Thursday, January 12, 2012
Uggie: "I am big fan of England"
"The Artist's dog Uggie visits the Guardian and tells Xan Brooks about his artistic ambitions and the ruff and tumble of modern showbiz" (from The Guardian). Yesterday we went to The Artist, a black and white silent film. How can I describe it? Boring. Endless. Pretentious. It is one of those egotistical "artistic" creations, of talentless writers writing about themselves writing, of talentless actors and film makers about themselves acting and making films. They are in love with themselves and believe that everybody should be passionately interested in their professional doings. The Artist is about an actor of silent films who finds himself unemployed when the talking film technology arrives. Sure it was a great and dramatic event for the film industry anno domine 1927, but why on Earth J and wife in Tel Aviv 2012 should be interested in it? That technological advance leaves bodies alongside is a common event and as far as I am concerned, the pain felt by aged hydrogeologists as their specialized skills became useless with the advent of computer models is more pathetic and heartbreaking. But no one is making films about that and no one has the pretentiousness of those brainless actors who think that the arrival of the talkies was Apocalipsis itself.
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3 comments:
My late father-in-law was a mechanical engineer and while he was never made completely redundant, he never really mastered computer technology. I recall him telling me that in his day, beam analysis was done by hand (actually slide rule). The method of analysis involves breaking the beam into segments and analyzing each segment individually. In order to make the calculation doable within a reasonable amount of time, the beam would be divided into some small number of segments, even though the accuracy of the calculation increases as the # of segments increase (with diminishing returns). Of course computers are extremely fast at such repetitive calculations and can break the beam into thousands or millions of segments and spit out the answer in a fraction of a second.
The funny/sad thing was that, even though the man was quite intelligent, he was completely hopeless when it came to computers, to the extent that, even though I tried repeatedly, I could never get him to independently master even simple tasks such as email. Somehow, computers were just completely out of his intellectual reach because he had not been exposed to them early enough.
Fortunately the law evolves very slowly and I'm not worried about being made redundant.
K
Lawyers will never become redundant.
Anon.
In my lifetime I have seen to disappear whole offices staffed by draughtmen - you cannot find an engineering drawing table anywhere. Autocad killed that profession. There remains very little of what I learnt in the University that is relevant to my work. I too am from the slide ruler and logarythm tables. What saved me, I think, is teaching in the University. The students here are very exigent and critical, they enjoy shaming teachers and write letters to the Dean about being presented long out-of-fashion methods, so I had to update myself. Starting to learn to work differently is diffcult, but the second year it becomes automatic.
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