Fenomenologia dei grandi collezionisti d’arte. E pure di quelli più piccoli. Gente che vuol far vedere di essere gente di mondo, anzi di classe. Non è un tema nuovo, ma fa parte degli intramontabili sketch della commedia umana.

Money quote: “Debates about why people collect art date back at least to the first century CE. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian claimed that those who professed to admire what he considered to be the primitive works of the painter Polygnotus were motivated by ‘an ostentatious desire to seem persons of superior taste’. Quintilian’s view still finds many supporters.”

https://aeon.co/essays/what-drives-art-collectors-to-buy-and-display-their-finds

“Black Panther”, il film esce domani: la mia recensione (senza spoiler)

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/02/black-panther-recensione-film-marvel/

È una scena cult della televisione americana. Adesso il libro che raccoglie la storia orale di ‘The Wire’ permette di apprezzare l’idea alla base e la preparazione necessaria per girare la famosa ‘Fuck’ Scene. Un monumento. Leggete un po’ e poi godetevi il video.

Money quote: “In a storyline that recalled Press’s killing, Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland visit the apartment of a murdered young woman in Episode 4. They quickly discover that the previous detective bungled the investigation, and they slowly and methodically retrace the murder and link it to Avon Barksdale’s conspirators. Television had never seen anything quite like it. McNulty and Bunk conversed in the nearly five-minute scene by using only iterations of the word fuck”

http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/the-wire-oral-history-fuck-scene.html

Nelle galere americane, per rilassarsi, si giocano i giochi di ruolo da tavolo (Dubgeon and dragons). Però spesso sono vietati i dadi...

Money quote: “Even in states where RPGs are allowed, restriction on the use of dice can complicate gameplay. In an effort to crack down on gambling, most correctional facilities in America don't allow offenders to use or create dice.“

Da noi tanto tempo fa ci si raccontava il Milione...

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/padk7z/how-inmates-play-tabletop-rpgs-in-prisons-where-dice-are-contraband

Idea fantastica! Dovremmo farlo anche noi!

Money quote: “In Italia i Qr code non sono mai diventati popolari. In Cina invece trovano diverse applicazioni. Se non l’ultima, una delle più curiose e originali arriva da Pechino. Le carrozze delle linee 4 e 10 della metropolitana sono state trasformate in librerie digitali. Una volta a bordo i viaggiatori possono fotografare con il proprio smartphone il Qr code e accedere a una serie di audiolibri. Da ascoltare fino a destinazione…”

http://www.east-media.net/qr-code-pechino-metropolitana-app-libri/

Chuck ama scrivere articoli di colore. Peccato non gli vegano sempre bene. La storia olimpionica del tongano Pita Taufatofua, mr torace, però è carina.

Money quote: “At that exceedingly rare event in life known loosely as the “Tongan cross-country skiing news conference,” Pita Taufatofua wore a ski jacket and maybe even another layer beneath and proved evocative, witty, a fine storyteller, self-effacing but non-farcical, ricocheting skillfully between the serious and the funny. By contrast, the body that got him the platform even came to seem kind of . . . blasé.

What an upset.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/who-knew-a-tongan-cross-country-skier-could-be-so-engaging-with-his-shirt-on/2018/02/14/c051a408-115f-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html

Lento ma a un certo punto efficace pamphlet per dire che la scuola fa male ai bambini perché blocca il modo naturale con il quale l’energia viene utilizzata per crescere diventando altro da sé. Quelli che sono stati male a scuola probabilmente ci si ritroveranno.

Money quote: ““There are very few children who do not feel, during most of the time they are in school, an amount of fear, anxiety, and tension that most adults would find intolerable. It is no coincidence at all that in many of their worst nightmares adults find themselves back in school. I was a successful student, yet now and then I have such nightmares myself.”
Instead of being drawn into self-development by self-oriented fun and fascination, the child is now prodded into it by other-oriented fear and guilt. This kind of motivation is unsteady, because the child naturally resents and rebels against it.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/get-your-flow-back-to-make-work-feel-like-play-8207d745c3d4

🙏🏻 Ci sono un sacco di modi di dire grazie, questo è uno di quelli https://twitter.com/domitilla/status/963327573462802433, la gratitudine fa bene anche alla salute.

