Umerez in English

The other day, I shared on my blog a piece from The Verge about a Microsoft employee who disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest what she described as genocide—referring to Israel’s military actions in Palestine. The article, and especially the accompanying video, really got me thinking.

This woman called on her company to stop providing AI technologies for use in Israel’s military operations in Gaza—operations which have continued in response to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. She directly accused her boss, Microsoft’s CEO of AI, of profiting from war and from what she referred to as a genocide of Palestinians by Israel. Her email, which is included in the article, is well worth reading.

Now, I find myself wondering: was this a pacifist protest, coming from someone with an anti-military, anti-escalation stance? Or was it solely a pro-Palestinian demonstration, aimed at condemning Israel’s military machine? I don’t know much more about this woman, so I’m not going to assume either. Instead, I want to ask a few broader questions—using this protest only as the spark for a wider reflection.

I’d ask someone who condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza and calls it genocide: do you believe Palestine has a right to defend itself? And if so, does that right include the terrorist actions of groups like Hamas? Does it include mass murder and the kidnapping of innocents—this time, Israelis?

I’d ask someone who mourns the October 7 attacks: do you think Israel has a right to defend itself? And if so, does that right include mass bombings of civilians—this time, Palestinians? The complete destruction of homes, businesses, infrastructure, hospitals? Occupation of land? The forced displacement of thousands, maybe millions?

The most common answer in both cases, I fear, is “yes” to everything. In which case we’re not really talking about pacifists—we’re talking about people who justify violence, as long as it’s their side doing it.

And I think it’s naïve to believe a different world is possible.

It’s naïve to think a massive corporation like Microsoft would refuse to let its products be used by the military to kill people—or flex power. They’ll call it defense, or deterrence, but let’s not kid ourselves.

It’s naïve to think that, with war drums beating across Europe and probably the rest of the world, the reasonable thing isn’t to ramp up defense spending and brace for what’s coming.

It’s naïve to believe that the tribes we call nations, states, powers—will stop violently competing for land and resources. That’s what we’ve always done. Sure, these last 80 years have been a golden age of peace and prosperity, powered by globalized capitalism. But the system’s full of cracks, and the players who didn’t benefit—or didn’t benefit enough—want to tear it down and start over. They want a new game, a new balance of power. No matter the price to pay. A price that others will pay.

And yet… naivety might be the only thing we’ve got left.

To keep believing a better world is possible. To keep shouting that we’re not going to war, no matter how convincingly they paint the enemy.

Don’t make me hate a Palestinian—I won’t.
Don’t make me hate an Israeli—I won’t.
I won’t hate an American, a Russian, a Belarusian, a Salvadoran, a Spaniard, a Chinese, a Korean, an Indian, a South African, an Algerian, a Brazilian, a Venezuelan, a New Zealander.

I will hate the men—it’s usually men—who send others to kill and die.

When war comes, I’ll protect my family. We’ll hide wherever we can. And if we’re lucky, we’ll crawl out of whatever hole we found. Or maybe not. Maybe the steamroller won’t let us breathe.

But no, that’s not really what I think. That’s what I wish I could think.

The truth is—I know fear. And I’m starting to feel it closing in. It makes us survivors. It makes us tremble. It makes us hate. It makes us react. Attack. Want to feel strong. Fear being crushed. Crush before being crushed.

I don’t know anything. I’m not sure about anything. I don’t think there’s anything we can do—except wait for history to overtake us.

It feels inevitable. And oh, how I wish it weren’t: Si vis pacem, para bellum.

🔗 DEVONthink 4.0 Public Beta | annotated by wishiwasgolfing

You can thoroughly test-drive DEVONthink 4 including the functionality of all editions during the short beta phase. Take a look at the product page and download DEVONthink 4 today. It is now also available for purchase on our website.

Dear FSM. DEVONthink 4.0 is here. Please grab my money.

