Time Lords and Necromancers

I head for Syria next week and while in Damascus I hope to see in the National Museum the remnants of one of the earliest polar-axis sundials ever made, the marble mid 14th century, horizontal, 2m x 1m sundial that was constructed by Ibn al‐Shāṭir and which used to grace the northern minaret of the Great Mosque. Failing that I hope perhaps to see the 19th century copy that replaced it. Ibn al‐Shāṭir was better known for his instrument making than for his astronomy but his extremely accurate modification of Ptomely’s geocentric planetary model, based on direct observation, was to heavily influence Copernicus’ later revolutionary heliocentric – yet almost identical – planetary model.

Ibn al‐Shāṭir was the head muwaqqit or religious timekeeper in Damascus and somehow this notion of being in charge of time and the connection to religion resonated in my brain.

In Ireland our chief Time Lord or muwaqqit is in law, surprisingly, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, currently Dermot Ahern T.D..

In a whimsical article by Benjamin Franklin to the Journal of Paris in 1784 he proposed moving to a daylight driven economic activity clock, based on the cost of burning candles, and he stated that with the change ‘All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days; after which the reformation will be as natural and easy as the present irregularity; for, ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte.’

In 1907 William Willett published a pamphlet The Waste of Daylight proposing an hour shift in the summer and on May 21, 1916 a month after the Easter Rising in Dublin the Summer Time Act became operational in England and this was followed on October 1, 1916 by the provisions of the Time (Ireland) Act of August 23 which permanently linked Irish time to UK or Greenwich Mean Time.

The Irish Free State was established in 1922 and in 1923 the first Summer Time Act was promulgated. It stated that the “The time for general purposes in Saorstát Eireann shall, during the period of summer time, be one hour in advance of West-European time.”

By 1925 the Department of Justice had evolved from the old Department of Home Affairs and the Summer Time Act of that year stated that

“The Minister for Justice may, whenever it appears expedient to him so to do, by order appoint that the period appointed by this Act or by any previous order made under this section to be the period of summer time for the purpose of this Act shall, either generally or in any particular years or year, not be the period of summer time for that purpose, and that, in lieu thereof some other period specified in such order shall, either generally or in such particular years or year (as the case may require), be the period of summer time for the purpose of this Act.”

The Minister had from the ether suddenly become Ireland’s Time Lord!

The ministerial responsibility for “Summer Time” was to continue with Summer Time Orders until, mysteriously, in 1971 when the

STANDARD TIME (AMENDMENT) ACT 1971, AN ACT TO PROVIDE FOR A PERIOD WHICH SHALL BE KNOWN AS WINTER TIME AND DURING WHICH THE TIME FOR GENERAL PURPOSES IN THE STATE SHALL BE GREENWICH MEAN TIME, AND TO PROVIDE FOR OTHER MATTERS CONNECTED WITH THE MATTER AFORESAID.

suddenly made the Minister for Justice and Summer Time become the Minister for “Winter Time” instead.

The Minister could do all or any of the following— (a) vary the period of winter time prescribed by subsection (1) (c) of this section, either generally (b) or for a specified year or specified years, (c) prescribe, either generally or for a specified year or specified years but not so as to affect the operation (d) of subsection (1) (b) of this section, that there shall be no period of winter time, (e) amend or revoke any order under this subsection (including this paragraph).

It could only happen in Ireland!

In 2001 the European Union went to a lot of trouble to permanently standardize Summer Time throughout Europe with their directive 2000/84/EC of 19 January 2001 and asked that all countries have legislation in place to accede to this directive by the end of the year. The first three articles of the directive stated:

Article 1

For the purposes of this Directive ‘summer-time period’ shall

mean the period of the year during which clocks are put

forward by 60 minutes compared with the rest of the year.

Article 2

From 2002 onwards, the summer-time period shall begin, in

every Member State, at 1.00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time, on

the last Sunday in March.

Article 3

From 2002 onwards, the summer-time period shall end, in

every Member State, at 1.00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time, on

the last Sunday in October.

What does Ireland do?

Ah! Wouldn’t you know? We publish a Winter Time Order instead (S.I. No: 506 Winter Time Order 2001).