Negli Usa chiude l’ultima fabbrica di Compact Disc - il mio articolo per la Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/02/14/tecnologia/news/negli-usa-chiude-lultima-fabbrica-di-compact-disc-7T0VckWefdtsOMBlmvKJaM/amphtml/pagina.amp.html

I delfini sono molto, molto intelligenti. Bella e rilassante lettura (a parte il fatto che ci sia chi mangia i delfini)

Money quote: "A dolphin’s ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they “caught on”. Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science

Una lettura per il fine settimana. Come probabilmente saprete, esiste una spaccatura nel mondo di chi utilizza strumenti a riga di comando ancora più profonda di quella generale tra programmatori (tab o spazi?). Mettendo da una parte chi usa IDE o altro (Atom e i suoi fratelli), il vero cleavage è tra Emacs e VIm. Ora, questa è come passeggiare nell'Alto Lazio al tempo delle invasioni barbariche, o fare le vacanze a Gerusalemme quando in Europa si formavano lunghe file di crociati agli imbarchi dei traghetti per il Medio Oriente. Discutere se sia meglio l'uno o l'altro con certe persone è una cosa che divide, ma tanto. Ci siamo capiti, insomma.

Ecco che bello bello arriva questo tipo che decide di usare, senza saperne particolarmente farlo (e chissà poi come lavora di solito) Spacemacs per trasformare Emacs in VIm (quasi). Partendo da zero. Senza sapere niente. Meravigliandosi di cose totalmente anti-VIm (l'interfaccia basata su menu invocabili con spazio, ad esempio). Perché lo fa? Perché è curioso e sperimenta? Sì, certo ma anche per il gusto di complicarsi la vita.

Money quote: "Can you use Spacemacs without any Emacs knowledge? Just about! It might be a little confusing during setup, but once you’re up and running it’s OK. Using Spacemacs without any Vim knowledge would be more challenging."

https://medium.com/usevim/spacemacs-review-and-introduction-for-vim-users-cecb0df0fc5

Penso si sia già capito, ma non credo alle teorie complittistiche, anche se mi affascinano (come affasciavano Umberto Eco, per intendersi: uno sguardo distaccato e perplesso). Questo articolo sul modo in cui raccontiamo le storie popolari, strutturate attorno all’idea di bene e di male solo a partire dal ‘900, però, ha veramente un sapore manipolativo. La considero una bella e interessante lettura per il fine settimana.

Money quote: “Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.”

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil

Ieri è uscita la prima puntata del “Postcast”, il podcast del Post, realizzata da quelli di Piano P (che già si erano occupati dell’ottimo “Da Costa a Costa”, condotto da Francesco Costa, una delle colonne portanti della testata). Nella prima puntata del Postcast, che avrà cadenza settimanale, si parla di un uomo sotto processo a Palermo, accusato di essere un’altra persona. A fine puntata c’è anche una rubrica di cinema, con qualche consiglio su cosa non perdere.

Link: http://bit.ly/2BAy6oX

È la mia macchiana fotografica preferita, il mio Santo Graal, per così dire. La Ricoh GR II sta (quasi) sempre con me. Sottoscrivo al cento per cento queste otto ragioni per cui possiamo considerarla una buona, anzi una fantastica macchina per fare le fotografie.

Money quote: "I borrowed one for a while to better understand its various joys and foibles and by the end of my time with it, I realised it had exceeded my expectations. I bought one shortly after and have been using it ever since for anything from general day-to-day photography to events and holidays. No camera is perfect and I won’t pretend the GR is an exception but there are many reasons why it stays in my pocket wherever I go – and here are my top eight. Not all of these are exclusive to the GR, although it’s the combination of these factors in one package that have made it my constant photographic companion"

https://www.wexphotovideo.com/blog/reviews/8-things-i-love-about-the-ricoh-gr/

The real culture war in tech is not Mac vs PC, iOS vs Android, mobile vs desktop, native vs web, proprietary vs open source, or hardware vs software—it's ethical people whose work serves humanity vs amoral people who do what they want and expect everyone else to just deal with it (Cit.)

