I recently glanced a mention of Thai Funeral Books which contain recipes which “in life were guarded like state secrets but in death are distributed for all to share”. These were referred to in a New York Times article about chef David Thompson – an Australian who attained a Michelin Star and now apparently wants to show Thais how to cook Thai food. The article can be found here. But what I found most intriguing was the tradition of placing your recipes in books to be disseminated only after your death. A brilliant idea which, at the very least, should improve cooking over time!

By Felix Lupa via cuded.com

In the way that human minds conflate thoughts – the idea of funeral books reminded me of an old thought about Facebook “status updates” and Twitter Tweets: that over time, more and more of our interactions will be “quantised”/digitised, so much so that a person’s entire life could be “replayed” upon our deaths. We no longer need a “Speaker for the Dead” as per Orson Scott Card’s invention for his 1986 SF novel of the same name – a listing of person’s Facebook Wall will suffice.

Yes, in the past: passports and phone directories kept vague outlines of where people were. Now: mobile phone base stations know where we are to the closest cell tower, and GPS augmented smart phones know where we are down to a handful of metres; “status updates” and Tweets capture snippets of our thoughts and opinions for all posterity; and services like Pandora or iTunes’ genius recommendation service know what music we’ll like – extrapolating from what we’ve played previously.

So what does the future bring? Already Google Instant knows what I’ll probably search for before I actually do – apparently only 25% of searches are entirely new after all. Is it so much of a stretch to think that the future will bring with it more sophisticated algorithms which simultaneously capture and analyse our interactions (be these interactions in text, speech, music, video, or any other form of quantisable communication) to the extent that so many facets of “who we are” can be estimated with so high an accuracy that the gestalt of these applications could pass some version of The Turning Test to people who actually knew the person being simulated?

Should that eventuality come to pass, be prepared for an interesting future populated with voices both living and those generated fresh from echoes left by the departed when they interacted with the living world. Heck, even prior to death you could talk to yourself (the digital you) and program messages only to be disseminated to friends and family at pre-determined dates. The possibilities are endless for these... Ghosts in the Machine. The quest for immortality is strong. And the technology, seemingly, doesn’t lie too far out of reach.

If the above seems like fiction, consider that even today Facebook and MySpace pages of departed people live on – acting as living tombstones with wall messages being added with each passing anniversary of that person’s birthday (reminders being automatically provided by the social utility web site in question). And further, chronologies of entire relationships between people are written in to their Facebook walls. World history has never been so chronicled as it is today.

As for me, I’d like to try some of the long departed recipes - glimpsing an eternity spent by ghosts in the interwebs makes me hungry. And I am strangely reminded of the ending of Robert Frost’s Birches which goes like this:

And if this post was cobbled together by a computer script synthesising articles I might have read in the past few days mixed with thoughts it knew I had over time... could anyone tell?

Perhaps it’s been all my travels of late but I don’t quite understand the hand wringing regarding the recent Australian federal election and how Labor should’ve had less right to form government given its lower popular vote. According to the following Newspoll dated the 18^th of Aug 2010 (found here – an excerpt of which is pasted below) the coalition’s primary vote was/is higher than that of Labor (43.4% versus 36.2%).

However, a minority government involving Labor and the Greens would have claim to around 50% of the popular vote (see above) or around 49.8% of the popular vote (according to the Election Analyser published by The Australian as of today – see the excerpt below). And in my book, if you can secure around 49.8% of the popular vote and the best the other side can do is 43.4%, then the game’s over, it’s done and dusted, the drinks have been consumed and everyone had not only back in bed, but dreaming of future intrigues.

I’ll leave the two party preferred for another rainy day. Best to keep those knives sheathed for a little while longer. Perhaps in 6 months or so it’ll be time again to talk of many things: of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax --- of cabbages – and kings --- and why the sea is boiling hot – and wether pigs have wings.

I have been reading John Hempton’s excellent multi part tribute to Edward Hugh (nicknamed “The Blog Prophet of Euro Zone Doom” by a New York Times article penned in early June 2010) which is an immensely readable overview of how the world got to where it is today vis-à-vis the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 (GFC).