A few highlights of the things that DT4 will bring:

• AI model integration: to summarize texts, assign tags, interact with our documents, search using natural language or incorporate AI actions into our automations.
• DT4 will support online models as well as locally installed models. Privacy will be in our hands.
• DT4 will automatically keep older versions of the documents, so we can return to them at any time. Audit-proof databases will prevent documents from being edited, perfect to store financial documents or other materials with special requirements.
• DT4 will find PDFs without prior OCR.
• Save frequently used batch processing workflows.
• DT4 will switch to a flexible license model. Purchasing a license will give us a year of updates. When the year is over, we can extend the license, but if we don’t, it’s not like a subscription model. We won’t lose access to the app, which will continue working perfectly. Just the updates won’t be available. We can choose to pause a while and extend the updates later.

On this International Transgender Day of Visibility, I want to say:

Let them be,
Let me be,
Let us be,
Let people be.

I don’t really know if this is going to last, but for the last two months I feel like I’m actually getting things done. I’m being constant with my daily and weekly review routines, I go through my daily tasks and leave only very few undone, I’m keeping good track of my many open projects at work.

This is, I think, thanks to a hard rule I imposed myself back in January. I decided to divide the day in two distinct halves: mornings are for doing things (I call it action mode); afternoons are for planning and cleaning up (management mode).

In the mornings, I keep my email client open, because I need to stay on top of any urgent message. But, here’s another hard and very effective rule: I only process or answer the email messages that are relevant to the tasks I am working on in that particular morning. The rest of the messages, urging as they may be, I completely ignore and leave for the afternoon.

In between action and management modes, mid-day, I take a break. Either for lunch or, two days a week, the gym.

In the evenings, my wife and I have started going out for a drink or a quick dinner. It’s our moment.

Days are long still. I woke up at 5:15 and I’m finishing my review and plan for tomorrow at midnight. So there’s still a lot to do for my goal of working better and working less. But I think I found a consistent routine that’s helping me stay on top of my game and it feels good.

🚀 How to read a Supreme Court case: 10 tips for nonlawyers | Ilisabeth S. Bornstein for The Conversation

> The opinion is generally made up of four parts: the facts, the issue, the holding and the reasoning. These parts may not be specifically identified with headers, but they are the main ingredients of the opinion. Here’s what each part means. > > Facts: This is a summary of who is suing whom about what and why. It may also describe which lower court or courts decided the issue and how it was decided before the case arrived at the Supreme Court. You’ll find the facts at the beginning of the opinion. > > Issue: This is the question the court is being asked to decide. It might be located at the start of the opinion or at the end of the facts. Sometimes, there may be more than one issue. To find the issue(s), look for key phrases like: The question before us is … We are asked to decide if … We consider the question whether … > > Holding: This is the court’s answer to the question(s) posed. This answer will serve as precedent to guide future cases on this topic at both the Supreme Court as well as lower courts. Sometimes the holding can be found right after the issue. Other times, it appears much later in the opinion or at the end. Some key phrases identifying the holding: Therefore we conclude … We hold … We find … > > Reasoning: Most of the opinion will be the reasoning. The reasoning explains how the court reached its holding. The court may explain which existing precedent – holdings from prior Supreme Court cases – applies. The court may also spend time explaining how to interpret language in a federal statute or balance conflicting rights, such as one person’s right to privacy and another person’s right to free speech.

🚀 The Scope of Hamas’ Campaign of Rape Against Israeli Women Is Revealed, Testimony After Testimony - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Among other things, the commission is aiming to obtain recognition in the international arena that the acts committed by Hamas against women and children come under the definition of crimes against humanity. To achieve this, they hoped to awaken from their torpor the women’s organizations associated with the United Nations, but the results have been disappointing. Most of their disappointment is directed at the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and UN Women. “These are organizations that have an important declarative role,” Elkayam-Levy says. “They are supposed to be the first pipeline from which information flows concerning human rights violations against women and children.”

These bodies were slow, however, to relate to the events in the western Negev, and the statements they ultimately published are frustrating to Elkayam-Levy, to say the least. “All kinds of vague statements are beginning to come out,” she notes, “calling upon both sides to ‘show restraint,’ and simply making October 7 vanish from the timeline. A parallel universe. The terrible betrayal we have felt has developed into a feeling that we are now the victims of wild incitement directed at us. At very early stages of the war, those organizations began running campaigns about the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. I am very uncomfortable saying this, but those organizations have shown themselves to be antisemitic bodies.

