La storia di Paul Manafort, spiegata bene. Perché questo sembra un personaggio di Doonesbury, davvero.

Money quote: “Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/550925/

Lo so che lo sapete, ma ve lo dico lo stesso: c'è una app per fare chat su iOS e Android che funziona solo nell'ultimo 5% della batteria del telefono. Genio

Money quote: "The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery.

Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace."

http://diewithme.online

Mi identifico molto con un passaggio di questo articolo:

Money quote: "While I am a professional engineer by day and a mobile tech blogger by night, I'm at a point in my engineering career where I don't have the daily need to run AutoCAD, Rhino, or other Windows engineering apps. I spend most of my time in Word, Outlook, OneNote, and other document and drawing review apps. Writing for ZDNet just requires a text editor, web browser, and basic photo editor. Thus, my life has evolved to the point where Windows is no longer a required operating system."

Alla fine, è quello che è successo anche a me. Mi sono liberato dal bisogno di software Microsoft e Adobe, più che da Windows, perché quello che faccio di lavoro non richiede più di operare sul testo attraverso meccanismi complessi. Invece, è possibile manipolare semplicemente le parole formate da semplici caratteri con qualsiasi editor e su qualsiasi piattaforma mi aggrada.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/leaving-windows-how-the-pixelbook-replaced-my-surface-pro-4-no-regrets/

La storia di come hanno fatto a fare gli emoji per Apple. Che fatica...

Money quote: “For the next three months Raymond and I would share an office and illustrated an array of faces, places, flags, animals, food, clothing, symbols, holidays, sports, and well, you probably know the rest. But long before any of this was complete, I had to learn how to design Apple-styled icons. We split the batch and the lesson in humility and craftsmanship began.”

https://medium.com/@agzmn/the-making-of-apples-emoji-how-designing-these-tiny-icons-changed-my-life-16317250a9ee

Le massaggia finché non "libera la loro energia interiore" (un orgasmo, in altre parole). Ma fino a ieri faceva un altro lavoro, che era travestirsi da pupazzo, un personaggio a metà fra il Gabibbo e Topo Grigio. È il mio nuovo eroe della knowledge society.

Money quote: “Today Joyner’s tantric massage practice boasts 30 clients—or “goddesses,” as he calls them—and he unblocks the energy of two to four women a week, he says. It’s a tad different than his work as a software analyst at Texas Instruments, a job he held for six years and landed shortly after graduating from ITT Technical Institute. But, Joyner says, his current work in tantra does share many similarities to another job he held from 1991 to 2001, that of Barney, the beloved purple dinosaur on the hit PBS children's show Barney & Friends.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmzgbw/the-guy-who-played-barney-the-dinosaur-now-runs-a-tantric-sex-business

👩🏻‍🌾🛍 #Economiasolidale #Terremoto
Chiudo le #notiziepositive della settimana segnalando una bella esperienza di economia solidale: in Lombardia una rete di Gas-Gruppi di acquisto solidali distribuiti tra Milano, Varese, Pavia e in Brianza da anno sostiene allevatori e agricoltori di Lazio, Marche e Abruzzo colpiti dal terremoto. Lo fa tramite acquisti collettivi e continuativi nel tempo e mercati di quartiere dove le aziende agricole delle aree terremotate portano i loro prodotti, quasi tutti biologici. “Tutto è nato a metà dello scorso anno - racconta Mauro Fumagalli, coordinatore dello storico Gas milanese Il filo di paglia - quando la figlia di un ex collega del nostro gasista Michele Salvi ci ha messo in contatto con alcuni produttori delle zone terremotate”. Da quell’incontro nasce l’idea di creare una rete di acquisto solidale: all’inizio vi aderiscono 12 Gas, oggi sono una ventina. L’obiettivo è concludere almeno quattro o cinque ordini all’anno e allargare la partecipazione ad altri Gas così da riuscire a sostenere un numero maggiore di aziende terremotate. Anche questa è ricostruzione!
Buon weekend!

