Come Ibernare il Mac per sopravvivere alle mancanze di corrente e salvare batteria - il mio articolo per Macity

http://www.macitynet.it/come-ibernare-il-mac/

Il problema tutto politico della scelta del tetto nella Berlino della mia gioventù

Money quote: “Flat roof advocates argued in the 1920s that they were less expensive to build and maintain, in addition to fitting in with Modernist ideas about minimalism and functionality, like using roofs as terraces. But the pitched roof partisans—including many nationalists—argued something entirely different: that flat roofs were a blight on traditional German architecture, or, as the critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote, “immediately recognizable as the child of other skies and other blood.””

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-heated-highly-political-roof-war-that-captivated-berlin-before-world-war-ii

Presidenti degli Stati Uniti in zona di guerra: giubbotto antiproiettile oppure no? La risposta cambia tantissimo la percezione (e il consenso) del politico che si protegge. L’immagine conta. Talmente tanto che forse si capisce perché è venuto fuori Donald Trump. In questo pezzo interessante si spiegano un po’ di cose. Belle anche le immagini d’archivio.

Money quote: ”“You don’t put stuff on your head if you’re president,” President Obama told the US Naval Academy’s football team after they offered him a custom helmet. “That’s politics 101.””

http://www.racked.com/2017/4/25/15422992/flak-jacket-politicians-kushner

Il mastodonte ritrovato. Le tracce fossili. Una specie di homo che non conoscevamo. Forse è vero, forse ci hanno portato qui gli alieni?

Money quote: “Prehistoric humans — perhaps Neanderthals or another lost species — occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago, a team of scientists reported on Wednesday.

The bold and fiercely disputed claim, published in the journal Nature, is based on a study of mastodon bones discovered near San Diego. If the scientists are right, they would significantly alter our understanding of how humans spread around the planet.

The earliest widely accepted evidence of people in the Americas is less than 15,000 years old. Genetic studies strongly support the idea that those people were the ancestors of living Native Americans, arriving in North America from Asia.

If humans actually were in North America over 100,000 years earlier, they may not be related to any living group of people. Modern humans probably did not expand out of Africa until 50,000 to 80,000 years ago, recent genetic studies have shown.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/science/prehistoric-humans-north-america-california-nature-study.html

Lei si chiama Gina Pell e vi avevo detto che sarebbe stata un soggetto interessante. Questo è l’articolo sulle generazioni, anzi l’azzeramento delle generazioni (i “perennials) che vale la pena di leggere. Soprattutto oggi, visto che l’ideologia delle generazioni di Strass e Kahn (una cosa un po’ più complessa di quel che non sembri) è nell’orecchio e nel cuore dell’attuale vertice governativo americano

Money quote: “The term generation used to refer to parents and their offspring every 25 years. It wasn’t until the 19th Century that it mutated to describe the social cohort we are born into. The Baby Boomers (1946–1964) are the first and only officially recognized generation by the Census Bureau because of its clearly defined characteristics. Leap forward to 1991 in Generations by Strauss & Howe and the moniker Millennial is coined. It took another decade for marketers and the media to up-spin Millennials, whose birth years fall within the range of 1982-2004 as “the next greatest generation” and begin focusing all their efforts to woo these limelit consumers, voters, and likers. As for the rest, born before 1982, well, the rest is history … irrelevant and in the past.”

https://medium.com/the-what/meet-the-perennials-e91a7cd9f65f

Non lo so, ma io questo Wikitribune, il giornalismo basato sui fatti, devo vederlo funzionare per crederci

Money quote: "Wikitribune is led by Jimmy Wales who has surrounded himself with an amazing group of people to bring Wikitribune to life."

https://www.wikitribune.com/

La sfortunata storia di Sam Caldwell e della sua solitaria e struggente opera di genio: la Sinotype: vecchie cose della Guerra fredda

Money quote: "Caldwell had not only invented the world’s first Chinese computer. He also unwittingly invented what we now know as ‘autocompletion’."

https://aeon.co/ideas/how-cold-war-rivalry-helped-launch-the-chinese-computer

Chi era Robert M. Pirsig, morto a 88 anni qualche giorno fa

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/24/525443040/-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-author-robert-m-pirsig-dies-at-88

Ehi, il lavoro mi chiama: parto tra poco per andare a Boston e rientro a fine settimana. Il canale va avanti, ma in modalità più saltuaria. A tutti, buon primo maggio.

(Per i curiosi: LIN-CDG-BOS)

La biblioteca di Alessandria esiste, e la stiamo buttando a mare. Le norme sul copyright (delle quali adesso gli americani si raccontano essere vittime) hanno bloccato del tutto il progetto di Google per digitalizzare tutti i libri del pianeta. Che sono digitalizzati, ma nom accessibili.

Money quote: "Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.” The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons. But books still lived mostly on paper. Page and his research partner, Sergey Brin, developed their popularity-contest-by-citation idea using pages from the World Wide Web"

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Meglio della riviera romagnola. Quando hai solo sabbia a disposizione, perché non fare un museo creativo?