My probably much mangled but abridged version of what John explains is as follows: when the financial world suffered a systemic heart attack in 2008 on account of the (I presume) sudden repulsiveness of assets built atop the premise of an always inflating US housing market, the suddenly illiquid and hard-to-value yet significantly-material assets that had permeated the asset side of the developed world’s bank balance sheets blew cavernous holes in their viability threatening to batter to a pulp any confidence in banking systems as a whole, which prodded suitably spooked governments worldwide to ride to the rescue by purchasing these decidedly suddenly illiquid assets… effectively moving the problem to sovereign balance sheets (causing Government total assets to inflate), but not before the house of Lehman fell and credit systems worldwide rediscovered liquidity risk forcing the great deleveraging which brought us the Great Recession where businesses everywhere were squeezed of credit… with this later mutating in to doubt over whether certain European governments (living beyond their means for years and over burdened with debt) can effectively raise the new debt required to run their countries (at non-ruinous interest rates) especially when these same countries had given up their ability to print money and devalue their old debts (i.e. the recent PIGS focus)… which presently calls in to question the viability of European Banks who've gobs of such sovereign debt assets on the asset side of their balance sheets (!) - given the possibility these sovereign debt assets might (wait for it) suddenly become repulsive and illiquid (sound familiar?). Yes folks, the spiral down has at least one other path downwards. John describes how all this might end horribly for the otherwise admirable and extremely well run National Bank of Greece.

When countries accumulate large net external debt positions denominated in currencies not their own AND then are hit by devaluation of their local currencies, the net external debt positions of such countries grow in local currency terms making debt servicing ever more difficult - potentially resulting in vicious downward spirals when the currency devaluations are large… as was the case during the Asian Financial Crisis. This inability of countries to issue debt in their local currency (resulting in foreign currency denominated net external debt positions) is termed “original sin” [1].

How does Australia fare in all of this? The following table shows Government Debt as a percentage of that Country’s GDP – which seemingly paints a rosy picture for Australia since its cumulative Government debt in 2010 is only expected to be 13.9% of its GDP as compared to say 86.6% for Germany or 97.5% for the US.

 Source: Finfacts article dated Jun 12, 2009

The picture however gets more complicated when we look at the total net external debt for Australia (i.e. adding in private and other non-government debt) to the mix. The next excerpt (from the Australian Bureau of Statistics) shows that the Total Liability position of Australia is, wait for it, AUD $1,214,128 million… or AUD $1.2 trillion.

Trading Economics puts the Australian GDP at US$1.015 trillion or AUD $1.16 trillion (at current exchange rates of around US$0.875 per AUD) implying a Total Liability to GDP ratio of 103%! Which is an altogether more worry-inducing level of debt.

Source: ABS Publication dated May 31^st, 2010

The ABS provides a breakdown for the currency denominations for this debt (refer to the highlighted last 2 lines of the previous excerpt) and I’ve calculated the rough percentage shares for each of these currencies. It is fortunate that some 42% of these Liabilities (or AUD $504 billion) is denominated in AUD… But this still leaves 58% or AUD$710 billion in Liabilities denominated in other currencies (spread between USD, JPY, GBP and Euro) susceptible, it would seem, to the vagaries of currency devaluations and the evils of “original sin”.

So why then isn’t there more PIGS type worry with regards to Australia? The following excerpt from a report released by The Australian Treasury in 2006 explains that that these private liabilities are mostly hedged (either naturally or through the use of financial derivatives) leaving Australia in a net long foreign currency position (when Australia’s foreign currency assets are taken into account):

Source: The Domestic Economy Division of The Australian Treasury Report on “How international investment income flows affect Australia’s Balance of Payments” published in 2006.

John Hempton succinctly sums up the difference between the PIGS group and Australia as follows:

I for one am glad there seems to be someone at the tiller! And even more amazed that they seem to know what they’re doing!!

-----

Notes:

[1] This paper published in 2003 delves further in to the historical origins of “original sin” and how a group of former colonies of Great Britain managed to overcome the problem.

[2] During the course of writing this post I also came across the following interesting breakdown of the sectoral composition for the debt of several countries.

Source: Finfacts article dated Jan 20^th, 2010.