"I, John O'Donoghue, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, in exercise of the powers conferred on me by section 1 of the Standard Time (Amendment) Act, 1971 ( No. 17 of 1971 ) (as adapted by the Justice (Alteration of Name of Department and Title of Minister) Order 1997 ( S.I. No. 298 of 1997 )), and for the purpose of giving effect to the European Parliament and Council (Summer Time) Directive No. 2000/84/EC of 19 January 20011 , hereby order as follows:

1. This order may be cited as the Winter Time Order, 2001.

2. (a) The period of winter time which, apart from this Article, would end at two o'clock Greenwich mean time in the morning of the Sunday following the third Saturday of March 2002, is varied so as to end at one o'clock Greenwich mean time in the morning of the last Sunday of March 2002.

(b) For the year 2002 and subsequent years a period of winter time begins at one o'clock Greenwich mean time in the morning of the last Sunday in October in any year and ends at one o'clock Greenwich mean time in the morning of the last Sunday in March in the following year."

Don’t you just love the logic that sometimes exists in the corridors of hubris?

It perhaps is just as well that the same Minister of Justice, Winter Time and Necromancy, who is now forever responsible for “Winter Time” in Ireland, and who in his wisdom also decided to confirm the crime of blasphemous libel in Ireland in the Defamation Bill of 2009, managed to eradicate forever the crime of sedition.

It is either whacky or muwaqqit or what!

[No. 31.] [2009.]

Defamation Act 2009.

PART 5

Criminal Liability

35.—The common law offences of defamatory libel, seditious libel

and obscene libel are abolished.

36.—(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter

shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on

indictment to a fine not exceeding €25,000.

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters

blasphemous matter if—

(a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive

or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any

religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial

number of the adherents of that religion, and

(b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the

matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this

section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would

find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value

in the matter to which the offence relates.

(4) In this section “religion” does not include an organisation or

cult—

(a) the principal object of which is the making of profit, or

(b) that employs oppressive psychological manipulation—

(i) of its followers, or

(ii) for the purpose of gaining new followers.

Dermot Ahern T.D.

Perhaps Irish Winter Time is a new religious movement and the legislation drafters of the Department of Justice are performing their equivalent of a necromancer's black mass and reversing everything that the EU demands? Have a close look at the blasphemy legislation. Religions are not fully defined except by the fact that they may not be a money raising outfit or employ psychological manipulation of their followers.

I guess that could exclude nearly every known religious movement established thus far. The promise of hellfire and damnation or paradise are polar opposites on the sun dial of theology yet can still manipulate.

As the song goes : Winter time and the living is … delayed

Michelle Bachelet: The new "Ovary-Secretary-General" for UN Women – An Inspired Choice.

"As the old joke goes, I have all the sins together.

I am a woman, Socialist, separated and agnostic."

Dr Michelle Bachelet, the 58 year-old former Chilean President, has been chosen by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to head up the new United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women to be known as UN Women. (see my blog of July 29, 2010)

This is an inspired choice.

The daughter of a father who was tortured and murdered by Pinochet’s regime, she herself was tortured before fleeing to Australia and the former East Germany. She returned to Chile in 1979 and graduated in 1983. A paediatrician by training she has advanced degrees in military strategy and military science and has been active in Chilean politics since 1980. As Minister of Health in 2000 her time was famous for the controversy surrounding the decision to make the morning-after pill available for victims of sexual abuse. She was appointed Defense Minister in 2002 and in 2006 was elected President of Chile. Of particular interest to her new colleagues in UN Women is that as President Bachelet insisted on ‘gender parity’ in all senior appointments. Her term of office as President ended in March of this year.

In case my choice of ‘Ovary-Secretary-General’ as a descriptive epithet is thought demeaning or crass it is not meant to be. The actual position Dr Bachelet is appointed to is as an Under-Secretary General and, leaving aside the fact that this dynamic woman would never be an ‘Under’ anything, I find the almost ‘marginalizing’ title Under-Secretary to be a little like being Sub-Saharan.

In any event Bachelet appears to have a wonderful sense of humour. When being interviewed by senior colleagues to see whether she would consider running for President of Chile one senator asked her ‘What is your dream?

She answered,

"You all want to know what is my dream?

Very simple. To walk along the beach, holding the hand of my lover.”

I really do wonder what she said to the very proper Ban Ki-moon!

Further Info:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/22/chile.gender

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/single-mother-poised-to-be-chilean-president-519042.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/world/15nations.html?_r=1&ref=world

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52834

London’s Domination of Foreign Exchange Markets: A Question of Luck, Legerdemain or Longitude?

According to the Bank for International Settlements Triennial Report in April 2010 world global foreign exchange markets had a daily turnover $4.0 trillion up from $3.3 trillion in April 2007. Of this market cross-border trading accounted for 65% and local 35%. Banks located in the United Kingdom accounted for 36.7%, against 34.6% in 2007, of all foreign exchange market turnover, followed by the United States (18%), Japan (6%), Singapore (5%), Switzerland (5%), Hong Kong SAR (5%) and Australia (4%).

