance and very impressive for the plastic-dynamic new style.’ (2) Atkin also underlines its striking Baroque characters. (3) That Leonardo had a composition quality which later will be called Baroque has been spotted earlier.(4) About the inborn Baroque’s taste in Leonardo also Frank Zollner speaking of The Fight for the Standard by Rubens,  wrote(5) that: ‘For more than a century the Louvre version of the Battle of Anghiari has been regarded as a an example of the Flemish Baroque, and therefore one might find it hard to accept that this drawing gives a reliable rendering of an early Cinquecento work of art. However, looking at his [Leonardo’s] drawings for the Trivulzio Monument it becomes clear that at the beginning of the sixteen century, Leonardo achieved a composition quality which much later would be categorized as baroque.”

The similarities between the sketch by Leonardo and the façade of the Church of San Paul of Macau are indeed impressive, but is it possible that Spinola had ever seen this drawing by Leonardo? The answer is yes, it is indeed possible because he studied in Milan and Rome starting from 1584 and, after having been ordained a priest in 1594, in 1596 he departed to China and Japan. What is certain is that from 1521 to 1568 and from 1586 until 1590 all the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci were easily available and visible in Milan, Pisa and Rome, only after 1590, having been taken to Madrid, they were no longer easy to see.

Carlo Spinola, like all Jesuits dispatched to the East had to follow a rigorous and intensive artistic as well as scientific training – he later taught mathematics and astronomy in Kyoto – because Jesuits understood earlier than others that to be accepted in China and Japan meant to be proficient in several disciplines, not only in theology and philosophy.

An article based on this post has been published on the Macanese newspaper Ponto Final, Macau Antigo and lusofonias.

http://pontofinalmacau.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/a-catedral-de-sao-paulo-em-macau-foi-desenhada-por-leonardo-da-vinci/

http://macauantigo.blogspot.hk/2014/11/catedral-de-sao-paulo-desenhada-por.html

http://blog.lusofonias.net/?p=21942

 

1. Firpo L. Leonardo Architetto e Urbanista Torino, 1963. On the recto we find notes and drawings about gravity, arms’ movements and falling of weights, which should be dated before the year 1500.

2. Heydenreich L.H. Die Sakralbau-Studien Leonardo da Vinci’s Leipzig, 1929.

3. Arking D. The Ideas of a great architect Rome, 1952. This sketch ‘anticipating a new style’ has been described by several authors. Leonardo is not copying any existing church but he is creating something new. The dating vary greatly: from 1490 until 1514. See also Maltese 1954 p. 358; Brizio, 1964 p. 402; Cogliati Arano, 1966, p. 23-25; Pedretti 1977, p.373; Pedretti 1978 p. 254-255; Cogliati Arano 1980, p. 45-47.

4. On the Baroque qualities of the Battle of Anghiari see M.Lessing ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’s Pazzia Bestialissima,’ The Burlington Magazine, LXIV, 1934, pp. 219-231.

5.Frank Zollner Rubens Reworks Leonardo ‘The Fight for the Standard’ in Achademia Leonardo Vinci, Vol. VI, Giunti, Florence, 1991.

Brittany Maynard and Euthanasia – An Update

 

Contrary to our best hopes and prayers Brittany has decided to carry on with her suicide on Saturday, the 1st of November. We do hope that no other people will follow her example in the future. May she rests in peace.

The very sad story of Brittany Maynard, diagnosed with Stage 4 glioblastoma earlier this year and given six months to live, is everywhere, on newspapers and in televisions around the world. Maynard and her husband Dan Diaz had moved from San Francisco to Oregon – one of only five states that have death-with-dignity laws. That’s what they call euthanasia – good death in Greek – to reduce the emotive impact on the public. Maynard plans to end her life in her own bed on November 1 – a day after her husband’s birthday – as a cancer patient she has been lobbying lawmakers in other states to pass legislation that would allow people to choose how they want to die.  Brittany Maynard says that she love life but she wants to be the one to switch off when time comes to choose manner of her death. At age 29 she was filled with high hopes for her future: starting a family with her newlywed husband, traveling and going on mountain-climbing with friends. But on January 1, 2014, everything changed: doctors determined that the source of her persistent headaches was a malignant tumour in her brain. At first, Brittany was given 5-10 years to live but then this April Maynard was diagnosed with a cancer which will likely take her life within six months. This, by the way, is an horrendous habit by American doctors, who always want to predict, like in a game, the time of your death while in Italy they speak only with the relatives. We are all condemned to death but why trouble ourselves with the date and the time? Which happiness can we get in our lives by knowing the time when the bomb we are sitting on will go off?