(…)

Last Thursday, early in the morning, Elkayam-Levy found herself in an unusual situation, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Two European prime ministers were visiting Israel, Pedro Sánchez from Spain and Alexander De Croo from Belgium. They gathered with their entourages in the hotel’s conference room to receive a briefing from the head of the Israeli Civil Commission.

Elkayam-Levy decided to put aside the “horror speech” – the gut-wrenching descriptions of crimes that she listed at the Harvard conference – and focused on the effort to recruit the foreign leaders to constructive cooperation. It wasn’t a debate, but an event in which Elkayam-Levy was the primary speaker, with the prime ministers listening. Sánchez was mostly interested in her positions on national security and terrorism; De Croo wanted to know if she believes in peace and asked her if she also sees the suffering of Gaza residents. Elkayam-Levy noted that she’s a longtime peace activist. The next day at Rafah Crossing, the two leaders would make pro-Palestinian speeches that would set off a diplomatic crisis with Israel. But Elkayam-Levy didn’t concern herself with that. “Even if they expressed a position that was critical toward Israel, at no point did they deny the acts that targeted Israeli women, or stayed silent.”

February is almost over but I’m happy to say that, with my previous post on digital excuses, I took part in this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted my Manu, who is one of my favorite bloggers, as I state in my blogroll.

And I’m on the list 🚀 IndieWeb Carnival: Digital Relationships – Manu

> the topic for the month of February is going to be “Digital relationships”. The meaning of the topic is intentionally vague but I can think of at least three ways to interpret it.
> - The first is probably the most obvious: relationships between us human beings that are lived primarily—or entirely—on the digital world.
> - The second is the relationship between us and the digital world itself.
> - The third is the growing trend of people having relationships with digital creations such as AI fiends, boyfriends and girlfriends.
> Those are three ways you can interpret the topic but don’t feel limited to just those three. Go nuts and be creative.

February is almost over and, if I don’t speed this up, I’m not going to make it to Manuel Moreale’s IndieWeb Carnival invitation for this month. And this is in part due to the digital caos I live in.

Yes, this is going to be a moaning post. Probably annoying for the people who read it and absolutely of no use for bringing any good to our collective lives, much less for adding anything nice or worthy to the IndieWeb Carnival. I’m not going to apologize, though, because this is my indie blog and my indie post and my indie state of mind. I’m a boomer, but I intend to take full advantage of the modern whining trend.

If the language in this post looks or sounds kind of off, cheesy even, it’s because it is. English is not my first language, not even my second, so I don’t fully master it. I’m writing this trying to think in English and not use the dictionary at all, so the expressions I use are coming from the top of my head, which is mostly full of tv shows, tech podcasts, social media and blogs, the tools I use to keep up with my English.

I was saying that me not being able to fulfil my commitment to write about digital relationships for the February IndieWeb Carnival is in part due to the digital caos I live in. I’m not really sure about that. Digital tools are a curse and a blessing. I live inside my laptop and my smartphone, and I run my legal practice entirely within their software tools. I think I have developed quite a sophisticated system of apps and scripts (keyboard shortcuts, macros, applescripts and other automations, nothing fancy) that make me very productive at work.

So it’s quite a systematic caos, if that’s possible. But for that same reason, I take upon myself much more work than I’m capable of handling. And I spend 3-4 hours a day only for managing incoming emails and new tasks. I like my job, I despise having to do it always in a hurry, overwhelmed and always with the feeling of trying to empty the sea with a spoon.

I’ve tried going analog, jotting down my tasks in a notebook, journaling, meditation, the usual stuff. I don’t see any benefit. I like typing on a keyboard, having all my notes neatly organized in my laptop, being able to find them quickly, using different tricks to link notes, files and projects and use my digital tools as my second brain. Analog stuff is always a crippled substitute that does not help at all in the long run.

So I stick to my curse and keep staring at my different screens and devoting a third of my day to email and tasks. I want to learn new things (French, the language; coding, even if it’s only javascript and applescript; playing an instrument…), I want to make bread, I want to blog more, I want to travel and I don’t have time for anything. Not even to write a post for the IndieWeb Carnival in more than a month.

