Calculated friday

December is time for making calculations. We must add up the monthly incomes, and subtract the usual costs, and other expenses not so common: the Christmas dinner, the gifts for family...

To do this, we use calculating machines. This way our mind doesn't get tired, and we can devote our thoughts to higher things.

All of us may think that calculators were invented by Mr. Casio, Mr. IBM or Mr. Hewlett-Packard. Nevertheless, it was a Galician man, Ramon Verea, who invented and patented it, in 1878.

Do you think he received any help from the Spanish government? Any prize or distinction? Did he do the patent in Barcelona, La Coruña or Sevilla? Did he become a millionaire? Is his calculator of iron and steel, weighting 26 kg, and named Verea Direct Multiplier, exposed in the science museum at San Sebastian, or Valladolid?

It was two centuries ago, but things have not changed since then. Ramon, with a brilliant academic record, was denied the scholarship that allowed him to study in Santiago de Compostela. So in 1855 he emigrated to Cuba, and from there he moved later to New York, Guatemala and Buenos Aires. He never returned to his homeland, and he died destitute in Argentina.

During this journey around the world, he had time to work as an engineer, a journalist, a translator, and an inventor. He directed for more than 10 years a newspaper in New York. 

His invention was patented in the U.S.A. He got the recognition of a medal at the World Exhibition of Inventions in Cuba. And his calculator (we couldn’t say it's a 'pocket ' calculator), is displayed at the headquarters of IBM in White Plains, New York.

So when you use a calculator machine this month, don’t forget about its magnificent inventor. It will be the best private tribute that we can do for him, because he hasn’t got any public one.

Angelical friday

Photo taken at the underground station of Kings Cross-St. Pancras in London on July 11, 2013 at 12:21 hours.

Germany is saving Europe.

It has spent €100 billion bankrolling bailouts in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus.

It can afford these rescues only because Germans work so hard: per head, Germany has grown at more than twice the rate of the rest of the euro zone since the euro was created.

Slow-growing countries are reforming their sclerotic economies largely because of pressure from Germany.

Guadalupe. A beautiful monastery.

Guadalupe.


     A charming village.


         An extraordinary monastery.


             History, art, culture.


                 Need more excuses to visit it?


You can do it from your seat: Guadalupe. A beautiful monastery.

The red fortress II

A new photographic walk by the Alhambra of Granada, but without colours. It doesn't need them.


Only black and white to reflect its grandiosity.


You can see the complete coverage on:

The red fortress II.The Alhambra (Granada, Spain))

7vium

The title of this blog pays tribute to the medieval Trivium+Quadrivium.

In the early Middle Ages, monastic and cathedral schools, only depositaries of knowledge of the epoch, turned to compile and organize all the known human knowledge in a comprehensive encyclopedic corps.

This compendium derived, in the late eighth century, in the Trivium et Quadrivium, which were adopted as the educational curriculum by Alcuin of York for the Palace School at Aachen, and soon spread throughout western Europe.

In it, the liberal arts, classified into seven branches, were divided into two groups:

- Trivium (Latin: three-ways), which grouped together the disciplines of eloquence: Grammar (lingua, "tongue"), Dialectic/Logic (ratio,  the "why") and Rhetoric (tropus, "figures").

- Quadrivium ("four roads"), including related disciplines of Mathematics: Arithmetic (numerus, "the numbers"), Geometry (angulus, "Angles"), Astronomy (astra, "the stars") and Music (tonus, "edges").

Out of this classification of the liberal arts, understood as 'art' or academic disciplines, which were trades or professions held by free men, we could find those arts classified as 'servile', vile and mechanical tasks played by servants or slaves.

Thus, the privileged classes were devoted to intellectual work, applied to the study of the Trivium and Quadrivium, while the popular classes developed crafts.

The scope and extent of this classification certainly evolved over time, but this design did not suffer significant innovations till the next era of intellectual transformations, called Renaissance, and especially till the age of Enlightenment.

Despite this, we still talk of  'liberal professions' in reference to those related to law, economics, medicine or journalism, for example.

Once this exposure, and given my interest to focus on the spreading of news and resources related to the so-called 'Science', without neglecting the other fields of knowledge and human creation that merit divulgation, I thought it was appropriate to pay tribute to that set of subjects that constitute the functional backbone of our existence, titling this blog as 7vium (3vium+4vium).

Hope this mutual journey will be interesting both for me and for you, and that we'll have fun together with the proposed themes.