Ma, così, tanto per dire: e se gli Illuminati esistessero veramente? Da cosa dipende la nostra propensione a cogliere schemi e intenzioni anche nel caos? Il filosofo Julian Baggini spiega con brio - tipico della pubblicistica in generale e di quello che ci si può aspettare dal Guardian in particolare - una cosa che a molti sfugge: gli adepti delle grandi cospirazione sono solo un pochino più in là, ma non di tanto, rispetto a tutti noi altri. O no?

Money quote: "When we dig for the truth, we flirt with madness"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/14/illuminati-running-world-not-mad-idea-questioning-hidden-power-elites-sane

Se c'è uno che bisognerebbe leggere sempre, perché quando è in giornata fa scintille, quello è Leonardo Tondelli. In questo caso, su The Vision (che non so cosa sia, ma da oggi lo seguo). E questo articolo sul liceo classico (che modestamente pure io) in cui si racconta a cosa serve, varrebbe anche solo per le fotografie, come dice il mio amico Mattia che me l'ha segnalato. Perché alla fine siamo tutti uguali, ma proprio tutti uguali, a generazioni e ritagli sociali.

Money quote: "Il Classico è ancora uno status symbol, o almeno è percepito come tale (ma c’è differenza?). Non è una cosa che i presidi possano scrivere nel Piano dell’Offerta Formativa; in compenso vi sarà capitato di leggere qualche Rapporto di Autovalutazione stilato da un insegnante o un funzionario un po’ troppo sincero (magari non sapeva che il Rapporto sarebbe stato pubblicato sul sito del ministero, e scambiato dalla stampa per “pubblicità classista”). Nel tal liceo ci sono pochi stranieri e neanche un disabile; in quell’altro si lamenta la presenza dei “figli dei portinai”. Il liceo classico è anche questo. Lo è sempre stato: la scuola per i rampolli di buona famiglia. Magari la famiglia non è così buona, ma mandando il ragazzo/a al classico spera che possa salire quel gradino sociale che evidentemente ancora esiste. Chi ricorda con affetto gli anni del liceo tende sempre a non far caso a quella cosa: i pesci non fanno caso all’acqua. Questo non significa che il Classico non possa davvero essere una formidabile palestra di vita. Seneca e Orazio possono davvero aprirti la mente; Tacito può davvero allenarti alla complessità. Ma forse è più facile che succeda in una classe piccola, senza compagni “problematici”."

http://thevision.com/attualita/liceo-classico-status-symbol/?sez=all&ix=1?sez=all&ix=1

Il pulsante con le faccine che vale più di complicate ricerche di mercato

Money quote: “By the standards of traditional market research, HappyOrNot’s analysis was simplistic in the extreme. There were no comment cards, customer surveys, focus groups, or reports from incognito “mystery shoppers.” There was just crude data collected by customer-operated devices that looked almost like Fisher-Price toys: freestanding battery-powered terminals with four big push buttons—dark green and smiley, light green and less smiley, light red and sort of frowny, dark red and very frowny. As customers left a store, a small sign asked them to rate their experience by pressing one of the buttons (very happy, pretty happy, pretty unhappy, or very unhappy), and that was all.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/customer-satisfaction-at-the-push-of-a-button

Signal, il servizio di messaggistica realmente sicuro (ma un po' negletto), lancia la sua fondazione, per tirare su due soldi. Con loro, arriva uno dei co-fondatori di Whatsapp, il riccone che ha lasciato Facebook e adesso si dedica al suo nuovo hobby.

Money quote: "We’re glad those are the choices we’ve made. Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous. In case you missed it, Brian left WhatsApp and Facebook last year, and has been thinking about how to best focus his future time and energy on building nonprofit technology for public good.