So I whine.

A good/bad thing (I can’t make up my mind) about digital tools is that they make the world bearable to me. I don’t feel much empathy for “the people”. I like hanging out in small groups, but I really dislike crowds and what I despise the most is the peer pressure that comes with social relationships, the silly competition, the “boy stuff” and the tribal behaviors. So I have found that the world and the people are much more attractive for me behind my computer’s glass screen. Lately, I have found that I prefer writing and interacting in English than in Spanish or Basque (my every day languages), which is, I guess, another way to isolate myself from the society I have to cope with directly.

Well, the thing is I don’t like what I see in the mirror lately. What I see is a guy constantly locked to his digital stuff, overwhelmed by the ever-lasting information flow and, one more thing, self-conscious that time is ticking and running out and that I have been doing this for the last twenty years, which means that I will have to admit that I’ve been wasting my life. I blame my digital tools because it’s easy to do and they can’t defend themselves, but I know that they’re only tools and that it’s only me to blame.

I said I wouldn’t apologize, and I won’t. This useless thoughts are what came to mind when thinking about what to write under the topic of “digital relationships”. I guess I needed to put them out. Probably, I should end this post with some emotional or inspiring phrase, but nobody is reading and I won’t do it just for myself. Not today.

🚀 ⚡️ [New Freeware App] Upsies – Upscale your images with MetalFX – Eternal Storms Software | Blog

>

> Upsies is something I wrote on a whim, just out of curiosity if it worked – using the MetalFX Spatial Upscaler to upscale photos and images. And lo and behold, it does work, and produces arguably nicer results than, say, resizing an image up with Preview.app.

I love everything Matthias does. This utility app does what it says, and it delivers.

🚀 Installing Pandoc on Apple Silicon with Homebrew · Nono Martínez Alonso

> Here’s how I installed pandoc on my MacBook Pro (13–inch, M1, 2020) to run with Rosetta 2 — not natively, but on the x86_64 architecture — until a universal binary for macOS is built that supports the arm64 architecture in new Appple Silicon Macs.

Thanks a lot, Nono.Ma. I needed to know which build to choose to install Pandoc on my Mac (it’s an M2 macbook pro) and I never remember the reference for the correct architecture (arm64 or x86_64). So you taking the time, two years ago, to document your Pandoc installation helped me a great deal.

🚀 US Supreme Court reconsiders longstanding doctrine on agency power

> Liberal justices argued that agencies’ experts, rather than judges, were often best placed to craft rules. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that striking out Chevron could turn judges into policymakers. “There’s a real separation of powers danger here,” she said. “I’m worried about the courts becoming uber-legislators.” > > If the Chevron doctrine were overturned, rules “are much more likely to be invalidated by a court, and so the agency will have to be much more careful about which options to choose and how it selects between various possibilities”, said Jonathan Masur, professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School. Federal courts would also have more power to determine whether rules fit their interpretation of a statute.

I’m not sure I grasp the whole implication of this debate, but I’d say that less regulatory discretion for the executive branch and a stronger judicial oversight is good for the balance of powers and the rights of the people as it furthers the control of the administrative activity. What’s wrong about agencies having to be “much more careful about which options to choose”?

🚀 If a human does it – Manu

> Except that if fucking Disney were to “just take inspiration” and steal designs from smaller artists we’d all be enraged, and for good reasons.
> So please, cut the bullshit. Train your goddamn AI on whatever you want, steal all the content, but at least be honest and feel some shame.

What can I say, I usually like everything Manuel writes. This is the case, too.

I really enjoyed True Detective’s comeback, episode 1 of season 4, dubbed “Night Country”. Main characters are Liz Danvers, police chief, played by Jodie Foster, and Evangeline ‘Gi’ Navarro, Trooper, played by Kali Reis. They both play really interesting rols, strong confident women.

I think Peter Prior, a police rookie, played by Finn Bennett, is going to be a good one, too.

And above all, the great Fiona Shaw is a great addition to the drama. She’s spooky as ever, I loved her part in the episode.

