Focussing after the fact

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This morning’s Observer column.

“From today painting is dead” is an aphorism often attributed to Paul Delaroche, a 19th-century French painter, upon seeing the first daguerreotypes (though Wikipedia maintains there is no compelling evidence that he actually said it). In a way, it was a misjudgment on the same epic scale as Thomas Watson’s celebrated observation that the total world market for computers was five machines. What Delaroche was presumably getting at was that painting as a naturalistic representation of reality was terminally threatened by the arrival of the new technology of “painting with light”. If that is indeed what he meant, then he was only partly right.

What brought Delaroche to mind was the announcement of the Lytro light field camera, which goes on sale next year. Based on some discoveries made by a Stanford student, Ren Ng, the camera turns the normal process of compose-focus-shoot on its head. Instead you just point the Lytro at whatever you want to photograph, and then you can retrospectively focus in on any part of the image. As the New York Times explained: “With Lytro's camera, you can focus on any point in an image taken with a Lytro after you’ve shot the picture. When viewing a Lytro photograph on your computer, you can simply click your mouse on any point in the image and that area will come into focus. Change the focal point from the flower to the child holding the flower. Make the background blurry and the foreground clear. Do the opposite – you can change the focal point as many times as you like.”

Dehumanising universities

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One implication of what’s happening to British universities is that the thrust of the Browne Report (and of government policy) is to marginalise the Arts and Humanities.  This is, IMHO, not only stupid and myopic, but also dangerous, because one of the functions of the humanities (as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out) is to enhance our capacity to empathise with others.  It’s also such a contrast with what happened after the end of the Second World War, especially in the US under the GI Bill, as veterans went to university and studied whatever they fancied.  

And then I remembered Auden’s poem “Under which lyre”… (which he subtitled “A reactionary tract for the times”)

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
     Through basic courses.

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
     They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

Summing up Steve Jobs

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What turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet was that Jobs did more than just create cool new devices. Rather he presided over the creation of new market ecosystems, with those devices at their heart. And if the ecosystems were more chaotic than he might have liked, they were also more powerful and more profitable. It’s true that, by the standards of today’s open source computing world, Apple’s platforms are still very much closed… But, by the standards of its old ethos, Apple is much more open than one would ever have thought possible. In giving up a little control, Jobs found a lot more power.

James Surowiecki, “How Steve Jobs Changed”, The New Yorker, 17 October, 2011, p.29.

Oh — you mean that 55 billion

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Lovely story on BBC News.

Germany has found itself 55bn euros ($78bn; £48bn) richer after discovering an accounting error at Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the troubled bank it nationalised in 2009.

The country now expects its ratio of debt to GDP to be 81.1% for 2011, 2.6 percentage points lower than previously forecast, the finance ministry said.

The miscalculation was at the so-called bad bank of HRE, FMS Wertmanagement.

The discovery was made earlier this month but only announced on Friday.

FMS will contribute about 161bn euros to Germany’s debt this year, compared with 216.5bn in 2010.

How to torpedo a Presidential candidate

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Terrific analysis by the Political Editor of the Irish Times of how Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness comprehensively destroyed Sean Gallagher, the front-runner in the Irish presidential election, and handed the election to Michael D. Higgins.

The critical passage in the TV debate is here.

Rage against the machine

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Good editorial in this week’s Economist. Excerpt:

To the man-in-the-street, all this smacks of a system that has failed. Neither of the main Western models has much political credit at the moment. European social democracy promised voters benefits that societies can no longer afford. The Anglo-Saxon model claimed that free markets would create prosperity; many voters feel instead that they got a series of debt-fuelled asset bubbles and an economy that was rigged in favour of a financial elite, who took all the proceeds in the good times and then left everybody else with no alternative other than to bail them out. To use one of the protesters’ better slogans, the 1% have gained at the expense of the 99%.

If the grievances are more legitimate and broader than previous rages against the machine, then the dangers are also greater. Populist anger, especially if it has no coherent agenda, can go anywhere in times of want. The 1930s provided the most terrifying example. A more recent (and less frightening) case study is the tea party. The justified fury of America’s striving middle classes against a cumbersome state has in practice translated into a form of obstructive nihilism: nothing to do with taxes can get through Washington, including tax reform.