La madre svedese di tutti i lucchetti compra l’americana August Home - mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/la-madre-svedese-tutti-lucchetti-compra-lamericana-august-home/

Gli insetti hanno un problema e presto, se continua così, lo avremo anche noi.

Money quote: “Since 1989, scientists from the Entomological Society Krefeld had been collecting insects in the nature reserves and protected areas of western Germany. They set up malaise traps—large tents that funnel any incoming insect upward through a cone of fabric and into a bottle of alcohol. These traps are used by entomologists to collect specimens of local insects, for research or education. “But over the years, [the Krefeld team] realized that the bottles were getting emptier and emptier,” says Caspar Hallmann, from Radboud University”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/oh-no/543390/

Il Vecchio Palazzo d'Estate di Pechino. Una meraviglia. Oggi ricostruito con il Lego. Andate a vedere la gallery, merita.

Money quote: "A team of three Chinese Lego fans have pieced together a model of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, at their studio in Beijing. The incomplete artwork has required some 660,000 pieces of Lego. The team has spent over 300,000 yuan and more than six months on their work so far. Upon completion, the Old Summer Palace on Lego is expected to be displayed at the Yuanmingyuan Park in Beijing."

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/1020/c90000-9282695.html

Si può vivere di solo iPad (con iOS 11)? C'è chi pensa di sì. Io intanto ho appena ricomprato il computer portatile. Ho fatto un errore? Non credo...

Money quote: "It's with that in mind that you should approach the notion of whether you could live your life with the iPad Pro as your primary -- nay, only -- machine. For the electronic minimalist in us all, the device can do plenty of the usual things you'd use a desktop for. But you'll always find that you can very easily butt up against the limits of what the iPad, and iOS 11, can do."

https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/16/ipad-pro-pc-replacement/

Una ragazzina di 11 anni spiega come si fa a gestire un ammiratore non desiderato, e andare invece dietro a un altro ragazzino che le piace. A parte la lezione - sempre attuale pur nella sua crudeltà apparente, per così dire - sono l'animazione e l'atmosfera creata dagli autori ad essere notevoli

Money quote: "Flirting packs a universal and somewhat heartbreaking punch into just over a minute."

https://aeon.co/videos/an-11-year-old-girl-on-what-to-do-when-a-boy-likes-you-but-you-like-someone-else

C'è così tanto da pensare e da dire, prima di poter andare avanti, che non so neanche da dove cominciare. Questa è una storia di molestie, e altre molestie, e vecchie violenze. Ma c'è di più. Consiglio di leggerla.

Money quote: "In the early 2010s I was standing by the campfire on the Saturday night of Foo and a man was making out with a woman. Both were obviously drunk. Foo fosters a casual atmosphere, especially at night, and drinking is not uncommon. The making out was pretty weird though, and uncomfortable. I and some other friends chatted about it, loudly, about how it wasn’t appropriate here, but the pair went on anyway, either not hearing us or not caring. One of my friends was getting a bit upset, and managed to break things up by starting a conversation with the woman, but before long the pair were back at it. He came back to me, on the verge of panic, and whispered in my ear. The woman was so drunkenly disoriented that she didn’t seem to understand what was happening, and the guy kept pouring drinks for her. It was quite possibly headed towards rape. He asked me what to do, and I realized the man in question was someone powerful. I blanked and said I wasn’t sure what to do, maybe try get them apart? My friend gave me a fantastic no-duh look and went back over to them."

https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee92fffb

Per gli amanti del volo, una storia piuttosto particolare di un pilota di F-8 Crusader dei Marines che, parecchi anni fa, si è salvato da una caduta di 15mila piedi (che sarebbero poi più di 4.500 metri).

Money quote: "“Some days you are the dog and others you are the fire-plug.”"

https://uss-la-ca135.org/60/1960Judkins-Knott.html

Nonostante il passo indietro imposto da Donald Trump, gli americani stanno scoprendo Cuba. Affascinanti le diverse strade retoriche grazie alle quali “addomesticano” l’esotico e l’alieno.

Money quote: “In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You’re a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world’s uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter. But like the “not even once” warnings around drugs like meth, you know that after the internet is in Cubans’ pockets, it’s over. Even backward, bitter-ender communist Cuba will become part of the vast data Borg, tied via arterial fiber-­optic cables and Wi-Fi to the same pandemonium that gave us cat videos, live­streamed murders, and President Donald J. Trump. The real irony is that if the internet does topple the government and bring democracy to this democracy-starved island, it’ll happen just as democracy itself is being undone by Facebook and every other filter-bubble-­creating, political-polarization-amplifying, algorithm-optimized feed.”

https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/

Intanto Paolo mi segnala un interessante lavoro di un fotografo italiano, Avalerio Berdini, proprio su Cuba e il Wi-Fi:

https://valerioberdini.photoshelter.com/gallery/Wi-Fi-Revolution/G0000D30tS1IfKXE/C0000tLrrj09cYlI

La guerra soft degli statunitensi in Africa.