Maynard then decided to take her life, or whatever was left of it, into her own hands. On Monday, Mrs Maynard launched an online video campaign for Compassion & Choices, an end-of-life non-profit organization, to promote death-with-dignity laws, which currently exist in only five states. In order to have the option of ending her life on her own terms, Maynard, her husband, Dan Diaz, and her parents moved from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, which has euthanasia. On November 1, Maynard plans to take a pill given to her by her doctors and painlessly fly away on another dimension, that’s what we call death, surrounded by her loved ones right in Dan’s bedroom, listening to her favourite music.

What has surprised me most s the fact that an article published by the popular Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera drew hundreds of positive comments, which for a Catholic country I did not expect. The few voices of disagreement were shut down by commentators with harshness or condescendence, as if speaking to small children. I disagree with euthanasia even if I may agree with suicide. If one wants to fall on his sword – as the Romans did – I can accept it, even if falling on your sword take great courage. I don’t agree on institutionalized euthanasia because that will open the floodgates of ‘forced suicide’ and abuses.

I watched a few years ago the sad story of a British couple: the husband was confined on a wheelchair and to an oxygen mask and he decided to end his life in order to free his wife from all inconveniences. They flew to Switzerland and the man was shown taking a lethal dose of poison from a nazi-looking Swiss doctor, while his favourite music was playing. Looking into his eyes I could see that he was not really ready to go down that road – no one of us will ever be… – but he was doing it to release the burden on his wife. But euthanasia’s victims will not just fade away, no matter which words we use to describe what they went through. They will leave behind scars among the livings which will never heal and many of them will later regret to have accepted that bargain, no matter how sick their beloved were. Serious doctors tell us that death can be rarely predicted with high accuracy and psychiatric assessments are not fool-proof – several cases of patients which had gone through euthanasia because they thought to be terminally ill have been already recorded – and powerful painkillers are available. We should not forget that in several developing countries, including Hong Kong, the population is aging and call by doctors or relatives ‘to go gently’ will be mounting but we should not set easily aside all calls to resist euthanasia, because they are based on thousand of years experience not only on moral and religious considerations. The first precept set by Hippocrates in his oath for doctors was not to harm the patients (primum non nocere) that cannot be seen as a mere coincidence. We see everywhere calls to politicians to change the laws and make euthanasia legal because politicians should ‘’reflect society not lead it.’’ I disagree because the first aim of a good politician should be to defend the weak and the poor including the protection offered by the law to sick patients from self-serving relatives and easy-going doctors. I still remember the words of my good friend Alfonso – who died at 53 with mesothelioma caused by exposition to asbestos – when he talked about the marvel, despite all his pain and sufferings, which he felt on seeing the grass of his garden grow every morning and wanting to enjoy it up to last minute of his tragically short life. I end here wishing and praying for a miracle for Brittany Maynard because miracles do happen, even if not all of us have eyes to see them.

Update on 31.X.2014.

Brittany Maynard hasn’t decided yet when she’ll end her life.

“I still feel good enough and I still have enough joy and I still laugh and smile with my family and friends enough that it doesn’t seem like the right time right now,” Maynard says in a video released to CNN on Wednesday. “But it will come, because I feel myself getting sicker. It’s happening each week.”

Since her announcement  Brittany has become a world celebrity and this can only increase her hopes and the feeling of being loved. She has seen the grass growing in the garden, as my friend Alfonso was saying…

A video explaining her choice has been watched by more than 8.8 million on YouTube. And she has become, unfortunately, a prominent spokeswoman for the “death with dignity” movement, which advocates that terminally ill patients be allowed to receive medication that will let them die on their own terms. Maynard acknowledges that some have been skeptical about her reading of the term ‘dignity’.