Is this dominance by UK banks of this extremely lucrative activity a question of luck, legerdemain or longitude?

Light Railways and Meridians

Ten years ago while researching the relationship between the English Admiralty and Algiers as background material for my first book, The Simurgh and the Nightingale, I spent a productive couple of days, courtesy of the very obliging and knowledgeable staff, in the Library of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. Every morning I would get on the Docklands Light Railway at the Bank Underground Station (about 10am when the rush was over) and then, as the track emerged into the light, move to the very front to enjoy the panorama as the train left behind the staid ‘old City’ to meander through the rapidly developing financial and commercial fantasia of the ‘new City’ in Canary Wharf.

Alighting at the Island Gardens station on the northern side of the Thames I would then walk to the glass-domed ‘beehive’ building housing the spiral stairwell that brought you down to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (opened in 1902). Ambling under the Thames to emerge again on the southern side close to the – then intact – tea-clipper Cutty Sark it was only a short walk to the precincts of the museum.

Truth be told it was quite an unanticipated and wonderfully magical daily journey, good weather, unexpected panoramas, and the daily sensation of travelling through history and in particular the history of time and the world of commerce.

Looking north from Observatory Hill, Greenwich towards Canary Wharf

The Caird Library (named after the Maritime Museum’s original benefactor Sir James Caird) is part of an extensive complex that also includes the Royal Observatory and Flamsteed House where John Harrison’s marine chronometers are currently housed. I took the opportunity to visit both on a number of occasions and afterwards would sit munching a sandwich, smoking my pipe, re-reading Dava Sobel’s book Longitude about John Harrison and staring across the Thames at the skyscrapers and cranes. It was hard to escape the realization as to how important having the Prime Meridian at Greenwich was for the commercial activities of London… past and present.

The Meridian and Universal Time

In the pre-electronic age the accuracy of navigation depended on knowing how far one had sailed from a fixed point to another. Hipparchus of Rhodes (c. 167-127 BCE), had marked off the earth's surface at the equator into 360 parts – the degrees. The original prime meridian, as a way of assigning a zero longitude to the grid was placed by Marinus of Tyre at the then furthermost known westerly point in Europe, the Fortunate or Canary Islands off the western coast of Africa, in 114 CE. Ptolemy was to incorporate this prime meridian in his long influential projections where he divided the remaining meridians of longitude into minutes and seconds of arc forming a very accurate location grid. Each 15° interval represents one hour of the 24 hours taken by one full rotation of the earth on its axis. Later the prime meridian was specifically located to the small Canary island of El Hierro or Isle de Ferro. As late as 1634 France in its mapmaking confirmed this meridian although would also incorporate the Paris Meridian as well on the maps.

There were however other competing prime meridians, such as those centered on Copenhagen and Antwerp but the reality for commerce at sea was that after the establishment of the English Royal Observatory in 1674, and the work of Harrison in 1750’s to develop an accurate sea chronometer, the meridian at Greenwich became the reference zero longitude for most maritime commerce. By 1825 every Royal Navy ship was equipped with a chronometer. By 1880 65% of the world’s commercial maritime fleets were using Greenwich, 10% were using the Paris meridian, and the remaining 25% using ten other different meridian lines. Because of this confusion a conference was called, at the instigation of the United States, and following an earlier conference in Rome, to settle once and for all an agreed-upon meridian.

On October 1, 1884 the delegates to the International Meridian Conference, assembled in Washington “for the purpose of fixing upon a meridian proper to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time-reckoning throughout the globe”, and Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers of the United States, was elected President of the Conference. In his introductory remarks Rodgers outlined the objectives of obtaining an agreed-upon designation for the Prime Meridian:

“Happy shall we be, if, throwing aside national preferences and inclinations, we seek only the common good of mankind, and gain for science and for commerce a prime meridian acceptable to all countries, and secured with the least possible inconvenience.”

Despite tremendous and highly technical efforts by the French delegation to secure the prime meridian for Paris the majority of the delegates (including Hawaii which at that stage was still an independent kingdom) opted for Greenwich. On October 22, 1884 the Final Act of the Conference published seven Resolutions.

I.

"That it is the opinion of this Congress that it is desirable to adopt a single prime meridian for all nations, in place of the multiplicity of initial meridians which now exist."

II.

