Smettere di radersi le gambe per protesta contro Donald Trump. Sembra una bischerata ma, dopo poche righe, almeno per me che sono dell'altro genere, si cominciano a capire parecchie cose. Molto interessante.

Money quote: "Although my husband supported my cause, he couldn’t help the fact that my hairy legs were a turnoff. I’ll admit I was torn — removing my leg hair to appease a man would be directly at odds with its raison d’être. Still, my commitment to my marriage outweighed any short-term political statement. So I agreed to set a “shave date” for International Women’s Day on March 8, which allowed me a full four months of luxuriating in my natural outrage."

https://medium.com/bottoms-up/the-politics-of-not-shaving-my-legs-2600cd7ea23f

Oltre all'apocalisse del settore retail, negli Usa c'è un profondo cambiamento in atto anche nel settore della grande distribuzione di alimenti, i supermercati (che, se andate negli Usa, sono una esperienza di per sé). Ecco, all'interno della crisi che tocca vari aspetti ed elementi, una cosa per me è significativa: la differente cultura alimentare e commerciale non permette loro di vedere che una parte del cambiamento deriva anche da una impostazione più sana della vita di sempre più persone. Sul serio. Stai a vedere che gli americani alla fine sono migliori dell'America.

Money quote: "Nielsen, a research and consulting firm, said last month that for the first time in a decade, shoppers were making more trips to stores, but coming out with less in their baskets. “They’re not stockpiling their pantries as much,” said Jordan Rost, the company’s vice president for consumer insights. “They’re really buying more fresh produce and prepared meals.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/dining/grocery-book-michael-ruhlman-supermarket-shopping.html

Bill Clinton e un suo vecchio amico giudice hanno fatto schema e domande delle parole crociate del New York Times, di cui sono appassionati.

Money quote: "In the case of today’s puzzle, Judge Fleming constructed the grid, with some input from Mr. Clinton. The president wrote most of the clues. When the judge proposed tweaks to certain clues, Mr. Clinton objected: “Too easy and boring. Might as well print the answers in the puzzle"


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/insider/bill-clinton-new-york-times-crossword.html

Il re dell'Olanda, perché l'Olanda ha un re, come hobby pilota aerei di linea di KLM. E vuole fare il salto su quelli belli grossi, oltretutto. OMG

Money quote: ""For me the most important thing is that I have a hobby for which I need to concentrate completely," he said."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/europe/netherlands-king-willem-alexander-klm-pilot/

È finita l'era della scrittura iper personale e soggettiva. Un'epoca durata un decennio, vissuta tutta in rete e probabilmente figlia di un riflusso verso il privato e il banale del giornalismo americano che ha solo aiutato Donald Trump.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over

Come formichine, piano piano i giornalisti americani lavorano all'ipotesi di impeachment di Donald Trump. Anche ripercorrendo il senso storico fondante dell'istituto giuridico (e del termine stesso: to impeach vuol dire "mettere in dubbio, in discussione"). Ecco dunque la spiegazione di come ha fatto l'impeachment ad entrare nella Costituzione americana.

Money quote: "On the morning of Friday, July 20, 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, addressed the question of whether or not a President could be impeached while in office. A king might be beheaded, a Prime Minister toppled. What fate could befall a terrible President? Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, and Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, moved to strike out a proposed phrase stipulating that the President could be removed “on impeachment and conviction for malpractice or neglect of duty.” Morris thought that if a President committed crimes, he wouldn’t be reëlected, and that would be that, since no other solution accorded with the separation of powers. “Who,” he wondered, “shall impeach?” The irascible George Mason, of Virginia, found this argument absurd. “Shall any man be above justice?” Mason asked. “Above all, shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice?” It was as good a question then as it is now."

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-impeachment-ended-up-in-the-constitution

Potremmo chiamarla superstizione scientifica. È l'attitudine ad applicare un determinismo dogmatico a cose di cui in realtà non si è capito il senso. Ieri era la religione, oggi la genetica. Perché no?