“When people criticize me for not waiting longer, or, you know, whatever they’ve decided is best for me, it hurts,” she says, “because really, I risk it every day, every day that I wake up.”

“I think sometimes people look at me and they think. ‘Well you don’t look as sick as you say you are,’ which hurts to hear, because when I’m having a seizure and I can’t speak afterwards, I certainly feel as sick as I am,” she says, with tears in her eyes.

“They mostly do boil down to my family and friends and making sure they all know how important they are to me and how much I love them,” she says.

Philip Johnson, a Catholic seminarian who says he was also diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, criticized Maynard’s choice.

“A diagnosis of terminal cancer uproots one’s whole life, and the decision to pursue physician-assisted suicide seeks to grasp at an ounce of control in the midst of turmoil,” he wrote in a column posted on the Catholic Diocese of Raleigh’s website. “It is an understandable temptation to take this course of action, but that is all that it is — a temptation to avoid an important reality of life.”

Here is a letter that Joe Neyer has written to Maynard,

Dying with dignity includes living with quality.

Hello.  My name is Joe Neyer.  I was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) in November 2012. I had to face a terminal diagnosis, so I can relate to what Brittany Maynard is facing. I was given 14 months to live. I had surgery and chemo, but the tumor returned, which made my prognosis even worse. Months at best, they said and more likely weeks. That was over a year ago now. I was given options, but they all involved living as a glio patient on chemotherapy or other hospital trials and that was not really how I wanted to finish out my life experience. I decided to include medical treatment with other alternatives.I looked into what other ways I could approach the “baby” growing in my brain. I realized that my right to die included my right to live, that I could accept my condition and still accept being alive and living as well as I could. And in that acceptance alone I began to see positive effects in my condition.I noticed others were also looking into these same things, asking similar questions, and discovered more and more. It is not without ups and downs, but opening to the actuality of the condition does help shed understanding on the fear that can arise when given a terminal diagnosis. Now I am looking to understand it, not run from it, so I pour my heart into that, understanding as much as I can. Understanding unfolds like a lily on a pond, naturally opening up and revealing what seems hidden in the depths. I am now almost two years out from that diagnosis and defying all expectations.I am not bed-ridden, not incoherent — actually seeing improvements in all areas of function.It is not a miracle cure.I am still a human dealing with glioblastoma.I take some meds: anti-seizure, low dose steroids and pain meds, adjusting these as needed as time moves along. Also, I include all sorts of other practices that have been a part of my life for decades now. So, it seems to me there are many ways to approach a terminal diagnosis.Sometimes we are limited by our own assumptions or by what the doctors and charts tell us ‘will be.’ Medicine should not be ignored or neglected of course, but there are often other things we can include that will make a big difference, not only in quality of life, but in the extension of life as well.  As a human with glioblastoma multiforme who is defying the odds and the expectations, I think it is important to share this aspect as well when we are talking about the right to die with dignity. It was great to see this conversation brought into the open by Brittany and there is much more to explore, it seems. Those with glio who watched her story were given death with dignity as an option. That is one story to be told here. I would like to add to it about living with quality while facing a terminal condition. It seems to me those same people afflicted with GBM who saw her story may benefit to know there are other options that they do not know. Not only on how to live, but potentially how to live well — if we are open to possibility. The right to die with dignity involves the right to live with quality.  We are beginning to find out just how much we can do in this regard when it concerns a terminal diagnosis such as GBM.

Thanks for your time.

 

 

The Dead Soldier’s Room

The parents of lieutenant Hubert Rochereau built a memorial for their son, fallen on 26 April 1918 in Belgium. They did it right in their house of Bélâbre, France, where he was born on 10 October 1896 and where he grew up. It is a sort of time capsule with his studio and bedroom left untouched since the fateful day they saw him leaving, for a last time, to the war. They just added his uniform, which is now falling into pieces, his medals, his plumed hat and some photographs. All is still there unchanged, ready for his return from the front as a young and victorious hero. It is a poignant remainder of the folly of war and a monument to the vanity of all human passions. A lace bedspread is laid on the bed, and there is a vial of glass with some soil in it, with the words: ‘The earth of Flanders in which our dear child fell and which has kept his remains for four years”. All his objects are still visible: the spurs of a cavalry officer, his sword and a fencing helmet, pistols, his pipe and a French flag, his books covered with dust.

