الروح تسافر بوتيرة الجمل

This is obviously from Google Earth. It’s approximately pentagonal and covers much of Western Europe. Most of it is within the territory of the Roman Empire at maximum extent, but not all. But what is it?

This is the polygon formed by the extreme points of my movements on the surface of this planet. It took around eight years to form this shape, and in fact I’ve just realised some of it is missing because I forgot Aberdeen, which extends the time period to nine years.

Here’s a revised version then:

Right, so now it’s a hexagon and it clearly shows the curvature of the planet because it’s slightly zoomed out. This, then, is the area I’ve occupied and visited in my life. I also visited all of it by travelling by road, rail or ferry. The westernmost point was actually by bike. The maximum distance within this area is between Rome and Inverness, which are 2 112 kilometres apart.

Although I have four times committed the sin of air travel in an heavier than air craft, which also occurred within this hexagon, I had already reached all these points overland and sea, and later on under the sea bed once the Channel Tunnel was built. It’s a modest area compared to many Westerners to be sure, but it has the virtue of having been experienced every step of the way on the surface. I didn’t have the dislocation one experiences of stepping into an airliner and off it again a few hours later without having witnessed the transition from, say, the green chalk downs and streams of Kent and Northern France to the near-desert of Burgos.

The earliest point on this map was laid down in August 1987 CE, when my brother and I visited Aberdeen. Aberdeen is Scotland’s third city, pretty isolated compared to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and largely made of granite. Even though it was the height of summer, it was a grey, overcast day and pretty cold really. It was also really windy. Aberdeen kind of has a beach, but I get the impression there isn’t much sunbathing on it. To be honest, even Blackpool in England, 370 kilometres to the south, isn’t really suitable for sunbathing or swimming in my opinion. Remarkably, though, like many other coastal towns in Britain, Aberdeen has its share of seaside shops selling buckets and spades and inflatables for the water, so I suppose there are people made of sterner stuff than I.

Inverness is only 133 kilometres from Aberdeen and I’ve been there a few times. Once again it can be exceedingly windy but it seems to be warmer than Aberdeen. Aberdeen has been known to drop below freezing in August, although its average temperature is 8.8°C, whereas Inverness averages 9.2 and has never dropped below freezing in August. It’s also a lot smaller than Aberdeen and doesn’t look overwhelmingly grey, has the fastest river in Britain running through it, which is also very short and probably would’ve stopped any Nessie candidates from entering or leaving the loch. Being the capital of the Highlands, like many other Scottish cities and towns Inverness has a lot more in the way of facilities than an English settlement of similar size.

The next corner of the hexagon is Inishmore, an island off the coast of County Galway and almost as far west as you can go in Europe. Its western end is 9° 50′ west of Greenwich and is unsurprisingly the furthest west I’ve ever been. There used to be an incredibly competitive pair of ferry services to it who would frantically plead and cajole you talking nineteen to the dozen to get you to use their boat rather than the other’s, but this is apparently no longer so because one of them sank the other’s boat! Sarada, I and our daughter cycled the length of the island and encountered its frankly terrifying cliff edge that runs along the southwest edge, and in fact I wonder in a geologically naïve way whether this is connected to it being on the edge of a continent, but whereas that’s an appealing idea it’s probably quite fanciful. Even so, the nearest land on that latitude to the west is over three thousand kilometres away on the east coast of Canada, or rather it’s Double Island in Nova Scotia. I visited Inishmore in 1995. Inverness was the site of a terminal argument between my first girlfriend and me about free range eggs, and County Galway marked the point at which two close friends of ours, with whom we’d gone on holiday, split up, so maybe there’s something about extreme points which puts relationships under stress, like the sweater curse.

