Ops. I did it again.

Delta Air Lines continua a stupire. Il carrier americano con il network più sviluppato in Africa e America Latina sta continuando a sfidare gli uragani e a volare verso aeroporti che vengono considerati "chiusi" e travolti dagli elementi, sfruttando momenti di pausa, occhi della tempesta e tutto il resto. Una storia che dovremo raccontare, un giorno o l'altro.

Money quote: "Update: Somehow we underestimated Delta. Earlier, it looked like Delta flight #2571 would be the last Delta flight into San Juan (SJU) before Hurricane Maria’s arrival. Instead, Delta flight #549 from Atlanta (ATL) to SJU will take the prize of being the last Delta flight to operate to the island before the Category 5 hurricane arrives. The story below has been updated to reflect this new flight."

https://thepointsguy.com/2017/09/delta-flies-into-hurricane-maria/

A Madrid c’è il gigante dell’Estremadura. Fico.

Money quote: “Around that time, the National Museum of Anthropology was being established in Madrid. The museum was headed by Dr. Pedro González Velasco. When the professor noticed of the existence of the giant, he contacted him, and both men came to an agreement. The professor would buy Luengo’s corpse in exchange for a daily income of 2.50 pesetas while he lived. The remains would be part of Dr. Velasco’s collection and would be displayed forever in his museum”

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-giant-of-extremadura

Letture domenicali. Alberto Saibene racconta sulla rivista il Mulino la Milano di via Paolo Sarpi, cioè Chinatown, dove entrambi viviamo più o meno dallo stesso tempo. Un ottimo articolo.

Money quote: “Anche se resta, al di là delle leggende, difficile contarli, oggi sono registrati circa 27.000 cittadini cinesi in città. Nel numero non sono però compresi i cinesi milanesi da tre generazioni e che si sono aggregati attorno a via Paolo Sarpi (una strada che incrocia via Canonica), la Chinatown milanese, luogo identitario di una presenza che si è diffusa poi in molte altre zone ed è facilmente avvertibile per le strade della città perché tanti sono gli esercizi commerciali di proprietà cinese (ristoranti, bar, lavasecco, negozi di chincaglieria, riparazioni di tecnologia domestica ecc.).”

https://www.rivistailmulino.it/news/newsitem/index/Item/News:NEWS_ITEM:4004

calendar.vim è quello che dice il nome: un calendario dentro vim. Se vivere nella riga di comando, è una soluzione. Se non avete capito di cosa sto parlando, non vi serve.

Money quote: In order to view and edit calendars on Google Calendar, or task on Google Task, add the following configurations to your vimrc file.

let g:calendar_google_calendar = 1
let g:calendar_google_task = 1

https://github.com/itchyny/calendar.vim/blob/master/README.md

Moby Dick è uscito nel 1851 ed è stato subito recensito dalla stampa dell'epoca con visuali alquanto diverse (non tutti gli hanno voluto bene, diciamo). Ecco una antologia delle recensioni.

Money quote: “To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.”

–London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851

http://lithub.com/the-original-1851-reviews-of-moby-dick/

Padroni e schiavi del tempo: l'orologio e l'uomo moderno.

Un documentario che è un po' "rieducational" però interessante

http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/how-clocks-forever-changed-humanity-in-1657.html

Una volta, anni fa, ero rimasto incantato da una storia del New Yorker sui manutentori di ascensori a Manhattan, a città dei grattacieli. Poi, anni dopo, ne ho letta un’altra meno potente ma sempre molto interessante sui progettisti di campi da golf. Adesso siamo agli skateparks, i posti tipo Venice Beach dove si va su e giù con lo skateboard (e ho molta invidia perché vorrei ricominciare, fin quando le giunture mi reggono). La storia per motivi stilistici e strutturali non è indimenticabile, ma comunque l’idea c’è e poi bisogna tenere sempre aperti i cancelli della propria mente, no?

Money quote: “A signature element to their design is an appreciation for aesthetics. Although the most important piece is the skateable functionality, they strive to have their parks be pleasing to the eye and incorporate the natural elements and surroundings.”

https://artistwaves.com/the-art-of-building-skateparks-c26c98974e83

La strategia del side project gratuito. Può funzionare

Money quote:
You build a side project, separate from your main/core business. The side project needs to be something that is 100% free, easy to build and provides massive massive value to your target audience. I'm not talking about an ebook (though you can do that), but a high value tool. It might even look like a full fledged stand alone startup company.

Then, instead of promoting your agency, you promote that side project. Why? Because it's something that (hopefully) provides instant value for free. People are more likely to share an awesome free and simple tool vs the website of your agency. So marketing the side project, simply by posting it on relevant forums, sharing it with bloggers, sending it to journalists to potentially write about, will make it a lot easier to drive traffic to those side projects.

On the side project, there's a link to your core business/service. A percentage of the traffic, will visit your core business and... if what you offer is relevant to that audience, convert to a customer."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6ztybx/how_i_attract_high_paying_clients_to_my_design/

Adolescenti che non fumano, non prendono la patente, non fanno sesso (e neanche si fidanzano). Negli Usa c'è chi si chiede cosa stia succedendo alle nuove generazioni. Alcuni azzardano delle risposte.