Il cambiamento cos’è? Cosa è davvero rilevante? Perché cambiamo tutti, a partire da quando siamo ragazzi e cresciamo (“Non ti riconosco più”, dicono gli amici che ritrovano dopo anni l’amico con delle caratteristiche inedite e spesso negative) oppure quando prendiamo una bella botta in testa e in un attimo diventiamo un’altra persona. Ma, questa è la domanda: a parte l’intensità del cambiamento, quanto il tipo di altra persona gioca nel processo? Cioè, quanto è importante la direzione oltre alla forza del cambiamento? Cambiare “in meglio” e cambiare “in peggio” sono percepiti alla stessa maniera? Un bell’articolo di filosofia dell’identità.

Money quote: “Further evidence that direction of change affects identity can be seen in popular examples. Take, for example, ‘The Enemy Within’ (1968), an episode of the original Star Trek television series. A transporter malfunction splits the ship’s Captain Kirk into two people, one with the properties of his negative side, the other with the properties of his positive side. Positive-Kirk and Negative-Kirk are both dissimilar from the original captain, yet the ship’s crew refers to Positive-Kirk as Captain Kirk and Negative-Kirk as the impostor. Improved Positive-Kirk is taken as identical and deteriorated Negative-Kirk as non-identical to the original.”

https://aeon.co/essays/how-a-change-for-the-worse-makes-for-a-different-person

Roger Federer è tornato in testa alla classifica ATP ad un’età, 36 anni, semplicemente fantascientifica. È come se fosse andato a giocare con la generazione di tennisti dopo la sua. Secondo me però questo è il momento di rileggere uno degli articoli-fiume più belli scritti da David Foster Wallace per il New York Times, tradotto da noi come Tennis e Trigonometria. Un capolavoro di long form journalism che mi fa sentire ancora di più la mancanza dello scrittore americano. Lettura domenicale perfetta.

Money quote: “The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Non so se aiuta a imparare a scrivere codice, però questo articolo un paio di cose su come si studia da soli le insegna

Money quote: “Everyone is different, and not everyone absorbs information the same way as the other. Yes, captain Obvious, but it’s not as obvious as it might seem. Before you start learning how to code, you need to learn how to learn.”

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/successfully-teaching-yourself-how-to-code-f6aac23db44a

Eric Lundgren è un imprenditore green ossessionato dall’idea dei rifiuti elettronici (che ricicla) e dall’abbattimento dei tempi di obsolescenza programmata. Microsoft lo sta mandando in galera.

Money quote: “Lundgren said he thought electronics companies wanted the reuse of computers to be difficult so that consumers would buy new ones. “I started learning what planned obsolescence was,” he said, “and I realized companies make laptops that only lasted as long as the insurance would last. It infuriated me. That’s not what a healthy society should have.”

He thought that producing and selling restore discs to computer refurbishers — saving them the hassle of downloading the software and burning new discs — would encourage more users to restore their computers instead of discarding them. In his view, the new owners were ennoscriptd to the software, and this just made it easier.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/true-crime/wp/2018/02/15/eric-lundgren-e-waste-recycling-innovator-faces-prison-for-trying-to-extend-lifespan-of-pcs/

The American Mall Game: Bloomberg ha fatto il giochino online in Html5 che spacca di brutto (se siete amanti dei mall)

Money quote: “A 2018 Retail Challenge”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/american-mall-game/

L’arma segreta dell’internet sicura è psichedelica - il mio articolo per la Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/02/19/tecnologia/idee/larma-segreta-dellinternet-sicura-psichedelica-EihmlqSXx9AL1laSnVCHQN/amphtml/pagina.amp.html