The next point is Madrid, where Sarada and I went on our honeymoon in June and July 1993 and have since revisited. Sarada used to live in Madrid, so she was revisiting it after some time away. Madrid is a number of things. It’s at the geographical centre of Spain and the first one of these points which is within the former Roman Empire although it isn’t actually a Roman city and it really shows with its very irregular street pattern. It’s hot and dry, and has a population of three million. The line between Inishmore and Madrid is almost 1 500 kilometres long and cuts across entirely Roman Catholic territory. Because it’s probable that the Gaels came from Spain, I’m likely to have an exclusively male-line connection with Spanish Celts living there in Roman times. I don’t feel a particular affinity with Spain but I do kind of wonder if the reason we got stuck in Burgos was that my ancestors were grabbing my ankles and pulling me down. Spain also hold the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever managed to get sunburnt, owing to being stuck outside in the midsummer Sun for weeks on end while we struggled to get back to England. This led to a flaky skin condition on my face which, surprisingly, resolved when I visited the next point of the hexagon.

Which is Rome, 1 300 kilometres or so almost due East, and once again the line cuts over exclusively Roman Catholic countries. Rome is just awesome. I first went there in July 1988 when I was interrailing with friends, and I was absolutely blown away by the place. Everything is still there! Well, not everything, but the layout of the streets and many of the buildings are ancient Roman. It was when I went back in about 2004 that my skin condition cleared up but unfortunately it returned once I went back to Britain and I was stuck with it for almost another decade. Rome is the furthest east I’ve been, whereas Madrid is the furthest south, but the two cities are on similar latitudes. Rome is 12° 30′ east, whereas Madrid is 40° 25′ north.

The last point is Innsbruck, the famous origin of the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and visited a few days before Rome in July 1988 on my interrailing session. It shares a number of features with Aberdeen and perhaps Inverness to a lesser extent. It’s in a mountainous area, it doesn’t mark any compass point extremities for me and it’s the third largest city in a Germanic-speaking partly mountainous Western European country. On my hexagon, it also shares a side with Aberdeen, and this line finally enters Protestant territory. This line is also the only one which cuts across countries I’ve never entered, namely Germany and the Netherlands. The interior of the shape, however, also includes the whole of Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Andorra, none of which are familiar to me. The whole northeastern line ventures into vagueness, but this is probably because the west side is mainly ocean.

Countries which are completely enclosed include Andorra, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Vatican (just – I’ve walked round it so it has no exposed side even if I hadn’t been elsewhere in Rome such as Trastevere), Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland and of course France, the largest country which is entirely enclosed. The centre of the area seems to be Limoges (“Lions In My Own Garden – Exit Someone”). The total area is larger than any US state and all but twelve countries.

It doesn’t need saying that I have by no means covered every square centimetre of this area, but that brings up a more general issue about what it means to be in a place. If I counted countries instead, the area would stretch from Out Stack to La Restinga and Roque del Barbudo to Museo di Ecologia degli Ecosistemi Mediterranei in Italy (just). It’s also notable that I actually live in the northwest of this area and have explored mainly south and east, and that the northernmost point is still in Great Britain. The largest number of borders between me and home is three, in the Vatican and Austria. The perimeter is getting on for a seventh of the way round the world, a distance light would travel in a single frame of video. However, this depends on the accuracy of that perimeter, because depending on what counts as an area I’ve been to.

The distance to the horizon seems like a reasonable measure, and it might make a difference to my polygon because of St Anton Am Arlberg. While I was in Austria, I climbed the Arlberg, not all the way to the top because it did the usual thing of appearing to be entirely ahead of me every time I thought I’d managed to get most of the way up it. I took a stone from it home with me, which over millions of years might make it a bit shorter if everyone did it so maybe don’t. Therefore it would be cheating to say that the furthest I’ve got sight of on this planet would be the view of the the horizon from the peak of the Arlberg, or rather the Valluga, which is 2 811 metres above sea level, which could extend to a further peak in theory. This is 189 kilometres to sea level, which is at least as far as the Großglockner, which is in any case the highest mountain in Austria and therefore would be easily visible from the Valluga on a clear day. It’s 12° 41′ east, therefore beating Rome by eleven minutes of arc. Beyond that, it becomes rather indeterminate as, for instance, another peak twice as distant but the same height twice as far away would also be visible in the same conditions, and beyond that the refraction of the atmosphere becomes significant. It’s possible to see slightly further than the horizon would be in a vacuum because the atmosphere refracts light and makes distant objects seem higher up than they really are. On Venus this situation is extreme and the viewpoint seems to be at the bottom of a basin when it’s on a flat surface, but it still happens on Earth.