Money quote: ""In a culture that says, 'Okay, you're going to go to high school, go to college, go to graduate school, and then get an internship, and you're not going to really be responsible till your late 20s,' well then the brain will respond accordingly," he said."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/parenting/ct-teens-not-drinking-20170919-story.html

Una rivista fatta da donne per le donne. Nel Giappone degli anni Dieci (per intenderci: Yukio Mishima doveva ancora nascere). Uno scandalo assicurato. Eppure, con coraggio e testardaggine, loro sono andate avanti un bel po'.

Money quote: "The young women who had created the magazine less than a year before had known it would be controversial. It was created by women, to feature women’s writing to a female audience. In Japan in 1911, it was daring for a woman to put her name in print on anything besides a very pretty poem. The magazine’s name, Seitō, translated to “Bluestockings,” a nod to an unorthodox group of 18th-century English women who gathered to discuss politics and art, which was an extraordinary activity for their time."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bluestockings-feminist-magazine-japan-sassy

Rocket Typist, in prova l’utility Mac per scrivere di più digitando meno - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/rocket-typist-scrivere-piu-digitando-meno/

Fate un giro anche voi con Short Trip di Alexander Perrin. Proprio niente male.

http://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/

Altra settimana, altro giro fuori porta. Questa volta sto partendo per gli Stati Uniti, costa occidentale. Fino a domenica prossima quindi gli aggiornamenti saranno più saltuari.

A New York sta arrivando rapidamente il giorno del giudizio per le licenze dei tassisti: la bolla cresciuta con il monopolio appaltato agli autisti-padroncini è sradicata da Uber e dagli alri servizi. E chi ha fatto debiti per investire in un “medallion”, una licenza, adesso è rovinato.

Money quote: “Owning a yellow cab has left Issa Isac in deep debt and facing a precarious future.

It was not supposed to turn out this way when Mr. Isac slid behind the wheel in 2005. Soon he was earning $200 a night driving. Three years later, he borrowed $335,000 to buy a New York City taxi medallion, which gave him the right to operate his own cab.

But now Mr. Isac earns half of what he did when he started, as riders have defected to Uber and other competitors. He stopped making the $2,700-a-month loan payment on his medallion in February because he was broke. Last month, it was sold to help pay his debts.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/nyregion/new-york-taxi-medallions-uber.html

Se le quattro del mattino sono l’ora migliore per lavorare, forse siamo veramente in difficoltà e bisognerebbe invece cambiare il resto del giorno, quello che non riesce più ad essere produttivo. Comunque, da Tim Cook in giù, ecco la razza di quello che si svegliano alle tre perché la loro vita nel l’orario normale non ci sta più dentro (secondo me è quello il problema e la risposta non è alzarsi alle tre, ma comunque...)

Money quote: “Early mornings are all about good decisions for Karen Schwalbe-Jones, the 48-year-old owner of Harmony Studios, a Pilates-based gym in West Hollywood, Calif. She says she started waking up at 4 a.m. about 13 years ago, when her son was born, as a way to fit in her own workout before shifting into business-manager mode.

She used to sleep until 5 a.m. and hope to fit in a run or Pilates session in the afternoon, but says the day would inevitably slip away from her, and by 2 p.m. she was irritable. “It wasn’t good for anyone,” she recalls”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-4-a-m-is-the-most-productive-hour-1471971861

A 91 anni è morto Hugh Hefner, il “più ricco copy-editor del pianeta”, fondatore dell’impero di Playboy, un personaggio strabiliante, unico, discusso, estremamente rilevante, dallo stile di vita unico. Lo racconta un ottimo obituary del New York Times. Quest’uomo è stato un pezzo importante della storia del costume americano e mondiale, il cui ruolo e soprattutto il cui impatto non devono essere sottovalutati. E comunque, what a life!

Money quote:

In an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/obituaries/hugh-hefner-dead.html

“Marvel’s Inhumans”, una serie tv sontuosa e infantile, con poco da dire | la mia stroncatura per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2017/09/marvel-inhumans-recensione-serie-tv/

Non è una verità assoluta, ovviamente, ma a me piace molto

È incredibile che così pochi abbiano fatto così tanto per la rivoluzione digitale. In questo caso Claude Shannon. Ma cosa sono alla fine i bit di informazione?

Money quote: "Shannon – mathematician, American, jazz fanatic, juggling enthusiast – is the founder of information theory, and the architect of our digital world. It was Shannon’s paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948) that introduced the bit, an objective measure of how much information a message contains. It was Shannon who explained that every communications system – from telegraphs to television, and ultimately DNA to the internet – has the same basic structure. And it was Shannon who showed that any message could be compressed and transmitted via a binary code of 0s and 1s, with near-perfect accuracy, a notion that was previously pegged as hopelessly utopian. As one of Shannon’s colleagues marvelled: ‘How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.’"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-a-polymath-transformed-our-understanding-of-information

Se pensate che Trump, Russia, Corea del Nord e riscaldamento globale non bastino a darvi l’ansia prima di addormentarvi, ecco un altro motivo. Ci siamo. È iniziata l’epoca in cui gli antibiotici non funzionano più. E adesso?

Money quote: “Last August, a woman in her 70s checked into a hospital in Reno, Nevada with a bacterial infection in her hip. The bug belonged to a class of particularly tenacious microbes known as carpabenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CREs. Except in addition to carpabenem, this bug was also resistant to tetracycline, and colistin, and every single other antimicrobial on the market, all 26 of them. A few weeks later she developed septic shock and died. For public health officials like Patel, that case marks the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.”

https://www.wired.com/story/the-post-antibiotic-era-is-here-now-what/