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/

Uno strano, strano ragionamento sulle generazioni. Ma strano, eh

Money quote: "What I’ve observed on campus—and what Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in our book—is that there’s an increasing tendency to define, to look at any place where there’s not numerical parity, where any group is underrepresented relative to the population and to say, “that is unjust.” And any social scientist who’s thinking in any other domain would say, “well, no, wait a second. You have to know the pipeline. You have to know how many people were trying to get in, were people treated differently because of their group membership?”"

http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/the-well_meaning-bad-ideas-spoiling-a-generation

Quando la computer science è più science che non solo computer.

Money quote: "A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

Il futuro degli Animali fantastici è relativamente sicuro - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/04/animali-fantastici-3-segreti-silente/

Gare di piccolezza

Money quote: "I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article "A Minimal Ray Tracer" from the book Graphics Gems IV).

The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer...that would fit on the back of a business card."

https://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/

Il romanzo più bello di tutti. Ma proprio di tutti tutti tutti.

Money quote: "“If we concede that human life can be governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed,” the book’s epilogue instructs. Even more than their Western European counterparts, Russians were obsessed with establishing a hard social science, as certain as physics. Any Western theory that promised such certainty found enthusiastic Russian supporters. In England, utilitarianism supported moderate liberalism, but by the 1860s Russians took it as proof of revolutionary socialism. The French positivist Auguste Comte, who coined the term “sociology,” originally planned to call his new discipline “social physics.” His Russian followers presumed that this “physics” already existed. Of course, Marxism—or “scientific socialism”—would eventually triumph over its rivals."

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/the-greatest-of-all-novels

Una console fatta in casa. Ma proprio tutta in casa.

Money quote: "This post serves as an introduction to a “homebrew” video game console made from scratch, using a lot of inspiration from retro consoles and modern projects but with a unique architecture.
Some friends of mine have told me again and again not to keep this project to myself and to put this information online, so here it goes."

https://internalregister.github.io/2019/03/14/Homebrew-Console.html

Ieri era il primo maggio ma nonostante tutto Mostly Weekly, la mia newsletter, è uscita come ogni domenica. Se volete potete leggerla anche qui:

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/165/

C'è tutta una matematica dello sviluppo cellulare che ignoravamo

Money quote: "Cells in embryos need to make their way across a “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate. New findings bear on how they may do this so efficiently."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-tells-cells-what-they-are-20190313/

È arrivato il multiverso della follia e Doctor Strange ci è dentro fino al collo - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/05/doctor-strange-multiverso-follia-recensione-film/