Money quote: “In Niger, about a dozen U.S. troops traveled with members of Niger's military to meet villagers in a remote southwest corner of the country, near the border with Mali. The entire contingent was ambushed as they were leaving. Four Americans were killed and two were wounded, and the Nigerien troops also suffered casualties”

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/20/558757043/the-u-s-military-in-africa-a-discreet-presence-in-many-places

Fantastica storia di un giornalista alla scoperta del mondeo dei materassi negli Stati Uniti. Ricordate, quel che succede negli Usa, qualche anno dopo arriva pure da noi...

Money quote: "I called my editor and confessed that in a moment of weakness I had accepted a free mattress from an online mattress reviewer named Kenny, and that I wanted to write about this bizarre industry and its even more bizarre David-and-Goliath legal battle.

I couldn’t know it then, but the outcome of that battle would influence the purchase decisions of many thousands, if not millions, of people seeking a good night’s sleep. It would also reveal just how thoroughly the internet and the businesses that thrived there had blurred the lines between product reviews and advertisements. All I’d wanted was a mattress, but what I got was a look at a little-known and hugely lucrative annex of e-commerce, one where the relationships can often get a little too comfy—until they’re not."

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars

Tim Cook a Firenze è stata una sorpresa - Il mio articolo per Il Post

Money quote: "I temi toccati da Cook sono stati davvero tanti e, a me sembra, con una onestà invidiabile e una considerevole mancanza di ego. Su Steve Jobs, che invece di ego ne aveva quanto una rockstar e aveva imparato ad usarlo per fare marketing ai suoi stessi prodotti, sono letteralmente stati scritti un paio di dozzine di libri. Parlare di Apple e parlare di lui e del suo carattere, della sua personalità, era praticamente un tutt’uno. Adesso, dopo un periodo di iniziali perplessità da parte della stampa e degli analisti, di Tim Cook non parla praticamente nessuno."

http://www.ilpost.it/antoniodini/2017/10/21/tim-cook-firenze-stata-sorpresa/

Dalle nostre parti c’è qualcosa che non funziona molto.

Money quote: “Italian movie actress and director Asia Argento is facing pushback in her home country after speaking out about an alleged rape at the hands of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. While Argento’s courage in speaking about what happened to her was praised in Hollywood, and helped encourage at least 40 women to speak out about their own experiences of assault at the hands of Weinstein, public opinion in Italy has sided more with Weinstein than with Argento, according to Quartz’s Annalisa Merelli”

http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2017/10/19/asia-argento-flees-italy-after-public-condemns-her-for-speaking-out-about-harvey-weinstein/amp/

Una delle più importanti scoperte del secolo, la collisione di due stelle che dimostra le teorie di Einstein sulla gravitazione, è nata di Slack

Money quote; “In between its silly chatrooms and custom emojis, Slack is a place where real work gets done. But in some offices—no offense—the projects managed on the messaging platform are way cooler than others. Some even have cosmic significance”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/543147/

Una lettura domenicale per niente volgare sul ‘Devil’s Threesome’: è considerato un tabù perché coinvolge due uomini e una donna e quindi non solo non è una fantasia maschile tipica come quella di un uomo e due donne, ma apre la strada anche a timori di omosessualità o comunque di competitività in un ambito, quello della virilità, piuttosto sensibile per l’ego maschile. Attrae invece fantasie femminili che vanno spesso frustrate. Insomma, un articolo interessante. Non vi sbagliate, comunque, la prospettiva è squisitamente maschile.

Money quote: “Amid this landscape, though, there are noble souls pushing through the personal and social barriers involved. As you might expect, some among them are bisexual, gay or queer — yet many of them are not. This raises a number of questions: What do men get out of these encounters? How do they affect their self-conceptions? And perhaps most importantly, is it possible for a man to give a threesome with another guy to his girlfriend as an experiential gift they might both enjoy, like pottery lessons or a ride in a hot air balloon?”

https://melmagazine.com/the-taboo-of-the-devils-threesome-3584ad281dbf

C’è chi sta cercando di raccontare la storia dei tatuaggi interpretandola letteralmente come il segno di un bisogno umano di raccontarsi. Qui ad esempio:

Money quote: “Ricercando le origini della pratica del tatuaggio si scopre il viaggio dell’uomo attraverso le società, i suoi simboli e ciò che ha creduto importante tramandare nel corso del tempo. Soldati, frati, ribelli e naturalmente donne – di cui avevamo già parlato in precedenza – sono i protagonisti di un racconto risalente a diverse migliaia di anni fa”.