That was certainly his parents’ way to bear the unbearable grief which had stricken them. People who lose their beloved ones sometimes wait for their return for the rest of their lives; they keep their shoes shining and dust their jackets every few days.  Hubert Rochereau’s parents decided to leave his rooms exactly as they were, and when they moved out of that house in 1935, they put down in the sale contract – certainly in exchange for a large discount – that Rochereau’s room should remain unchanged for 5 centuries. “This clause had no legal basis,” points out the current owner, Daniel Fabre, who showed the room to the Nouvelle République newspaper. On inheriting the house from the grandparents, he respected the wishes of the Rochereau and will continue to do so.

The words of a poem written in 1897 by Rudyard Kipling come to mind. Kipling’s only son was also killed in Flanders, in 1917 by a German bullet that went through his head while jumping out of a trench. 580,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of Flanders.

Far-called, our navies melt away;
   On dune and headland sinks the fire:   
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!   
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,   
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
A book recently published in the USA is also exploring the same heart-breaking sensations. The title is Bedrooms of the Fallen by Ashley Gilbertson, it is a collection of photographs of the rooms of 40 American soldiers fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq, with short interviews with their parents. Also there we find pictures of their rooms, they objects, all left untouched by their mothers and fathers. Grief’s rituals remain the same throughout the ages.

 

 

 

 

Clare Hollingworth – Hong Kong’s Living Treasure – Turns 103.

Clare Hollingworth can be seen at the FCC – The Foreign Correspondent Club in Lower Albert Road – where a table is always reserved for her. She will turn 103 on Friday 10 October 2014 and she can be considered a living treasure of Hong Kong. Clare was born on the same day that Sun Yat-Sen with other Chinese revolutionaries overthrew the Qing dynasty in China!

She has always been a journalist and a writer, throughout her life never wanting to retire and when she sits for lunch at the FCC she always ask for the earphones to listen to the latest news broadcasted by the BBC.

The greatest scoop in her life was a phone call she made after watching Stuka planes bombing units of the Polish army and her newspaper The Daily Telegraph came out with the title announcing ‘WWII HAS BEGUN!’ That day was the 29 August 1939 and Clare Hollingworth had been employed by just one week by The Daily Telegraph and dispatched to Poland to report on the worsening situation in Europe.

Clare borrowed a car from the British Consul in Katowice to depart on a fact-finding mission in Germany and while driving along the border she saw a massive build-up of Nazi troops and tanks facing Poland. The following morning she called the British Embassy in Warsaw to tell them that the German invasion of Poland was on the way. To convince the incredulous embassy’s staffs, she held the telephone out of her room’s windows to capture the sounds of German bombs exploding.

She wrote:

“The frontier is still closed to local traffic. Everywhere I saw signs of the most intense military activity. In the two miles between Hindenburg and Gleiwitz I was passed by 65 military despatch riders on motorcycles. The only cars to be seen were those belonging to the military.”

Clare has remained a war reporter for all her life, showing a great mettle and uncommon courage. She reported from Palestine, Algeria, China, Aden and Vietnam. In 1946 she was a survivor of the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem, where 91 people were killed. She was married twice, with Vandeleur Robinson in 1936 but they divorced in 1951 and with Geoffrey Hoare in 1951 but he died in 1965. She has been living in Hong Kong since the early 1980s.

Clare is the author of five books:

Poland’s Three Weeks’ War (1940);

There’s a German Right Behind Me (1945);

The Arabs and the West (1950);

Mao and the Men against Him (1984);

Front Line – Memoirs – (1990, updated with Neri Tenorio in 2005.)

Clare Hollingworth’s 103rd Birthday Party will be held at the FCC on Thursday, October 9, 2014, in the Bunker of the FCC, from 5:30pm – 7:30pm

Happy Birthday, Clare!

 

The Rise of the Inward-Bound Courses also known as Philosophical Retreats.

The popular magazine The Economist publishes the column ‘Schumpeter’ – named after the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883 – 1950) – which is normally dedicated to current issues of business management. On the latest issue (October 4, 2014) we have found an interesting piece which we would like to comment. The subject is the increasing popularity of the so called inward-bound courses, versus a decrease in interest of the outward-bound courses which, up to now, are quite common for top managers of big corporate institutions.

