Early modern compilers of information feared that without care for its safekeeping, information might run through their fingers like sand, lost forever.
Mr Hammond is in Afghanistan and is due to sign an agreement in Afghanistan today to set up a British run military academy there that has been called "Sandhurst in the Sand".
Surely, they say, anybody who can both run a large multinational company and also get up and down out of a nasty sand trap must have been designed by something real smart.
Sand told the judge he fled first to Florida and then to Thailand Sand's attorney, Glenn Obedin, said his client had grown tired of living on the run and contacted authorities late last year.