Roland Allen
speaker
51 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Roland Allen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, Mike, this is wonderful. So this is the metric system as it applies to paper sizes. So there is a good deal of math involved, which I will spare you. But essentially, it means that you're dealing with fractions of a square metre of paper. And so you can bring your paper size into the metric system, which of course is a really handy way of unifying your weights and your volumes and your
lengths and widths and everything like that. So you have a sheet of paper which is slightly taller and skinnier than US letter, but which then turns into a really great system because you can fold it and it's in the same proportions as it originally was, just half the size, which you can't do with letter.
I think you can think about a notebook as being the nearest thing we had to a computer for hundreds of years. And then think of it as a bit of hardware. And then there's different kinds of software which you can put into it. So for instance, double entry bookkeeping, which every accountant or bookkeeper has to learn today.
And so a lot of your, you know, I ask everyone who's listening now to put up their hand if they've trained in double entry bookkeeping. And that changed the world, double entry bookkeeping.
Absolutely. Okay, so this is how accountancy works, right? So credits and debits and profit and loss and balance sheets and valuing a company, valuing a business, valuing stock, depreciation, all of these financial concepts entirely depend on writing stuff down, writing your numbers down in a careful format and then collecting them.
And the only way you could do that for hundreds of years was in a notebook. So everyone who is in any kind of business had to have notebooks, which they kept their financial records in. In 1300, back in Italy, this is when they started doing this. And It's at that point that we see the first companies. So if you've ever worked for a company, they were invented back then in Italy.
But so also were limited liability partnerships. So was futures trading. So were all kinds of really sophisticated financial instruments. The first merchant banks came from Italy at this point. You had...
international businesses which were really much better organized than a lot of businesses I've worked in today and they all used notebooks as their basic technology and that's the case for hundreds of years and then you have sketchbooks and I think sketching is another example of software which you do in this little bit of hardware which is a notebook so
People learn to sketch, they learn to scribble and crosshatch their shadows, and they learn to do observational drawing, which is faithful to life. And then you get the artists of the Renaissance. I find that just a mind-blowing idea. And it just carries on and on like that.
The great scientists, Newton and so on, all made their breakthrough discoveries basically on the pages of their working notebooks or their lab notebooks.
So Mike, thanks very much for having me. That was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
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