The bean-counters’ sword

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This morning’s Observer column…

In the summer of 1978, a Harvard student named Dan Bricklin was cycling along a path in Martha’s Vineyard, when he had a big idea. As an MBA student, he was being taught to do financial planning using a large sheet of paper ruled into a grid pattern. One entered numbers corresponding to sales, costs, revenues and so on, into cells on the grid, did some calculations and entered the result in another cell. This was called ‘spreadsheet analysis’ and it was unutterably tedious because the moment any of the numbers in the sheet changed, everything else that depended on it had to be recalculated – manually.

Bricklin’s big idea was that all this could be done by a computer program…

Footnotes:

John Dvorak’s engaging rant is here.

Dan Bricklin maintains some enthralling pages about the background to VisiCalc.

Just think…

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… that this is the last weekend the Bush regime will be in power.

Alexander Cockburn, for one, will miss him. Here’s his valedictory message, from Counterpunch:

I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

On Bush’s Jr’s fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Twenty years earlier, and even when Bush Sr sat in the Oval Office, the “strong leadership” craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled, their estimable reforms swiftly aborted and the kleptocrats handed back the keys to the presidential office by the CIA and their local right-wing allies…

Thanks to Kevin Horgan for the link.

Googling vs boiling (contd)

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From Nicholas Carr’s Blog.

Still, the numbers add up. Google says "the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn't include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.

Leibovitz revealed

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We finally got to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery today. Verdict: very mixed. The glossy, showbiz, Vanity Fair pictures of celebs — Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Leonardo di Caprio with a dead swan draped round his neck (and not particularly in focus either) — are mostly vapid, though there are a few exceptions (Daniel Day Lewis reclining like an Edwardian roue, for example). And the best that can be said for her landscapes is that they are, well, dire.

But there are also some wonderful images: a terrific picture of Cindy Crawford, nude except for a python draped tastefully around her, shot in B&W against a background of lush vegetation; one great portrait of Susan Sontag in chemotherapy, wearing a black poloneck sweater and a wonderful crew-cut of white hair; a sensitive picture of Richard Avedon; and a sensational portrait of Leibovitz’s mother. Her four recent photographs of the Queen (which are shown outside of the exhibition proper, in the lobby of the NPG) are very fine indeed, nicely composed and beautifully lit. HM the Q looks very sombre, but the pictures make one think of Leibovitz as the Holbein of our time. (Come to think of it, her recent work seems increasingly painterly: for example her Louis Vuitton advertising pictures of Keith Richards in a New York hotel bedroom put one in mind of Vermeer and the way he lit and portrayed his subjects with their possessions.)

There’s also a moving image from Leibovitz’s time in Sarajevo with Sontag: a child’s bicycle lies on the ground, surrounded by a swirl of smudged blood. The kid was hit by a mortar just in front of Leibovitz’s car. They packed him into the car and sent it off to the hospital, but he died en route. In between these eye-catching prints are lots of snapshots from the photographer’s family life.

One unusual feature of the show is a room with two walls covered with proofs and contact prints of the pics in the exhibition; this gives a good sense of the variety — and in a way the ordinariness of her life.

The NPG shop is selling the Annie Leibovitz at Work book (above) which is basically her commentary on the pictures plus some other stuff (notes on Equipment, Ten Most Asked Questions, Publishing and Chronology). It’s intriguing, informative — and very reasonably priced at £15.