http://freedamedia.it/2017/10/storia-dei-tatuaggi-il-bisogno-umano-di-raccontarsi/

Ehi, dove sono tutti gli alieni che innegabilmente devono esistere data la ricchezza dello spazio e nonostante le grandi distanze ma che nessuno ha mai visto? È il paradosso di Fermi, al quale adesso viene data un'altra interessante intepretazione: e se stessero tutti dormendo, in attesa di tempi migliori (cioè più freddi) per accendere i loro computer? (Siamo decisamente ossessionati dal calcolo automatico)

Money quote: "The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. Space is awfully big, so it might seem just too hard to detect some distant alien civilization. But if the evolution of life and intelligence isn’t immensely improbable, lots of technologically advanced civilizations should have developed elsewhere in our Milky Way galaxy long ago. And although the galaxy is vast, the time that’s elapsed since its creation is even vaster, so those alien civilizations should have had plenty of time to reach our corner of space already. In the words supposedly uttered by Enrico Fermi when he came to this realization one day in 1950 while lunching with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory: Where is everybody?"

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/computing-and-the-fermi-paradox-a-new-idea-emergestheyre-all-asleep

Un progetto ambizioso che rischia di finire nel niente (causa sottovalutazione della sua complessità) ma che ha una vocazione eroica e meritevole. Un programmatore di Seattle ha deciso di creare un videogioco in rete in maniera collaborativa. Lo scopo è quello di insegnare alle giovani generazioni di programmatori tecniche avanzate per la creazione di forme di intrattenimento videoludico. Attenzione, niente di legato a interfacce o gameplay, bensì tecnicalità sulle tecniche di programmazione che non vengono mai insegnate a scuola e che tengono il settore sotto scacco. Interessante, utopico e al tempo stesso faticoso.

Money quote:

Game programmers need to start creating high-quality teaching materials for their trade. While most game programmers frequently post about specific algorithms they've discovered, few ever post about the programming methodologies they have found to be effective, nor about how they approach the general problems inherent in developing a large, complex game codebase. As a result, novice game programmers looking to learn the basics of programming must rely on materials from other industries that are often of dubious quality.

Personally, I have found most resources that purport to teach people how to "program properly" actually teach primarily bad programming practices. The copious emails I received from college students around the world in response to a post I made about compression-oriented programming confirmed for me that there are many young programmers out there whose progress is being hamstrung by bad learning materials. This project is an attempt to provide one high-quality alternative, and perhaps to convince other experienced game programmers to think about what they could do to help teach the next generation of game programmers how to program well.

https://handmadehero.org

In ogni caso il video è piacevole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=A2dxjOjWHxQ

Per quelli che credono che "all that glitters is gold", il lavoro nelle HR di Google, azienda in cui è più difficile entrare che ad Harvard.

Money quote: "HR “specialists” don’t participate in second-round interviews. We merely collect times of availability from candidates and then wait for the results. If a second interview goes well, we hand off the candidate to another recruiter. If it doesn’t go well? TextExpander: semicolon followed by “NO” populates a sympathetic four-paragraph rejection email. We then return to step one: LinkedIn."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/17/my-google-job-was-tedious-and-pointless/

Ma poi, non so se ve lo siete mai chiesto: perché gli Stati Uniti, che sono uno dei paesi più ricchi al mondo, non hanno un servizio sanitario pubblico degno di questo nome che offra assistenza universale come accade, ad esempio, in Italia? Le cose ovviamente sono parecchio complicate e la storia è paradossale. I motivi sono diversi da quelli che potreste immaginare.

Money quote: “It wasn’t one moment, says Karen Palmer, professor of health science at Simon Fraser University, but rather, “a series of decisions, turning points, and cascading events.” Though until World War I there had been some attempts by socially liberal governments to follow the examples of Germany and others, they were met with opposition from doctors, insurance companies, businesses, and even some conservative labor organizations, which considered state-sponsored health care paternalistic and unnecessary. Labor unions also worried that it would weaken their own bargaining power, says Palmer, as they were otherwise responsible for getting their members social services.

But the root of the current system, Palmer says, can be found in World War II. In 1943 president Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an effective freeze on labor wages, and companies started offering health and pension benefits as a way to retain workers instead. This was the beginning of employer-sponsored healthcare, though there was no government mandate to offer it (except in Hawaii). Unions began negotiating the benefits as part of what they could obtain for workers. The rest of the population wasn’t covered, but it meant the unions didn’t put pressure on the government to create a public health system.”

https://qz.com/1022831/why-doesnt-the-united-states-have-universal-health-care/

Cloni (o nuove versioni aumentate) open source di giochi relativamente noti. Attenzione: sono proprio tanti.

Money quote: "Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them."

http://osgameclones.com