"That the Conference proposes to the Governments here represented the adoption of the meridian passing through the centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich as the initial meridian for longitude."

III.

"That from this meridian longitude shall be counted in two directions up to 180 degrees, east longitude being plus and west longitude minus."

IV.

"That the Conference proposes the adoption of a universal day for all purposes for which it may be found convenient, and which shall not interfere with the use of local or other standard time where desirable."

V.

"That this universal day is to be a mean solar day; is to begin for all the world at the moment of mean midnight of the initial meridian, coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date of that meridian; and is to be counted from zero up to twenty-four hours."

VI.

"That the Conference expresses the hope that as soon as may be practicable the astronomical and nautical days will be arranged everywhere to begin at mean midnight."

VII.

"That the Conference expresses the hope that the technical studies designed to regulate and extend the application of the decimal system to the division of angular space and of time shall be resumed, so as to permit the extension of this application to all cases in which it presents real advantages."

The Resolutions were then ratified on November 1. The only change between their publication and ratification was that the delegate from Turkey, the only Islamic country represented at the Conference and who had originally voted in the affirmative for Resolution V (the beginning of the universal day to be at midnight), wanted it recorded that he was in fact voting against the Resolution. The Islamic day begins with the setting of the sun not the rising.

The London Equation: Longitude + Latency = Liquidity and Leverage.

The real importance of the 1884 decision (Resolution V) for London’s modern foreign exchange prosperity was that the Greenwich meridian was linked to the Universal Day. Initially Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was used but could refer either to an astronomical day starting at noon or a civil day starting at midnight. In 1928 Universal Time (UT0) was introduced and further refined by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1972.

Foreign exchange markets are a decentralised fluid financial interface for the trading of currencies. Ethically they exist to assist international trade and business but in reality have become the most lucrative trading “Poker Game” with both buyers and sellers gambling on small percentage profit-generating movements on huge amounts of electronically transferred money.

Electronic trading (and profits) depends on both timing and quantity and increasingly is becoming dependent on Alogithmic or computer-generated trading ‘gambles’ particularly in the high frequency trading environment that pertains in the currency exchange markets in different time zones across the world.

Algorithms are named after the great Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (780-85 C.E.)known by his Latin name of Algoitimi from the Latin translation of his book Algoritmi de numero Indorum (al-Khwārizmī on the Hindu Art of Reckoning). al-Khwārizmī introduced Indian mathematics to the west and particularly the concept of zero, the zero of both longitude and time.

Algorithmic trading bypasses human intervention to a great extent and depends on the software parameters designed into individual systems and timing and latency. All computers run on sets of programmable instructions called executables. In a foreign exchange transaction the latency is the delay between the algorithmic executable instruction commanding the transaction and the market actually responding by confirming the trade. The delay, if there has been even a minute shift in exchange rates in that same period, can lose much of the projected profits.

Ultra-low latency is the real buzz word in foreign exchange ‘poker’ and without it a ‘player’ will not survive at the table. This is where London's longitude and the determination of Universal Time brings its advantage. Most electronic signal systems work on a fuzzy logic basis where approximation rather than absolute accuracy is accepted. In foreign currency trading the greater the time zone discrepancy from the reference point the greater the latency lag, the greater the possibility of  a less-than-optimal algorithmic trade generated by a computer. 

Legerdemain

To me however, the exponential expansion of the foreign exchange trading appears to be a completely unregulated, latent, labile, and larcenous market, and will eventually destroy both itself and us. The world has previously seen stock market crashes based on equities imploding and most recently on the trading of 'sub-prime' property values. Foreign Exchange Markets and FOREX trading are not altruistic. It is absolute speculation and the biggest game of poker in town. Because many of the 'plays' now and most in the future will depend on algorithmic electronic calculation the potential for hackers, launderers, and larcenists is enormous. Pitting computer software programs against each other in an ‘no-parameter’ or even ‘uncontrollable’ game will eventually reach stalemate and the ‘sleight of hand’ involved to generate profit rather than assist development will strangle us.

Hogarth's Ruin at the Gambling Table 1735

Further Info:

http://www.world-exchanges.org/files/statistics/excel/WFE09%20final.pdf

http://forex.timezoneconverter.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_latency_(capital_markets)

http://www.zyen.com/PDF/GFC%207.pdf

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/upload/pdf/Archive_and_Library_Access_Statement.pdf

http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/server_process.php?show=conJmrArticle.15&outputFormat=pdf

Rihla (Journey 17): Corsica – Hairy Chestnuts, Identity Politics and Unanswered Questions

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