True Detective’s new season is placed in a lost town in Alaska, 160 miles North of the Arctic Circle, just after the last sunset of the year, when a long night starts. There’s a mine where most people work, that led to an unsolved murder a while back, and a scientific station where new dark things seem to have happened. I don’t know yet, but it looks like Liz Danvers and Gi Navarro are going to have to face some ghosts, from the past and the present, figurative and tangible ghosts brought by the ever lasting night.

🚀 20240114 | Short Thoughts

> But I from all these articles, and the associated comment threads, I’ve found a lot of alternative search engines, and I tried a few. I’ve started using Startpage as my Google proxy, for more anonymity. I’ve found that the results are not the same as directly querying Google, but they are pretty good and sometimes better (less sploggy, even). DuckDuckGo and Startpage/Google are still my go-tos, but I’ve added a few more back-up engines, too: > > * Mojeek has its own search index. sierdy called this the best alternative to the Google-Bing-Yandex index trifecta. I’d call it good, not great. Seems to surface mostly older pages (which can be useful sometimes). Has advanced search (remember that?), and a beta-version Substack specific search engine, which I haven’t tried. Less good for what’s the answer?, better for what else is out there? > * Marginalia is maybe more interesting than “useful,” depending on why you are browsing. It focuses on indexing the “small web,” and as the developer says:
> It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Interesting, for fools like me that once tried DuckDuckGo, failed a couple of times and went back to Google.

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Mi oración. Hoy, para empezar el año.

Vivo en un país libre
Cual solamente puede ser libre
En esta tierra, en este instante
Y soy feliz porque soy gigante

Amo a una mujer clara
Que amo y me ama
Sin pedir nada
O casi nada
Que no es lo mismo
Pero es igual

Y si esto fuera poco
Tengo mis cantos
Que poco a poco
Muelo y rehago
Habitando el tiempo
Como le cuadra
A un hombre despierto

Soy feliz
Soy un hombre feliz
Y quiero que me perdonen
Por este día
Los muertos de mi felicidad

🚀 Curio giveaway! - BrettTerpstra.com

> 🎄 Merry Christmas! I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a Pro license ($119 value) for Curio. Curio is the perfect app for managing your brainstorms, your research, your projects, and your digital life. A Curio “space” is a blank canvas on which you can add notes, web pages, pdfs, images, mind maps, outlines, and more. All searchable and linkable, and even shareable. Version 27 is freshly out and ready to take it to the next level. It even includes multiple AI integrations to assist with research.

Don’t miss these great giveaways by Brett Terpstra. I already won a 1-year subscription for SaneBox and it’s awesome.

This is for Sarah Burstein, I thought she might like it. Sarah just tooted “Se acabó”, and she might not know that it’s a song, an anthem, sang by María Jiménez, a strong woman and wonderful performer that lived a hard life and passed away a short while back.

I was looking for “Se acabó” with proper lyrics translated to English, but I found this other song that I love. I wanted to share it with Sarah and with anybody else that just had enough, that want to shout “Se acabó”. The translation for the lyrics is below the video.

{{< youtube 4QP-Z7eJSos >}}

That
Whom you loved so much
As long as it suited you, that one
That’s still me

The one
Who lifted you off the ground
The one who lifted you up to the sky, that one
That’s still me

The one
Who loved you beyond measure
And in her love left her life, that one
That’s still me

That one
The one whose story you tell is humiliating
The one you drag with the people of your class
And from whom with viciousness you stole her joy, ay

Oh, that one
The one you threw away like a dog from your life
And because of you she is lost in the world
And for whom everyone still respects you

But how badly I misjudged you
If you like garbage, but look how crazy
But for you it’s all right
But how I miscalculated

I thought you were so decent and you like it ordinary
For cheap or what do I know
And I don’t sing of pain
I’m not looking for someone to love me
Nor do I seek financial backing
I’m not looking for someone to love me

I, I am not a bill of exchange
Nor am I a currency to be given
That is given to anyone
Like a check to the bearer

What I did thank you for
Is that you keep in mind
That I’m not for sale
And much less for you
Love

You’re a businessman
You want everything with partners
Now I get it, I get it
You let me down so much

I’m leaving you a blank check
In your name, it’s for you
For as much as you want
That where it says “contempt”¹
That should be your price
And it’s signed by me

🚀 bring back the blog – The Homebound Symphony

> Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

That’s exactly what I try to do with this little corner of mine, so I’m happy to belong somewhere, at last.

