Better Decisions Through Data.
India, astrolabes, government and democracy (and data)? These things pretty much have nothing to do with each other, right? Right. Astrolabes have nothing to do with democracy (or the conquistadors). This is a electronic voting machine used in India. You’re probably thinking: we just put this photo in here because we thought it would look cool. But is there a relationship. What is it? And how does it relate to Catalan hero Ramon Llull?
Let’s see … India and astrolabes. Is that the relationship? Some possibilities (and controversy) there; we’ll leave for another day. Electronic voting machines another big source of controversy; we could post endlessly here. 🙂
And democracy: we’ve talked about that before in our social progress posts (the dutch schoolhouse photo post on IG and others). India is the world’s largest democracy (although we hope that’s just a prototype; if that thing’s used in real elections in India we’re nervous. 🙂 )
There are, of course, endless relationship between democracy, voting, politics, governance, open data, and data science. Those are great topics for future posts, but that’s not the link we have in mind.No the link we had in mind is one Ramon Llull, Catalan national hero and that language’s most influential writer (now part of Spain/Spanish. He is credited with being the first to use an astrolabe at sea, way back in 1295.
Llull was one of those polymaths several centuries ahead of his time. Mariner’s astrolabes may have been the equivalent of the latest iPhone back in those days (Apple Maps! 🙂 but technology moved more slowly back then. It took 2-3 centuries for sea astrolabes to become commonplaces, just in time for our earlier conquistadors (whose story we are continuing after all). Llull is honored by some as the very first data scientist for a “computer” consisting of paper dials he invented (or perhaps borrowed from a Persian metal version) back in the 1200s. We think this is a bit of a stretch, but he was very interested in voting systems back in the 1200s. He invented systems similar to instant run-off and other elections schemes that wouldn’t be reconsidered for several centuries (but today are in use in many organizations.) In ways, Llull was almost a Monte Python character. More on this in later posts.
A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.
There are no comments so far