Observations from a Hill

I read a short essay today - a student piece, I imagine - by one Julius Zimmer of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, submitted for a course on American photography, entitled "On The Change of Photography in The Age of Smartphone Cameras". It voices in part the now familiar idea - trope - even, that the ubiquity of the smartphone and its by now remarkable [by any standards] photographic capability and image storage capacity, is making the profession of photographer redundant. To a degree, one might argue that this was indeed the case: so few people require or even want their personal lives recording by a professional third party photographer these days as their and their friend's phones are always there, making the best of them via some very clever software. So yes, the jobbing (portrait) photographer as a species is indeed on the  endangered list; but as for true professional portrait photographic artists - those who not only command the highest prices but produce works...

I was reading with sardonic interest about Dominic Cummings 'comeback tour'. He reckons that he still has the key to unlock whatever the problem is with society as we currently know it. Really? I somehow doubt it based on what we've seen hitherto. The problem with being bright and a bit chippy about your background - lower middle class in Cumming's case - is that you can get a little beyond in your thinking, imagining that your wish list of objectives is, in fact, a plan. Of course, most often this is simply not the case. Most of us have had some scheme or other crushed into the sand, despite our absolute belief in its truth of purpose. And most of us will simply turn and face another pressing issue to solve, leaving our grand scheme for someone else to worrit over. We all go through an 'omnipotent' era in our lives - the 'invincible' years of youth. The mark of of a grown-up is recognising the limitations of one's capabilities and talents, and voici...

We've all heard of Photoshop , right? Even those who have never seen, let alone used the software recognise the name as the now common verbal usage of the name: to 'Photoshop' an image, meaning to edit and alter a digital photographic image to some end. Far fewer people would know just how long this raster image editing software - at first a standalone application, then a suite of software, now a full-blown subscription megalith of related media apps, available online, has been around. It's interesting to note, however, that its origins lie in the late 1980s , the brainchild of Thomas and John Knoll . Pictured are the two 1.44 MB floppy disks that contain the first version of Photoshop we ever owned, back in 1989/90. It is the LE edition and was probably bundled with a scanner of some kind. Significantly, the application software in its entirety comes on Disc One, with Disc Two holding all the support stuff: tutorial material, documentation and manuals and such. Th...

Further to last night's scribble, I'd just like to add in a few thoughts I've touched on in the past as a kind of superscript - can't call it a postscript as that implies some kind of finished article - to the vague meanderings that I put out here on a daily basis. Thinking on about all of these amazing notions and schemes about knowledge accumulation, management and retrieval still always brings me back to those seminal days at Apple in Cupertino, when geniuses - I don't use that term lightly - produced some of the most potentially transformative software of the twentieth century, pointing towards future developments that could, indeed should have transformed our interactions with the machines in our daily lives for the better; but which were either left to wither and die or were summarily axed from the corporate thinking of the company that spawned them in the first place. Three technologies always stand out in Apple's history for me, particularly as two of th...

Niklas Luhmann maintained that his Zettelkasten was his second brain. When it came to researching themes and topics for his numerous books and academic papers, its meta-system of links to discrete ideas and references, too numerous for him to hold in entirety in his own brain, formed a kind of physical, paper-based rather than neural network map of his generalised learning process, from which he could inform and enhance his current thinking. Melvil Dewey , in inventing his Decimal Classification system for cataloguing publications - the heart of most of the world's library catalogues, hinted at a method of cross-connection between discrete sources of knowledge to aid further knowledge generation and research. Otlet and La Fontaine extended this idea further and established the notion of data connectivity and correlation with the Universal Decimal Classification system , which took Dewey's concept from the simple cataloguing and indexing of documents - taxonomies of books, p...

The Peter Mandelson affair grinds on; the dark angel's fall from grace accelerating exponentially as he approaches terminal velocity toward the Ground Zero of his own making. The problem is that some of us could see he was a car crash waiting to happen back in the New Labour days. He must have a hefty dose of personal charisma in the flesh, so to speak, as he never came over as anything but an ineffectual political operator, either on screen or by deed itself to us here in reality-land. He struck me back then, a quarter of a century ago, as a bit of a no-mark, and that view hasn't changed since. The biggest sin in all of this affair, though,  is that he managed to schmooze his way back to a position of handsomely-paid influence under a newly-minted Labour government dedicated on paper to avoiding the mis-steps and sleaze of the outgoing Tory mess that preceded them. Starmer's decision to drag out this [old] New Labour fossil was obviously a disaster in the making from day o...