Fare bene gli squat. È importante farli e farli bene.

Money quote: "“For lower-body strength and flexibility, there is probably no better exercise,” said Bryan Christensen, a professor of biomechanics at North Dakota State University in Fargo, who studies resistance exercise.

The benefits are not confined to the lower body. “It is really a whole body exercise,” said Silvio Rene Lorenzetti, the director of the Performance Sports division of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sport in Magglingen. “It requires core stability and trains the back.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/well/how-to-do-squats.html

Se guardiamo il lato business dei film di Tom Cruise, e il modo con il quale l'attore americano gestisce sia la relazione con la Paramount che la produzione dei suoi film (molto più "improvvisati" di quanto non si pensi) le sorprese non mancano.

Money quote: "The notion that a studio can control spending on a Cruise movie is dismissed by executives who have been in the trenches with him. One says a studio can only hope to “influence” Cruise and McQuarrie. “Tom looks at [the money] he delivers to the studio,” says another. “Why wouldn’t you go do whatever you want? Who’s going to tell you not to?” These executives say Cruise is driven by his own perfectionism. “It’s not always in the best interest of the budget, but he is incredibly detailed and willing to put in an enormous amount of time and effort on every aspect,” says a source on M:I 7. “The guy does give every ounce of his being to this endeavor,” confirms another."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/tom-cruise-mission-impossible-paramount-1235116830/

Un bel ritratto di MacKenzie Scott, che è una donna con una identità forte e definita ma che è tuttavia segnata dal mondo nel quale è nata. Alla fine, tutto quel che ha fatto ricade sulle fortune (e sfortune) del padre e poi del marito Jeff Bezos. Questo ritratto cerca di spiegare chi è Scott, perché fa beneficienza e cosa succede quando una donna diventa estremamente ricca ma non è più "protetta" dal marito estremamente potente oltre che ricco.

Money quote: "But as Ms. Scott’s fame for giving away money has grown, so, too, has the deluge of appeals for gifts from strangers and old friends alike. That clamor may have driven Ms. Scott’s already discreet operation further underground, with recent philanthropic announcements akin to sudden lightning bolts for unsuspecting recipients."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/business/mackenzie-scott-charity.html

Buona Pasqua a tutti i lettori di Mostly Weekly!

By the way, anche oggi come ogni domenica c’è Mostly Weekly, una delle migliori letture pasquali di quest’anno secondo molte delle mie personalità multiple. Alcune si sono anche abbonate.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/163/

Il ladro che spiega come ha fatto a fare i suoi colpi: rapine all'americana (due dentro a farsi dare l'incasso con la macchina per la fuga pronta fuori) che però sono un po' diverse da come si vede nei film. Strano racconto

Money quote: "Rental cars were perfect because they were easy to obtain and return with almost no trace—I say almost because being listed as a co-driver is what eventually got Lawton caught—and because they were boring. Getting distance between himself and the site of the crime wasn't the only important thing, Lawton told me. "You want to blend in," he said. "That's the getaway. You're not gonna outrun the cops, this is not Baby Driver.""

https://www.thedrive.com/news/44744/americas-most-notorious-jewel-thief-breaks-down-the-perfect-getaway-car

Il nuovo e giovane presidente del Cile, l'uomo del cambiamento, va a vivere in un'area depressa della capitale e lancia un segnale forte. Molto interessante.

Money quote: "Unlike the White House in the U.S., 10 Downing in the U.K. or Argentina’s Quinta Presidencial de Olivos, Chile doesn’t have a presidential residence. Each leader has chosen where to live. Billionaire former president Sebastian Pinera was allowed to stay at his mansion in a swanky part of Santiago called San Damian, but Michelle Bachelet and Ricardo Lagos had to move to homes that met security requirements. All of them were in the more expensive eastern parts of Santiago."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-11/why-chile-s-president-bought-a-home-in-a-dangerous-area

Addio allo scrittore Valerio Evangelisti - Il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/04/valerio-evangelisti-morto/

C'è gente che va in pensione presto. È una storia americana, e là fa notizia. Da noi, è come un tuffo nel passato

Money quote: "Ironically, engineering my exit from the workforce made me love my career so much more. It became much easier to shake off the dumb, day-to-day annoyances that used to stress me out. Because I had this fun secret — I was retiring and nobody knew — I had this new perspective. That made it harder to leave. The first person I told at work was my first boss and mentor. I definitely had a couple of drinks first and then cried when I gave her the news. But ultimately, I never second-guessed my choice to retire early, in part because Mark and I were both in it together and he didn’t have the same hesitation. Also, my body was hurting more, so the clock was ticking."

https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/early-retirement-38-tanja-hester-fire-blogger.html

Il futuro a quanto pare sono le batterie. Ma se ci fossero altre soluzioni? Sarebbe meglio per molti motivi, anche perché a quanto pare tantissime batterie non è una buona idea (né molto possibile)

Money quote: "“I’m kind of surprised and encouraged that the solutions to the long-duration-energy-storage problem could be the caveman stuff,” Craig said. Batteries depend on “pretty sophisticated electrochemistry that quickly gets outside of what I understand. And yet the solutions may be picking up heavy stuff with cranes, picking up the earth with a hydraulic jack. I think there’s some fellas in Nevada that are putting rocks in a train and rolling it uphill, then they come back down. Like, Fred Flintstone would be comfortable with most of this stuff. It could be the way.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/25/the-renewable-energy-revolution-will-need-renewable-storage

Un ritratto a tutto tondo di Joseph F Kahn, il nuovo direttore del New York Times.