Magari siete utenti Windows: forse per bisogno, forse per paura, forse per diletto. Chissà, nessuno è perfetto. Vengo così a portarvi un po' di pace della mente: uno dei miei strumenti preferiti e quotidiani di scrittura: iA Writer. Il quale sta per sbarcare sulla vostra piattaforma, dopo essere stato su macOS, poi su iOS e poi su Android. iA Writer è a pagamento, e lo si comincia a pagare su Kickstarter, per poi trovarselo comodo comodo sul vostro Pc. Ve lo consiglio.

Money quote: "For seven years now, iA Writer has been used and loved by professional writers on Mac, iOS, and Android. iA Writer runs on Windows 7, 8 and 10. It comes with a custom installer. Everything is designed to make you focus on the text."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reichenstein/a-focused-writing-app-for-windows

Da qualche anno ho salutato Google come mio motore di ricerca principale e sono passato, armi e bagagli, a Duck Duck Go. Funziona molto bene e permette di utilizzare anche altri motori con un livello decrescente di privacy. Questo per dire che adesso quelli di DDG hanno lanciato anche il loro ad blocker con auditing dei siti che visitate. Visto che la mania del momento è nascondere miner di BitCoin dentro le pubblicità (adesso succede anche con quelle mostrate da YouTube) e che questa è una brutta sorpresa anche per chi usa Mac, anziché un antivirus o sistema di scanning/protezione inutile, costoso e potenzialmente pericoloso, un sano antitracker funziona meglio. Lo consiglio assieme a Ghostery e a Firefox Focus.

Money quote: "The vast majority of websites across the Internet contain hidden tracker networks, with Google trackers now lurking behind 76% of pages, Facebook’s trackers on 24% of pages, and countless others soaking up your personal information to follow you with ads around the Web, or worse. Our Privacy Protection will block all the hidden trackers we can find, exposing the major advertising networks tracking you over time, so that you can track who's trying to track you."

https://spreadprivacy.com/privacy-simplified/

Un bel ricordo della scrittrice di gialli Sue Grafton

Money quote: “Grafton belonged to a cluster of female authors who viewed the private-detective subgenre, previously dominated by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Grafton’s own hero, Ross Macdonald, in desperate need of subverting. The new detectives created by writers like Maxine O’Callaghan, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Grafton were not, as some critics insisted, simply their male counterparts in skirts. They were capable, confident, commanding. They were damn good at their jobs even if their private lives suffered. They valued their friends, their causes, their communities. They emerged from the distinct combination of second-wave feminism and 1970s American paranoia, seeing the world around them with a stark lack of sentimentality, unlike the romantic nobility of their male counterparts”

http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/sue-grafton-was-a-master-at-subverting-the-detective-novel.html

Space Invaders compie quarant’anni - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/01/30/tecnologia/giochi/space-invaders-compie-quarantanni-eX1lmT0lADyqkghmXYUPzN/pagina.html

Un viaggio piuttosto complesso, e a tratti quasi fuori-strada, sul tema del dolore e di come curarlo o mitigarlo. Ovvero, sul potere del tocco.

Money quote: "Research I recently conducted with my colleagues Haifa Irit Weissman-Fogel and Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa suggested that interpersonal touch is an effective way of reducing pain. We recruited 23 romantic, heterosexual couples to participate in the experiment. The women received pain stimuli under varying conditions. First, alone, without their partners, and then with their partners, but without physical contact. In the third condition, the women held hands with their partners while receiving pain and, in the fourth, they held hands with a stranger. This study showed that the third condition – partner’s touch – resulted in enhanced pain-reduction in comparison with others. Moreover, women with highly empathetic partners reported increased pain-reduction associated with that partner’s touch. It seems, then, that this study empirically supports the idea that touch can transfer a partner’s empathy, thereby decreasing pain. And it happens that this finding dovetails with previous research showing that a range of emotions from disgust to love to fear can be effectively communicated solely by means of touch."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-is-the-physiological-basis-of-the-healing-touch

La più grande libreria olandese di storia dell'arte: un capolavoro anche architettonico.

Money quote: "The 19th-century library, which has recently been restored, has been collecting content since 1885. Its shelves are stocked with manunoscripts bound to entice any art history lover. While browsing its extensive collection, you’ll come across books, journals, and periodicals, as well as catalogues about art auctions, exhibitions, trades, and collections."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cuypers-library

“Invading the Vintage”, il futurismo rétro di Franco Brambilla - una bella gallery di Fumettologica in preparazione alla mia intervista a Franco Brambilla

http://www.fumettologica.it/galleria/invading-the-vintage-franco-brambilla/

La fantastica storia di come la Pepsi Cola entrò nel mercato sovietico e di come si facesse pagare in natura (navi e altro).