Money quote: "Evolutionary determinism was the first thread of the gene metaphor. Natural selection preserves only what is inherited from the successful organisms in the past. The second thread comes from Darwin’s contemporary, Gregor Mendel, who conducted his studies of peas in order to understand the nature of inheritance. His findings also fit the Newtonian worldview perfectly. If natural selection was a law of nature, like gravity, then Mendel’s laws of inheritance promised to identify the fundamental building blocks of biological causation. By choosing specific traits that he knew bred true, Mendel identified a pattern of inheritance that provided perhaps the most powerful tool for research design in the history of science. The genetic research that followed eventually led to the identification of the nature of DNA, the locations and structure of genes in DNA, and the understanding of how they code for proteins. But that same Mendelian thinking made us conceptual prisoners of the deterministic, law-like interpretation of genetic function that leads us to think of traits themselves, not just genes, as discretely packaged units, produced by discretely packaged genes. That suggests that a pea seed already contains mini-green peas, or that a fertilised human egg contains a tiny human: a kind of genetic superstition"

https://aeon.co/essays/dna-is-the-ruling-metaphor-of-our-age

A large cargo ship emits pollutants as much as 50 million cars and besides environmental issues, fuel consumption has a big impact on shipping costs, too. Meanwhile global scale shipping companies like Hanjin are getting "stuck at sea" and are reconsidering sail power, a few old sailing vessels are reviving a small scale exotic way of transporting goods around the world. Clippers are schooners are run mainly by cooperatives or syndicates of owners like once upon ago. Take a look and support the clipper's routes while sipping a cup of fairly imported chinese tea: http://fairtransport.eu

Il mistero dell'iPad. Dopo il picco iniziale, declina inesorabilmente. Eppure è un prodotot considerato straordinario dagli utenti. Anzi, forse proprio per questo (la possibilità di usarlo per anni senza dover aggiornare come fanno gli utenti dei telefoni smart) è la principale causa della sua poca "velocità". Qui una analisi interessante da un addetto ai lavori piuttosto addentro alle logiche di Apple

Money quote: "It will be interesting to see how Apple finds ways to reboot iPad sales without bastardizing the device"

https://mondaynote.com/the-ipad-mystery-54efb0a7c224

Un incontro e la storia che ne consegue.

Money quote: "An elegant middle-aged man, in a spotless black jacket, came up to me, hand extended, to say hello, and I was startled. My neighbours in Japan tend to be formal and reticent; few of them are eager to take the initiative. And we were simply standing around an art gallery on Kitayama Street in northern Kyoto, 20 years ago, where a handful of us had gathered to see an exhibition of a friend’s pen-and-ink drawings. In the classical sumi-e style, they were deliberately sketchy and full of emptiness; the heart of the paintings was the negative space at their centre, which every viewer could fill in according to his whim or choice.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170413-the-mysterious-man-who-gave-me-japan

Delta, la compagnia aerea americana che mi ha fregato sul volo di ritorno (facendomi perdere per 90 secondi -peraltro causa di un loro ritardo precedente- l'Intercontinentale JFK-MXP) da un anno ha un nuovo Ceo, ed è diventata più "morbida". Sarà...

Money quote: "Delta in recent years “viewed every issue as a bet-the-company kind of case, and they fought it tooth and nail,” said Kathryn Thomson, a former general counsel at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She senses now, a year into Bastian’s tenure as boss, that Delta may be becoming more like other airlines that tend to “pick and choose which issues are most important to them and fight for them.’’"

https://skift.com/2017/05/18/delta-ceo-steered-airline-to-become-less-combative-with-rivals-and-allies/

Siamo tutti solo delle "proprietà" degli Stati di cui abbiamo la cittadinanza o dove viviamo.

La storia di alcuni passaporti che fanno dell'arte una scusa e della violenza una estetica oltre che un dogma di fede.

Money quote: "Over the last century, passports have come to represent a fundamental aspect of our identity. When IS proclaimed its caliphate, they instructed fighters to tear up their passports, cutting ties with their ‘colonial’ inheritance and committing themselves to a new entity. No less ideological is the utopian World Passport conceived in 1954 by peace activist Garry Davis. Issued by a “world government of world citizens”, it is said to be owned by 10,000 people, but not recognised diplomatically: in 2016, hip-hop artist Mos Def was detained in South Africa for trying to use the document to leave the country."

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170515-a-passport-from-a-country-that-doesnt-exist

In Alabama il colosso aerospaziale europeo Airbus ha una fabbrica. O meglio, un centro di assemblaggio degli A320. La logica di funzionamento è strettamente innestata sia sugli accordi nazionali per portare la fabbrica negli Usa che nelle politiche internazionali degli Stati Uniti in particolare ma anche de altri paesi industrializzati, oltre che dalle possibilità che la logistica moderna - grazie all'informatica - è in grado di dare. Affascinante.