Starting with an initial $50,000,000 in funding, we can now increase the size of our team, our capacity, and our ambitions. This means reduced uncertainty on the path to sustainability, and the strengthening of our long-term goals and values. Perhaps most significantly, the addition of Brian brings an incredibly talented engineer and visionary with decades of experience building successful products to our team."

https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/

Insegnare informatica significa far imparare a usare un computer o programmare? - il mio articolo per Wired Italia

Money quote: "Ormai nella didattica alla voce informatica entra tutto: dal videogioco alla lavagna multimediale (la famigerata Lim), dall’Ecdl (il patentino europeo per usare il computer) all’apprendimento di un linguaggio di programmazione come fosse una lingua straniera. Ma tutto questo è veramente informatica? E cosa si dovrebbe realmente insegnare nelle scuole primarie e secondarie?"

https://www.wired.it/play/cultura/2018/02/28/informatica-computer-programmare/

Google vuole innovare la posta elettronica (di nuovo). Questao volta trasformandola in AMP, come le pagine web. E non è una bella cosa.

Money quote: "See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it, but it’s the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks. It not that there’s something wrong with them. It’s that they’re mature, useful items that do exactly what they need to do. They’ve transcended the world of likes and dislikes."

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-idea/

Il New York Times vuole rovinare la festa dei Bitcoin?

Money quote: “Money is supposed to be a means of buying things. Now, the nation’s hottest investment is buying money. And the investment rush is raising questions about whether one reason for the slow pace of economic growth in recent years is that the nation is busy distracting itself. While Bitcoin mining may not be labor intensive, it diverts time, energy and capital from other, more productive activities that economists say could fuel faster growth.“

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-electricity-productivity.html

Perché gli esseri umani si suicidano e gli altri animali no? Abbiamo trasceso gli imperativi della biologia e siamo sciolti da ogni vincolo, anche rispetto alla nostra stessa specie?

Money quote: “The trouble is, all human beings have moments of despair. It is a grand, if tragic, truth that because humans have ambition that is so much higher than other animals, hurting is bound to be a part of life. The Italian poet Cesare Pavese said it explicitly: ‘No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.’ The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once told a friend that ‘all his life there had hardly been a day, in which he had not at one time or other thought suicide a possibility’. More typically, among today’s US high-school students, 60 per cent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 per cent have thought about it seriously in the past year”

https://aeon.co/ideas/humans-are-the-only-animals-who-crave-oblivion-through-suicide

L’allegro mondo dell’Accademia americana.

Money quote: “When I left that institution, I landed in a bad Philip Roth novel set in the Midwest, where married faculty were insouciantly bedding grad students even as they sat on their committees, and senior faculty were sleeping with junior faculty even as they determined our merit raises. When faculty complained to the chair about the situation, she said her hands were tied. It was consensual, among adults. When another professor reportedly sent a photo of his penis to a grad student, giving new meaning to the term faculty member, I didn’t stick around to debate the point.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/20/real-scandal-academia/

Siamo un popolo di posseduti. Era l’unica spiegazione logica, in effetti

Money quote: “One of the organizers of the Sicily gathering, Friar Beningo Palilla, told Vatican Radio there are some 500,000 cases requiring exorcism in Italy each year.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/02/23/vatican-host-international-exorcism-conference-meet-growing-demand/367735002/

Il titolo era intrigante (“Comunicare significa fallire”), il resto è noia

Money quote: “Pensa a quello che vorrai ottenere tra tre anni. Non tra un mese o un anno. Se ti impegni davvero lo avrai in tre anni. Hai bisogno di tempo per realizzare queste tre cose: imparare le tecniche per distribuire efficacemente i tuoi contenuti; promuovere e gestire solide relazioni e infine adottare un mindset che ti permetta di generare contenuto quotidiano, di qualità, con poco tempo e minore sforzo.”

https://www.skande.com/comunicare-significa-fallire-201802.html

Questo ha cominciato a lavorare a distanza quattro anni fa. Le sue riflessioni per me sono molto interessanti.