It’s odd that even though German is my second language, sort of, I’ve never actually been to Germany. The languages indigenous to the polygon are English, Irish, Gàidhlig, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton, French, Flemish, Luxembourgisch, Alsatian, Italian, Castilian, Provençal, Latin (the Vatican), German, Dutch, various Swiss and Northern Italian Romance languages and Basque. That’s all surviving Celtic languages and one non-Indo-European language. As for population, it’s harder to work out but it’s above a hundred million people. It’s also large enough for the angles not to conform with plane Euclidean geometry and therefore also area. It covers more than 19° of the curve of the planet. From north to south, a degree of longitude at the latitude of Inverness is fifty-nine kilometres and the same at Madrid’s latitude is eighty-five, nearly half as long again. Most of the area is on land but the biggest area of water is the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.

I feel a sense of being at home within this irregular hexagon, but more towards the northwest than in other directions. Italy and Spain appeal to me but they don’t feel like my native land, but I think of myself as primarily a White Northwestern European, and by that I include the British Isles, Low Countries, northern part of France, Denmark and the German-speaking countries. I don’t get more specific than that, except that I feel duty-bound to learn Gàidhlig due to my heritage and the fact that it’s endangered. Through that, I feel I should make a connection with the musical tradition of the Q-Celtic areas. I think of Q-Celtic as a linguistic continuum stretching from southwest Ireland to northern Scotland interrupted by speakers mainly of Anglic languages historically. However, I also have it in perspective and am aware that there are many more speakers of Urdu and other North Indian languages in these isles than all of the Q-Celtic speakers put together. I’m also dubious about the idea of Celtic identity and about the idea that Celtic identity is dubious. Nonetheless, every living native speaker of a Celtic language has ancestry within this hexagon, and also every living first language Basque speaker. No other language family or sub-family is represented here in this way. It also contains an unusually large number of imperial capitals with all the dubiosity that carries with it: Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels and just barely Amsterdam, which is twenty kilometres from the line between Innsbruck and Aberdeen. The so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealth within Europe, which seems no longer to be recognised, is partly outside it.

That’s it really. That’s the area I have direct and contiguous experience of, not separated by air travel. I think this is important because it gives me some kind of inkling of the size of the planet, its shape and its connections. It would be increasingly difficult to grasp a larger area of this kind, and much harder to travel on the surface through it.

The soul travels at the pace of a camel.

Brain Of Britain

In the 1950s, it was estimated that if all the connections in the human brain were modelled with valves (or tubes in American English), that “brain” would be the size of what we now call Greater London. I don’t quite understand how this happened because Greater London wasn’t in existence at the time. I seem to recall that that administrative unit was created by drawing a circle twelve miles in radius around Charing Cross and including all the boroughs which its circumference passed through, but that seems to be too small. In any event, this is an area of 1569 km². This was during the time of the first generation of digital computers, when the switching elements were valves.

Later on, transistors had replaced valves. These are effectively solid state switches which can be turned on or off by the application of a current, hence their tripodic nature, and were initially made of germanium, an element I used to think was called “geranium” for some reason. Later transistors were of course silicon, but in both cases they’re “doped” with small amounts of another element, often arsenic. If a human brain were to be made of that kind of transistor, it would be the size of the Albert Hall. This is a large public building in Covent Garden, near Charing Cross in fact, which is elliptical seen from above, and has axes of almost seven dozen and six dozen metres. Taking the mean diameter, this gives it an area of 4778 m², and this gives me pause because it’s so much smaller than the first figure. Did they actually mean Greater London at all?