Money quote: "Tottori was already famous for its 10 miles of massive sand dunes along the coast of the Sea of Japan. The museum was an attempt by the city to capitalize on its main tourist attraction."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-sand-museum-at-tottori-sand-dunes

Avete presente Blade Runner con le auto che volano? Ecco...

Money quote: "Lilium enables you to travel 5 times faster than a car by introducing the world’s first all-electric vertical take-off and landing jet: an air taxi for up to 5 people. You won’t have to own one, you will simply pay per ride and call it with a push of a button. It’s our mission to make air taxis available to everyone and as affordable as riding a car."

https://lilium.com/

Lo studio definitivo su come defecano i mammiferi. In quanto tempo, quante, quali "polpette" (come direbbe un bambino) fanno e facciamo. Condotto in modo scientifico e assolutamente serio, permette di capire finalmente il funzionamento di questa attività universale. Lo studio ha visto un impiego di mezzi notevoli, e risultati sorprendenti e - direi - alquanto democratici: in natura defechiamo sostanzialmente tutti alla stessa maniera e con la stessa velocità, uomini e bestie.

Money quote 1:

"To come up with a universal deuce-dropping time, the researchers turned to YouTube, a dog park, and Zoo Atlanta. There, they filmed elephants, giant pandas, and warthogs producing bum brownies. In all, they collected 23 clips of pooping from 11 types of animals—which included cats, a mountain gorilla, lions, a black bear, zebras, a hippopotamus, and white rhinos, in addition to the others listed. It’s unclear if more data would alter their estimate of a universal time. They also eliminated power-poopers from the study, such as rabbits, rodents, and ruminants, which can serve up a bundle of turd pellets in short order"

Money quote 2:

"They noted marked similarities between the species. Animals tended to produce two pieces of poo per go. Each piece was about the length of the animal’s rectum. This suggests that the colon stores a rectum-sized turd tube prior to evacuation. And that the turd length was about five times the diameter of an animal’s rectum."

Money quote 3:

"With all the data, the researchers assembled a mathematical model to calculate evacuation times. It’s a wee bit crappy: the model estimated that the universal poop time was 5.6 seconds, not 12. But it did hold steady for animals of various sizes.

Patricia Yang, lead author of the study, speculated to New Scientist that the reason animals might have evolved similarly swift defecation times was to avoid lingering over a smelly deuce that could attract predators."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/speed-of-poop-big-or-small-mammals-drop-a-deuce-in-12-secs-study-finds/

Un Surface bello da paura - il mio articolo per IlPost
http://www.ilpost.it/antoniodini/2017/05/02/un-surface-bello-da-paura/

Poi c'è quell'altro piano di Sergei Brin, quella steampunk delle navi del cielo: i dirigibili...

Money quote: "The people familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships. His interest in the crafts started when Brin would visit Ames, which is located next to Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In the 1930s, Ames was home to the USS Macon, a huge airship built by the U.S. Navy. About three years ago, Brin decided to build one of his own after ogling old photos of the Macon."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/with-secret-airship-sergey-brin-also-wants-to-fly

Compie 80 anni Luxo, la lampada che ha ispirato il logo della Pixar - il mio articolo per Macity

http://www.macitynet.it/compie-70-anni-luxo-la-lampada-ispirato-logo-della-pixar/

Il film ha successo e tu fai un sacco di soldi, vero? Falso. Non va così. Vincono sempre le major. Tranne questa volta: c'è una causa in corso che potrebbe cambiare Hollywood per sempre. Questa è la sua storia.

Money quote: "Last October, Shearer sued Vivendi for $125 million. Asserting that the movie “has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue in the thirty years since its original theatrical release,” the complaint notes that the four collaborators are entitled to 40 percent of all net receipts from the film, plus 50 percent of the gross receipts from the music, and that Vivendi “fraudulently underreported the revenues owed” them. The suit demands an honest accounting of what’s owed Shearer and the others and accuses Vivendi of deliberately failing to fulfill the terms of the original deal with Embassy. In response, Vivendi filed a motion expressing “genuine admiration for the talents of Shearer and his partners,” but argued that the company had “not received anything close” to what Shearer claims"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-20/this-is-spinal-tap-s-400-million-lawsuit

Un discorso su come si studia (e ci si appassiona) alla matematica che in realtà si allarga anche ad altri e più vasti problemi cognitivi: come si impara.

Money quote: "The road to expertise is paved with 10,000 hours of practice, so claims Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Gladwell’s claim is a gross simplification. Anders Ericsson, the man behind the original research, has set the record straight in Peak. He duly rebukes Gladwell for imposing an arbitrary threshold of 10,000 hours (it actually varies within and between disciplines). More importantly, Gladwell does not distinguish between different types of practice. Ericsson’s research, and the weight of his book, is premised on the principles of deliberate practice"

https://hackernoon.com/you-werent-bad-at-maths-you-just-weren-t-looking-at-it-the-right-way-7b11fb0a0982

Facebook vende agli inserzionisti le crisi adolescenziali dei suoi utenti - il mio articolo per Macity

http://www.macitynet.it/facebook-vendere-agli-inserzionisti-le-crisi-adolescenziali-dei-suoi-utenti/