Here is the link to the complete article:

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21621778-business-leaders-would-benefit-studying-great-writers-philosopher-kings

And here is their definition of outward-bound courses:

 It is hard to rise to the top in business without doing an outward-bound course. You spend a precious weekend in sweaty activity—kayaking, climbing, abseiling and the like. You endure lectures on testing character and building trust. And then you scarper home as fast as you can. These strange rituals may produce a few war stories to be told over a drink. But in general they do nothing more than enrich the companies that arrange them.

Here is a definition of inward bound courses:

It is time to replace this rite of managerial passage with something much more powerful: inward-bound courses. Rather than grappling with nature, business leaders would grapple with big ideas. Rather than proving their leadership abilities by leading people across a ravine, they would do so by leading them across an intellectual chasm. The format would be simple. A handful of future leaders would gather in an isolated hotel and devote themselves to studying great books. They would be deprived of electronic distractions. During the day a tutor would ensure their noses stay in their tomes; in the evening the inward-bounders would be encouraged to relate what they had read to their lives. It is easy to poke fun at the idea of forcing high-flying executives to read the classics. One could play amusing games thinking up titles that might pique their interest: “Thus Spake McKinsey”, or “Accenture Shrugged”, perhaps. Or pairing books with personality types: “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” for a budding Donald Trump and “Crime and Punishment” for a budding Conrad Black. Or imagining what Nietzschean corporate social responsibility would look like. Or Kierkegaardian supply-chain management.

The idea that a great manager or a commander must possess a classical preparation is not new, both in the East and in the West. Confucius wrote six centuries before the birth of Christ that a true gentleman should be able to play music but not too well. A similar concept was also expressed by Aristotle. In Roman times a successful statist or general should delve more into philosophy than on the technicalities of his trade. Girolamo Cardano accused Agrippina and Seneca, Nero’s mother and tutor, in his Neronis Encomium (1562) of having criminally deprived him of the benefits of the ‘sacred philosophy’ in order to render him unable to properly rule the Roman state, thus forcing him to get back to them for advice and guidance. The ultimate aim of inward-bound courses should be the development of the concept of Mindfulness which should lead to the creation of a thoughtful awareness of our place in society and in life. A mindful person will not steal and cheat but rather he or she will be willing to take personal responsibilities for his actions. Otherwise, not doing that, he or she will move into stupidity, isolation and live always under the influence of a bad conscience. If we look at the CV of the most successful American and European CEO we can find out that, surprisingly, many of them had studied philosophy at university. For instance Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, was a philosophy postgraduate at Oxford University and toyed with the idea of becoming an academic before choosing the life of a billionaire, this shows that to be successful we should have studied and digested the classics, even better when we were young and with a fresh mind. The great danger is that after becoming big shots our minds will be closed and ‘full of rubbish’ and in that case during our philosophical retreats we may just want to get smart pills to be used during board meetings.

 Inward-bound courses would do wonders for “thought leadership”. There are good reasons why the business world is so preoccupied by that notion at the moment: the only way to prevent your products from being commoditised or your markets from being disrupted is to think further ahead than your competitors. But companies that pose as thought leaders are often “thought laggards”: risk analysts who recycle yesterday’s newspapers, and management consultants who champion yesterday’s successes just as they are about to go out of business. Inward-bound courses would do something even more important than this: they would provide high-flyers with both an anchor and a refuge. High-flyers risk becoming so obsessed with material success that they ignore their families or break the law. Philosophy-based courses would help executives overcome their obsession with status symbols. It is difficult to measure your worth in terms of how many toys you accumulate when you have immersed yourself in Plato. The business world has been groping towards inward-bound courses for years. Many successful CEOs have made a point of preserving time for reflection: Bill Gates, when running Microsoft, used to retreat to an isolated cottage for a week and meditate on a big subject; and Jack Welch set aside an hour a day for undistracted thinking at GE.

The book by William Deresiewicz Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life Free Press, 2014 is a book in which  the author argues that universities and school are inadequate and should be changed inserting more old style philosophy in them. He is convinced that colleges should re-introduce more liberal arts and humanities, that is English literature and Western classics.