By the early 1960s, engineers were starting to put several transistors in the same package. Incidentally, these were not the first integrated circuits. Earlier, valve circuitry was being put into the same evacuated chamber and it was possible to make a valve comprising several discrete components, which was sometimes done in radio receivers. However, the real advance was putting components onto the same wafer, because it became feasible to make a single chip which worked as a logic gate, and later an arithmetic and logic unit and eventually an entire CPU. In 1965, Gordon Moore made the observation that the number of transistors which could be made to fit in the same area of silicon seemed to be doubling every year, and this became known as Moore’s Law. Incidentally, in my alternate history known as the Caroline Timeline I tried to imagine what would have happened if advances in this area had been linear rather than geometrical, with progress proceeding at 1979 levels. I call this Vannevar’s Law. In 1978, the BBC TV science documentary series ‘Horizon’ noted that it was now possible to fit an equivalent number of transistors to the human brain in a five metre square room. Moore’s Law no longer applies. The doubling was revised to once every two years at some point and it seems to have broken down in the late ‘teens. Assuming ‘Horizon”s room was 5x5x3 metres, or 75 m³ in 1979, there would have been eighteen iterations between that year and 2015, which would’ve reduced the size by a factor of 2¹⁸, which is 262 144, equivalent to a cube less than seven centimetres on a side, or about the same size as a Rubik’s cube. It would’ve been about the same size as a human brain in 2011 or so by those calculations. Does that mean it’s been theoretically possible to build a gynoid or android with the equivalent of human abilities for a whole decade then? That would assume that human brain functions can be precisely replicated using hardware in the form of logic gates, and that’s not clear.

I actually want to go the other way with this.

Edited public domain image from NASA

This image is not ideal. It excludes the Shetlands and includes about half of Ireland and bits of France, but I want to focus on Great Britain here. But we’re not quite there yet. Back to Greater London and the Albert Hall.

It wasn’t clear to me what kind of plan the human brain in the first two scenarios had. Was it supposed to be a two-dimensional or three-dimensional equivalent? Is the Albert Hall in particular supposed to be filled with transistors or is it just a flat surface covered in them? Brains are not like that, and the human brain is even less so due to being very wrinkled. This brings up a bit of a quandary for me. My head has a feature called cutis verticis gyrata, where my scalp is convoluted in a brain-like manner. Its cause is unknown but it gives me cause to wonder, is my scalp folded in the same pattern as my brain? Feeling it certainly seems to divide it up into similar lobes, gyri and sulci to the presumed brain underneath it, but if so, is that because there is some geometrical reason why the folds would be in the same place as the brain, or is there some connection between my gyri and the skin of my scalp? Is it like my cortex somehow communicates with my dermis and causes it to pile up in that manner? I don’t know. Nor does anyone else actually: the condition is entirely mysterious.

An unfolded version of the human cerebral cortex would have an area of about two thousand four hundred cm², but even then it’s a three-dimensional object and there’s more to the brain than the cerebrum. Perhaps counter-intuitively, there are several times as many cells in the cerebellum than there are in the cortices, and these are in a similarly folded arrangement and there are plenty of other bits inside the brain such as the hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdalæ, corpus callosum, basal ganglia and so on. Producing three-dimensional circuitry is an unsolved problem in microelectronics, but if the brain can be understood correctly as circuitry, the problem has been solved.

Great Britain does not have a definite area, and there are two figures for it, for similar reasons as the difficulty in working out the true size of the brain and its equivalent. The United Kingdom, i.e. including the bit of Ireland still claimed by Westminster and therefore more than just Great Britain, can be considered to have an area of 242 495 km² or 243 610 km². There are two reasons for this discrepancy. One is illustrated by the idea that “if Wales were flattened out it’d be bigger than England”. The UK is not flat. The first figure is basically the area enclosed by the coastlines considered as a two-dimensional surface. The second takes into consideration the fact that there are hills, valleys and mountains involved. This is where fractals come into play. The resolution of the hills and valleys is important here too. Hills could be thought of as cones or pyramids, or they could be thought of as rough surfaces. However, this doesn’t make the area infinite because it converges on a limit. The question of the coastline and tides also arises, although area based on tides is standardised by some kind of international agreement. But the coastline is also fractal and this influences the area. By one measure, the coastline of Scotland is ten percent that of the whole of Europe, and Europe itself has an unusually long coastline compared to other parts of the world. I’m guessing this also converges to a limit. Scotland’s coastline is, remarkably almost half the length of the oceanic coastline of the whole of the United States, if the later is calculated by a method excluding firths, but more like a ninth if the Great Lakes and firths of the US are included. Scotland is convoluted. It’s “brainy”.