I still think AI will be a good tool for mortal humans and an even better creativity booster in the hands of Artists, but these words by Nick Cave deserve to be reflected upon, because the risks are enormous too.

Typora is a great Markdown tool and text editor and it never ceases to amaze me.

I was trying how DEVONthink handles Mermaid to render diagrams and graphic charts in Markdown, and I opened an example file in my Markdown-tool of choice, Typora, and found that this magnificent app supports Mermaid natively. So here’s a couple of screenshots.

The first one shows the Mermaid code and the resulting image:

And here are more examples.

I’m in love with Typora. I’ve previously written about it here too: How to insert images in Typora.

Ene, aho zabalik jarraitzen dut lan zoragarri hau ikusi eta gero.

{{< youtube KlRfXo3SC_k >}}

John Gruber-en Daring Fireball orriari esker ezagutu dut. Hiroshi Sumi (@kyabetsumade) da egilea.

Bideoa ikusi lehendabizi, eta gero Gruber-en orrira jo pare bat bitxikeri gehiago ikusteko. Baina lehendabizi bideoaz gozatu.

Leer esto en Español.

Read this in English.

And the last gem I found is this one, which I’m hoping will bring me a lot of note-taking joy: https://decoding.io/2023/12/bookmarked-type-take-notes-without-interrupting-your-flow/

Bookmarked “Type – Take notes without interrupting your flow” – Decoding

> Bookmarked “Type – Take notes without interrupting your flow” > > Take notes without interrupting your flow. > > Type lets you quickly jot things down with the timestamp attached, without interrupting your flow. > Very interesting use of text files. I want to integrate this app into my workflow somehow.

Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the Supreme Court, dies : NPR

> O’Connor served on the court for a quarter of a century and, after that, became an outspoken critic of what she saw as modern threats to judicial independence. > > While on the court, O’Connor was called “the most powerful woman in America.” Because of her position at the center of a court that was so closely divided on so many major questions, she often cast the deciding vote in cases involving abortion, affirmative action, national security, campaign finance reform, separation of church and state, and states’ rights, as well as in the case that decided the 2000 election, Bush v. Gore – a decision she later hinted she regretted.

Sid tibi terra levis.

If you don’t know @hiro’s blog, you’re missing out on tons of interesting stuff.

Hiro Report delivers lots of different site recommendations, every week. Not a single week goes by without something interesting, useful or outright fun. And going through past reports is a joy, too.

It’s got tips, apps, movies, sites, hardware… lots and lots of surprising stuff.

So thanks a lot for your weekly report, @hiro, I hope you continue bringing it to us and, above all, I hope it makes you famous and fulfills your plan to control the world 😂.

Painting on the edge: Overview and contents – The Eclectic Light Company

> Whatever reading you like to make of Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas or The Spinners, one of its striking features is the motion blur of the spinning wheel in the foreground. > > > > Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), The Spinners (Las Hilanderas, The Fable of Arachne) (detail) (c 1657), oil on canvas, 220 x 289 cm, original 167 cm × 252 cm, Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons. > > A closer look reveals the detail in Velázquez’s painting, which was clearly the result of close observation of the blurred image the artist perceived. There are hints of radial spokes, and concentric circles suggesting the structure of the hub and its rim in rapid motion. Other parts that would have been in motion, such as the wheel’s support, are also carefully blurred, as is the yarn. > > From the middle of the nineteenth century the advent of photography altered human perception. Although lenses and optical instruments had been used well before Vermeer’s day, the ability to capture the effects of lens focus and depth of field in still images influenced paintings from the late nineteenth century. > > > > Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes (1858–1925), In the Classroom (1886), oil on canvas, 68.5 × 110.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons. > > Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ wonderful In the Classroom was painted in 1886. It bears unmistakeable evidence that it was either painted from photographs or strongly influenced by them. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.