Money quote: "Abe Rosenthal, the totemic New York Times editor who published the Pentagon Papers, used to say that there was one path to the executive editor’s office — over the dead, burned, and maimed bodies of the ten other people who wanted the job. So I turned to Joseph Kahn, the new top dog at the Times, and asked whom he incinerated to get here.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, suppressing a sly smile. It was late last Friday afternoon — just days before it would be announced that he had ascended to journalism’s Iron Throne — and we were sitting in a conference room high above the empty newsroom. “The truth is that we’re in a bit of a different era, and some of the transitions in the past admittedly have been rocky, and there have been more abrupt changes in leadership. I think we’re going to have a really smooth change in leadership.”"

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/joe-kahn-new-york-times-profile.html

La storia della banana. Che oltretutto si è pure estinta una prima volta, e adesso rischia di nuovo di fare la stessa fine anche con la versione "fake" che mangiamo da decenni.

Money quote: "However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/bananas-have-died-out-once-before

Un gruppo di animatori dei Blue Sky Studios (rimasti anonimi) ha pubblicato online una scena con protagonista Scrat de L’era glaciale che rappresenta l’ultima animazione realizzata dallo studio, chiuso nel 2021.
👉 https://bit.ly/3k485mO

Se pensate che Facebook sia brutta e cattiva, non avete ancora visto niente: guardate un po' meglio Google

Money quote: "Google is the undisputed leader in the tech giants' race to accumulate user data, thanks to its huge array of services, devices and leading share of the digital ad business (37% to Facebook's 22%). It likely knows everything you've ever typed into your browser’s search bar and every YouTube video you’ve ever watched.

But that's just the beginning. It may also know where you've been, what you've bought and who you communicate with."

https://www.axios.com/what-google-knows-about-you-3f6c9b20-4406-4bda-8344-d324f1ee0816.html

Se correte potete iscrivervi alla mia newsletter domenicale gratuita Mostly Weekly: il prossimo numero è gustosissimo

https://antoniodini.com/newsletter/

Una brutta sorpresa: se pensate che nel mondo ci si fa largo sulla base del merito, pensate ancora. Perché non è così. (Né dobbiamo pensarlo, perché poi è peggio)

Money quote: "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."

https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you

Tenere un diario. Che sia tradizionale, Bullet Journal o altro, sono convinto sempre più che abbia senso. Questo articolo è piuttosto lungo e articolato. Non è detto per questo che abbia senso, e la metodologia che spiega a me interessa fino a un certo punto, però può essere utile a chi voglia ripensare/pensare il proprio rapporto con la scrittura - e usare carta e penna è d'obbligo secondo me - partendo da questo approccio strutturato e motivato.

Money quote: "I decided to introduce the insights that I was gaining from my work and from my personal therapy journey into my journaling practice.

I call the framework I came up with cognitive journaling, since the main ideas behind it derive from cognitive psychology."

https://betterhumans.pub/cognitive-journaling-a-systematic-method-to-overcome-negative-beliefs-119be459842c

La storia è molto semplice per le medie e secondarie: nelle scuole si usano sempre più i computer, con connessioni filtrate e app limitate. Tuttavia, uno dei software gratuiti che tutti usano è Google Docs. E dentro Google Docs c'è la chat. È diventata il canale segreto degli adolescenti.

Money quote: "As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/

Ragionamenti sul perché cancellare tutti i propri social e mandare al diavolo 60mila follower così, come se non valessero niente. (E in effetti...)

Money quote: "Aside from the social media affecting the type of work that I create, there is also the human element to consider. Personally, I am someone who gleans much of my information through external data points. I overthink everything. This makes social media a minefield for someone like me. I would analyze likes and follows and unfollows and draw conclusions based on what were likely benign engagements, and I would arrive at concrete and final conclusions that negatively impacted real-life relationships.

It sucked, to put it mildly."

https://petapixel.com/2019/02/19/why-i-deleted-all-of-my-social-media-and-60000-followers/

Back to basics. Sette cose utili a tutti quelli che manipolano grosse quantità di dati su una macchina Linux/Unix/macOS

Money quote: "This is the selected list, probably in the order of most frequent usage:
grep
cat
find
head/tail
wc
awk
shuf
In addition, it is shown how two auxiliary commands (xargs and man) can improve even further the usability of the 7 commands above."

https://neowaylabs.github.io/programming/unix-shell-for-data-scientists/