The other factor, which doesn’t influence Britain much, is the fact that it follows Earth’s surface. This gives it a slightly larger area than if it’s assumed to be flat, and also a slightly different area than if you assume it to be a 242 495 km² portion of the surface of a sphere, because Earth is not perfectly spherical but deviates something like 0.5% from the shape of a sphere, and not even in a particularly regular way. Hence there are difficulties.

For the sake of argument I’m going to assume that the area of Great Britain, i.e. the big island I live on, is 209 331 km². This excludes any claims made on Ireland and also Lewis, the rest of Na h-Innse Gall, Ellen Vannin/Man, Ynys Mon, the Isle of Wight, Sheppey and much of Portsmouth (which is on an island). However, it would include the likes of Bede and Frog Islands in Leicester, Dungeness and the Isle of Thanet, since those are not currently islands.

When I look at a map of Great Britain, it is of course very familiar to me, as it would be for most Brits, but when I look at a photograph, map or diagram of the human brain it is less so, unsurprisingly. The brain is also much more significantly three-dimensional than Great Britain is and my lacking spatial abilities are brought into play. Parts of Britain are familiar enough to me that I can fairly easily identify individual rivers, villages, towns and cities in some parts of the island on unmarked maps and photos, particularly if I know which way the compass directions are. What I want to know is, how familiar am I with the anatomy of the brain compared to the geography of Great Britain?

The human brain has a volume of about 1 500 ml. It isn’t entirely sensible to assume it to be a sphere, but it’s still probably the best I can manage as a means of estimating its horizontal cross-sectional area. A sphere with a volume of 1 500 ml would have a cross-sectional area of 158 cm². Compare this to the area of Great Britain, this means that every square millimetre of the brain is proportionate to thirteen and a quarter square kilometres, and I’m guessing that’s the size of a small town.

Like my knowledge of British geography, my knowledge of brain anatomy is very uneven. I know the lobes, some of the sulci and gyri, the structures I mentioned above and the connections made by the cranial nerves along with the ventricles, the basal ganglia and a few other things. I’m also aware of the general layout of the neurones and supporting cells on a microscopic scale. But please don’t ask me to do brain surgery or it’s “there go the piano lessons”, and you also have to contend with the fact that my spatial abilities are pretty poor. It took me a very long time to place even two minor brain structures in relation to each other. I’m talking months.

It amounts to this. There are small areas of Britain of which, like practically anyone else, I have detailed local knowledge. By the way, it’s an interesting exercise to assess the accuracy of Wikipedia by looking up one’s local areas and comparing the articles to what one knows to be true of them because in that respect we’re all experts. Most of us couldn’t do the same with articles of the nucleus accumbens or substantia nigra. The brain is also characterised by different systems marked out by their use of different neurotransmitters, which I might compare to things like the National Grid, the road network and the rail system, although like most other things they’re three-dimensionally arranged.

The body of a nerve cell is about 100 μm wide. A brain scaled up to the size of Great Britain would have such cells 300-400 metres in diameter, so they’d be about the size of a medium-sized park or small lake – perhaps part of a neighbourhood such as a street. You could probably jog round it in about five minutes if you were fairly fit.

I want to be more familiar with the anatomy of the brain just as I want to know the geography of Great Britain, but in order to be able to do that, I need my own brain to have sufficient abilities to grasp its own three-dimensional structure, which makes it a harder task than, say, “doing the knowledge”. But isn’t it odd how we can basically be such a complex organ without having any knowledge of what we are? It isn’t even the same as self-awareness. You could have any degree of that without having a clue about the brain. I can tease out individual bits of experience and correlate them to the nature of the brain, such as the visual system, sensorimotor homunculi, reticular system and others, and I’m aware of the probability of what this particular brain does with certain neurotransmitters compared to others, but like most other people my brain is in a dark bone box doing all this stuff and will forever remain a mystery to me, not least because in order to understand it fully, I would have to have a more complex brain which I wouldn’t then be able to understand, and so forth ad infinitum.

Life is strange.