Money quote: "The U.S.S.R. was Kendall’s land of opportunity, and his goal was to open it to Pepsi. In 1972, he succeeded, negotiating a cola monopoly and locking out Coca-Cola until 1985. Cola syrup began flowing through the Soviet Union, where it was bottled locally. It was a coup: As the New York Times put it, the soda was “the first capitalistic product” available in the U.S.S.R. Pepsi had become a pioneer. But there was one issue: money."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships

“Racconti di un futuro imperfetto”, un classico della fantascienza di Alfonso Font - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/01/racconti-futuro-imperfetto-alfonso-font-mondadori/

Il discorso integrale, lo State of the Union Address di Donald Trump di ieri sera.

Money quote: “Over the last year, we have made incredible progress and achieved extraordinary success. We have faced challenges we expected, and others we could never have imagined. We have shared in the heights of victory and the pains of hardship. We endured floods and fires and storms. But through it all, we have seen the beauty of America’s soul, and the steel in America’s spine”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trannoscript-trumps-state-of-the-union-address/551864/

Storia di uno dei più pazzeschi, folli, straordinari comici della televisione americana

Money quote: "The one-liners were impeccable, unimprovable. Dangerfield spent years on them; he once told an interviewer that it took him three months to work up six minutes of material for a talk-show appearance. If there’s art about life and art about art, Dangerfield’s comedy was the latter — he was the supreme formalist. Lacking inborn ability, he studied the moving parts of a joke with an engineer’s rigor. And so Dangerfield, who told audiences that as a child he was so ugly that his mother fed him with a slingshot, became the leading semiotician of postwar American comedy. How someone can watch him with anything short of wonder is beyond me."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-rodney-dangerfield.html

L'ipnotica storia della macchina fotografica - una Leica M2 - appartenuta a Sean Flynn, il figlio di Errol Flynn, e della sua scomparsa tra Viet-nam e Cambogia durante la guerra che stava documentando. Era un foto-reporter scavezzacollo, membro di un gruppetto di foto-reporter scavezzacolli.

Money quote: "Sean Flynn was the only child of the famed actor Errol Flynn & Lili Damita and was well known for his work as a photojournalist covering the Vietnam war. Flynn worked closely with special units in Vietnam and Cambodia, capturing incredible images of the war. Many of his images would be considered to be the raw view of an especially brutal war."

https://www.japancamerahunter.com/2018/01/camera-historica-the-sean-flynn-leica-m2/

Solo l’intelligenza artificiale ci potrà difendere da attacchi hacker e malware - il mio articolo per la Stampa

Money quote: "«Quella della sicurezza è una guerra che possiamo vincere solo se lasciamo che a combatterla al posto nostro siano le macchine» dice Gil Shwed, il fondatore dell’israeliana Check Point"

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/01/31/tecnologia/idee/solo-lintelligenza-artificiale-ci-potr-difendere-da-attacchi-hacker-e-malware-qpTQjUkLEEIPPyVVIMUxHN/pagina.html

Perché le cinture di sicurezza degli aeroplani per i passeggeri sono fatte come sono fatte? Risposta breve: perché costano molto poco. Però la risposta lunga è più interessante...

Money quote: "Seat belts became common in airplanes by the 1930s and 1940s, though even in 1947 there was pushback from the airline industry. (They often insisted that a tight belt could cause internal damage upon a crash. This is very rarely true and also pales in comparison to the number of injuries, internal and external, that are caused when a passenger doesn’t wear a seatbelt.) The Federal Aviation Act of 1958, spurred by several airplane crashes, began the move towards better safety requirements; these were codified in 1972 and have been occasionally updated ever since."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-are-airplane-seatbelts-so-weird

Fuji vuole comprare Xerox, nascerà un colosso da 18 miliardi di dollari - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/fuji-vuole-comprare-xerox-nascera-un-colosso-18-miliardi/