Money quote: "Alabama has paid handsomely for its factories. The state’s industrial revolution began in 1993 when a new governor, Jim Folsom, outbid other states for the Mercedes-Benz plant. (To land the deal, Folsom also agreed to remove a Confederate battle flag from the state capitol.) Airbus, the most recent arrival, got $158.5 million in state and local benefits, including a school at Brookley where the state trains potential Airbus employees at public expense. Of the 915 workers to be enrolled in the program, Airbus has hired 231"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/magazine/a-look-inside-airbuss-epic-assembly-line.html

Case portabili, portatili e addirittura indossabili. Quel che c’è da sapere sulle micromagioni prefabbricate. Sorprendenti architetture mobili.

Money quote: “It is not all fun and games—others are designed for important, practical use. It can also be used to provide shelter during a crisis, or for protection in extreme weather. The Rapid Deployment Module is a temporary dwelling that can be assembled in an hour to provide shelter during a crisis or disaster, while the DesertSeal is an inflatable, lightweight tent that can protect inhabitants from extreme heat.”

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mobile-architecture-tiny-houses

A dimostrazione che non serve essere Google per riuscire a creare uno dei più grandi e "potenti" progetti di archiviazione digitale, ecco il quartier generale di Internet Archive, la fondazione che fornisce la macchina del tempo del web

Money quote: "With the stated mission of providing “universal access to all knowledge,” the Internet Archive is one of history’s most ambitious cataloging projects. So far millions of books, movies, television, music, software, and video games have been collected and digitized by the project, and that’s not counting the billions of websites they’ve been archiving over the past two decades with the Wayback Machine."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/internet-archive-headquarters

La foto della domenica. Stasera 23.40 Raiuno La Silicon Valley studia l'immortalità. Ma intanto Interviste ai centenari sulla longevità. Nuovi approcci con Aubrey de Grey e Stuart Kauffmann

Visto che non ne troviamo sostanzialmente traccia sui nostri giornali, alcune considerazioni circa i miti dell'intelligenza artificiale, cioè quello che in effetti non è.

Money quote: "The most common misconception about artificial intelligence begins with the common misconception about natural intelligence. This misconception is that intelligence is a single dimension. Most technical people tend to graph intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence — as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude. At one end is the low intelligence of, say, a small animal; at the other end is the high intelligence, of, say, a genius—almost as if intelligence were a sound level in decibels. Of course, it is then very easy to imagine the extension so that the loudness of intelligence continues to grow, eventually to exceed our own high intelligence and become a super-loud intelligence — a roar! — way beyond us, and maybe even off the chart."

https://backchannel.com/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai-59282b686c62

Lo sapete che dentro i motori di ricerca ci sono decine di migliaia di piccoli esseri umani che, una risposta alla volta, correggono i problemi degli algoritmi nel trovare i siti realmente rilevanti per i quesiti che vengono loro posti? Una variazione sul tema dell'idea che dentro l'automa ottocentesco che giocava a scacchi ci fosse un nano particolarmente dotato nel millenario gioco di strategia. Solo che i nani ci sono davvero, (e vengono pagati quattro soldi).

Money quote: "Billions of people worldwide use search engines without understanding the inner workings and processes providing the information that they are looking for. Despite widespread use, the background mechanics of search are not fully visible and are often hidden behind technical decisions and trade secrets. Web search is a highly profitable business, from which Google secured 74.9 billion US dollars of revenue in 2015. Around 90 percent of that revenue comes from advertising."

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2017/02/21/the-hidden-human-labour-behind-search-engine-algorithms/

Che effetto ha la tecnologia? Come funziona? Come fa a cambiare il mondo? Alcune considerazioni di Elon Musk che servono da lezioncina zen per il mondo dell’imprenditoria

Money quote: “If you're not progressing, you're regressing; so, keep moving forward.”

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/elon-musk-just-gave-some-brilliant-career-advice-here-it-is-in-1-sentence.html

Dovremmo uccidere Google AMP prima che lui uccida il web e la libertà di informazione. Possibile che nessuno se ne accorga?

Money quote: “Google AMP, by its design, disassociates content from its creator. Google does not and never has cared about creators, all it wants is content, the more the better to churn through its algorithms, surround with advertising and serve up to the world.”

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/