A literary or a philosophical retreat would be good to busy men and women and help them refocus their lives, as it is no use to keep pedalling on a bicycle without understanding on which direction we are heading to.

 

 

Italians did it 2 years earlier. October 1914, the Dardanelles.

4 October 1914. One hundred years ago the first operations in the Dardanelles begun with the participation of ships of the British Royal Navy supported by French, Russian and Australian units. It was a purely naval operation at the beginning but it failed to achieve its aims due to the strong fortifications and the presence of Krupp artilleries, sea mines and German advisers. The Ottoman Empire was an unaligned power in 1914 but the British had confiscated 2 battleships constructed for the Ottoman Empire which were in British shipyards. To draw Turkey to its side Germany pretended to send a gift of two ships, the SMS Goeben and the cruiser SMS Breslau, as replacements. But in fact the crews were all Germans. The Turks decided to close the Dardanelles to Allied shipping following an incident of 27 September 1914, when the British seized an Ottoman torpedo boat. This drastic decision was actually taken by the German military advisors stationed in the Dardanelles and without informing the Ottoman government. On 28 October, the Ottoman fleet, controlled by Germans began raiding Russian ports in the Black Sea. Odessa and Sevastopol were bombarded, a minelayer and gunboat were sunk. Russia was thus forced to declare war on the Ottoman Empire on the 2 November, and the British followed suit on 6 November. On 3 November 1914, Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the first British naval attack on the Dardanelles following the opening of hostilities between Ottoman and Russian empires. This attack actually took place before a formal declaration of war had been made by Britain against the Ottoman Empire. Admiral Fisher was recalled from retirement at the end of October 1914 by Winston Churchill and forced to draw plans for a naval action in the Dardanelles, which was Churchill pet idea but the two men continually quarrelled throughout the campaign, and Fisher finally resigned on 15 May 1915 after repeated threats to do so and having abandoned his post – with calls of hang him for desertion -. Then the British carried on with their attack with the battle cruisers of Carden’s Mediterranean Squadron, HMS Indomitable and Indefatigable, as well as the obsolete French battleships Suffren and Vérité. It ended in a disaster because the battle of the 18 March 1915 resulted in a victory for the Ottoman Empire. For just 118 casualties, they sank three battleships and damaged another with mines and inflicted seven hundred casualties on the British-French fleet. That operation was originally conceived to be purely naval due to a lack of available troops but by early February, it was decided that more regular infantry was needed. Contingents of Royal Marines were to be supplemented by the last unallocated regular division, the British 29th Division. It was dispatched to Egypt, to join Australian and New Zealand troops which were already undergoing training. At the outset of the operation the expected role of the infantry was to be the occupation of Constantinople and the taking of the straits was to be accomplished by the Entente naval forces, but plans were changed. What was to become the Battle of Gallipoli, a 10-month battle of attrition, began at 07:30 on 19 February 1915. The subsequent involvement of Australian and N. Zealand troops, which were machine gunned on Gallipoli shores remains one of the blackest page in their history. Few people outside Italy remember or know that the idea of forcing the Dardanelles was though feasible by Winston Churchill because it had been somehow carried out by Italians only two years before, during the Turkish- Italian War of 1911-1912. That war ended with an Italian victory and the occupation of Libya and the islands of the Dodecanese.

The Dardanelles were forced by an Italian squadron of 5 warships (Spica, Centauro, Perseo, Astore, Climene) led by Commander Enrico Millo di Casalgiate, a native of Chiavari in Liguria (1865 – 1930) who was in command of the dreadnaught Vettor Pisani in 1911 and there he planned the violation of the Dardanelles which he actually carried out in the night between the 18 and the 19 July 1912. He himself participated, being on board of the first ship of the line up, the Spica. The idea was to use torpedoes against the Ottoman battleships anchored there but the Italian ships were spotted after breaking in and were unable to torpedo the Ottoman fleet because of intense artillery fire. Millo for his daring attempt – which proved to be a propaganda coup reported all over the world – was awarded a gold medal for bravery.

 

Ave, Obama, morituri te salutant!

My friend Bruno sent me an email to express his admiration for the rhetoric qualities displayed yesterday – while speaking at the United Nations – by President Barak Obama. In fact he spoke without reading a script and doing all the right pauses, the right movements of the head and arms.

