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

Dolci storie di cuccioli di orso polare

Money quote: “She was the size of a squirrel, deaf and blind. Translucent fur barely covered her pink skin. Soft paws paddled against the straw, and her nose led her in one direction: toward her mother.”

http://projects.oregonlive.com/projectnora/1-3/

David Hume e Adam Smith sono due filosofi e pensatori che più hanno influenzato il nostro tempo, alla base del pensiero economico e sociale moderno. Hume in particolare è stato anche un ateo imperterrito, sino alla fine.

Money quote: “As the Scottish philosopher David Hume lay on his deathbed in the summer of 1776, his passing became a highly anticipated event. Few people in 18th-century Britain were as forthright in their lack of religious faith as Hume was, and his skepticism had earned him a lifetime of abuse and reproach from the pious, including a concerted effort to excommunicate him from the Church of Scotland. Now everyone wanted to know how the notorious infidel would face his end. Would he show remorse or perhaps even recant his skepticism? Would he die in a state of distress, having none of the usual consolations afforded by belief in an afterlife? In the event, Hume died as he had lived, with remarkable good humour and without religion”

philosopher and infidel | Aeon Ideas
https://aeon.co/ideas/he-died-as-he-lived-david-hume-philosopher-and-infidel

Intel Nervana, i primi processori per reti neurali e AI arrivano entro fine anno - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/primi-processori-nervana-neural-network-attesi-la-fine-dellanno/

Una idea che secondo me (e non solo secondo me) sarebbe esportabile anche in altri ambiti: il blocco degli appunti (diciamo anche: il diario di bordo personale) del software engineering

Money quote: "To deal with the newbie developer info-flood, I went back to the concept of a ‘software engineering lab notebook’. At first, I jotted down commands needed to setup proper compilation flags for the dev environment and how to run the build locally to debug errors. A bit later, I started jotting down diagrams of the internals of the systems I was working on and summaries of code snippets that I had found particularly thorny to understand. Sometimes these notes proved indispensable in under-stress debug scenarios when I needed to quickly revisit what was happening in a particular area of the codebase without the luxury of a long debug."

http://winterflower.github.io/2017/08/17/software-engineering-notebook/

Parlare male, perché la lingua nella quale ci stiamo esprimendo è una seconda lingua acquisita più avanti nel corso della nostra vita, ha più vantaggi di quello che non sembra. Primo fra tutti, la possibilità di avere un trattamento di favore da parte di chi è invece nativo.

Money quote: “Thus it might come as a surprise that, in 1980, Henry Kissinger (the former US secretary of state and a non-native English speaker, originally from Germany) told Arianna Huffington (the Greek immigrant and entrepreneur/writer who would eventually start The Huffington Post) not to worry about [her] accent, ‘because you can never, in American public life, underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility’.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-unexpected-benefits-of-getting-lost-in-translation

L’approccio quantitativo supportato da tecnologie che consentono quello che viene definito il “quantified self movement”, ha un grosso problema: uccide la possibilità di pensiero profondo, e ogni approccio puramente qualitativo.

Money quote: “The stringent requirement for measurement limits learning in two ways: first, tasks are tightly structured and centred on closed problems with definite solutions. These tasks tease out only a sliver of students’ thinking skills. Second, detours are rarely permitted on the learning journey. Students have scarce opportunity to explore new terrain — say, more open-ended problems — because this form of learning is not so easily measured”

https://hackernoon.com/the-quantified-self-movement-may-sound-the-death-knell-of-deep-thinking-c771be8dc30f