Borges on Risk Management

[cordura21]

Well, actually it can be on my back-testing efforts, or in the way sometimes we try to live and control our life. It can also be on how good renovation can be. Anyways, I think it's nice, hope you enjoy it, and that the translation does justice to its beauty.

(btw, here's a link to Borges' own reading )



Of Exactitude in Science



...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.



From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda



The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. English translation quoted from J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975.

[FatChoi]

That's excellent. I also like and find this relevant from Borges:



These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

-- Essay: "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

[chiral3]

Funny you mention this too... I have brought up this Borges reference dozens of times in the past year or two during meetings.