I was also quite impressed but I answered that before entering into politics Obama had taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School and had been a civil rights attorney. In a court, especially an American one, the way an attorney moves, speaks, reasons and that way he piles up his arguments is the key to an absolution or a condemnation because the popular jury will be convinced, one way or another.

I remember that during his first electoral campaign by Obama, while sparring with John McCain, he had greatly impressed British author Jeffrey Archer who spoke about it while presenting his latest novel at the FCC. Archer – more than a month before election day – had no doubts about who will be the next president of the United States. He told us that the next president would certainly be Barak Obama and he added that John McCain challenged Obama on a debate about racial discrimination in America, a grave mistake, according to Archer, for two reasons: first, because the colour of Obama’s skin made him well prepared on the that argument and, second, because Obama was one of the greatest rhetoricians of our times.

The art of rhetoric in classical antiquity was one of the most important subjects of study, and was considered an art which could move mountains. We can see the truth of this statement by the fact that President Obama got the top job and the Nobel prize for Peace mainly because of his rhetorical abilities, which are not – according to some of his critics – backed by many other virtues.

The art of rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, Sicily, during the V century BC by Corace and by his pupil Tisia and, almost immediately, the debate about being good or appearing good was initiated. According to the Sicilian school the key point of this art was always to come up with something new. Gorgias from Lentini and Trasimacus from Chalcis then created the Athens’s school and made rhetoric also the art of writing well, not only speaking well. Trasimacus was the inventor of the ‘musicality’ of the speech, with the precise indication of pauses and accelerations, a thing which Obama seems to master almost to perfection. Isocrates, a pupil of Gorgias, created a classification of the different styles of speech and the body movements, for instance the importance of fixing three points, left centre and right and move the eyes continuously like scanning them.

Empty talking rhetoricians were called sophists (because they were able to demonstrate that black is white and hot is cold) but were condemned by Plato in his Eutidemus and his Gorgias. Aristotle saw rhetoric in a more favourable light compared with Plato, his teacher and created the distinction between: judicial, deliberative and epidictic forms. Then subdivided it into three styles: etical, passional, logic.

The Romans learned about rhetoric from the Greeks, even if Cato the Censor stressed that it boiled down to be a  vir bonus decendi peritus. And with Cicero and Quintus Hortensius we find the best example of the Roman interpretation of this art, following the classical division of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio which President Obama is following almost to the letter. All the Roman and Greek knowledge in rhetoric was then summarized during the II century under the Flavians by Quintilian in his book Institution Oratories which has been the standard text up to the end of the Renaissance, my guess is that President Obama had studied Quintilian while he studied at Columbia UNiversity.

 

The Name of Arezzo taken by Swire

Apartments at the new de luxe skyscraper named after the Tuscan City of Arezzo are on sale in Hong Kong, at 33 Saymour Road in Mid Levels.

This is another project completed by the powerful conglomerate going by the name of Swire Group who owns also Cathay Pacific Airlines. It would be interesting to know if the citizen of Arezzo are aware of the fact that the name of their wonderful city has been used to name a de luxe building in Hong Kong. Probably they don’t know and their city council forgot to patent their name, while Swire did not ask for their permission. This is something happening frequently with European capitals – I myself live in a building named after Vienna.

But the fact that it happens frequently seems not to be a great excuse for not asking. Swire and the others construction companies are probably aware of the fact that if they would ask then they will have to give something in return but why not?

Yes, why not giving something and in exchange getting something back from Arezzo, like an official visit by the city major of the Tuscan city or a show staged by young “aretini’ artists in the lobby of that building?

This will benefit both Swire and Arezzo, which by the way is really a wonderful city of 100.000 inhabitans,  having the black prancing horse of Ferrari as its symbol and being older than Rome – Arezzo was one of the twelve capitals of the Etruscan empire, known as the dodecapolis –  located 50 miles far from Florence. It has been the cradle of many illustrious artists, like Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo,Petrarca and Vasari just to quote a few. Here is the website provided by Swire, containing prices and and breathtaking views of the Bay of Hong Kong from the windows of this new building.

http://www.arezzohk.com/en/index.html