Money quote: "I’d venture that the reason people are so curious is that working remote is a big, scary leap, and one that a lot of people are interested in potentially making. I think the questions I got can roughly be broken down into 3 kinds of concerns about working remote:

Personal mental health/productivity concerns: Will I get lonely? Will I be too distracted when working from home? Can I maintain good work/life balance? Will the travel impact my personal life?
Basic ability to do one’s job: Will I miss out on conversations in the office? How will communication work? Will people forget I exist?
Career growth: Can I take responsibility for really important projects? Can I get promoted? Can I be a leader?"

https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/18/working-remotely--4-years-in/

La parte di codice può essere laboriosa (ma è pochissima roba). Invece, il modo di pensare e la logica mi affascinano. E poi, chiedersi come funziona "cd" non è banale...

Money quote: "In my last blog post, I dove into some of the code behind the sudo command. I thought this was pretty fun. sudo is one of those commands that I use quite often but haven’t had the chance to look into truly. I started thinking about other commands that I use on a daily basis but had little understanding of the internals of. The first command that came to mind is cd"

https://blog.safia.rocks/post/171311670379/how-does-cd-work

Bloomberg prova a fare i conti in tasca, anzi in fabbrica, a Tesla. Quante Model 3 sono state prodotte sinora?

Money quote: "Our best estimate is that Tesla has manufactured 8,852 Model 3s so far, and is now building approximately 881 a week. Those figures, and the charts below, represent Bloomberg’s latest estimates and will automatically update to reflect changes in the data."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

Come fanno le formiche a costruire un ponte? Seguono un algoritmo, talmente semplice che lo possono seguire anche le formiche...

Money quote: "There’s more to it than that, though. Bridges involve trade-offs. Imagine a colony of ants comes to a V-shaped gap in its path. The colony doesn’t want to go all the way around the gap — that would take too long — but it also doesn’t build a bridge across the widest part of the gap that would minimize how far the colony has to travel. The fact that army ants don’t always build the distance-minimizing bridge suggests there’s some other factor in their unconscious calculation."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-simple-algorithm-that-ants-use-to-build-bridges-20180226/

Ps: a me le formiche fanno schifo, e non sono gli unici animaletti piccoletti a farmi questo effetto

La classe creativa, quella che lavora in spazi non suoni, quella che ha tolto il posto dall'idea di posto di lavoro. E che lavora negli spazi condivisi. E WeWork è il suo profeta. Smartwork, o quel che è. A me non piace, forse perché lavoro così. Boh. Questo è l'articolo che ne parla

Money quote: "WeWork was founded by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey in 2010, and it started with a single office in New York City. Today, the company has 274 offices in fifty-nine cities, from Bogotá to Tel Aviv. It is the fourth-largest startup in America, and it is reportedly valued at more than $20 billion (US), which puts it below only Uber, Airbnb, and SpaceX. WeWork leases buildings, renovates them to a millennial-approved sheen, and then rents them out desk by desk and office by office. There are now five locations in Canada, and at the inaugural Toronto office, a “hot desk”— a spot at a communal table or couch— starts at $500 per month, a permanent desk at $700, and a private office at $1,000. The company is now trying to become the leader in a crowded market where dozens of hubs all promise a variation on the same thing: an inspirational environment among like-minded members of the creative class, plus coffee."

https://thewalrus.ca/why-its-so-hard-to-actually-work-in-shared-offices/

In effetti le spogliarelliste al corteo funebre (cinese) mi mancavano. Ma ne parla la BBC quindi...

Money quote: “According to one theory, strippers are used to boost funeral attendances because large crowds are seen as a mark of honour for the deceased.
Another states the practice could be linked to a "worship of reproduction".”

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43137005

Ci sono molte donne con un elevato tasso di intelligenza che riescono a mimetizzare il proprio autismo. Che, peraltro, nelle donne sembra di capire sempre più che si manifesti in maniera differente che negli uomini. E insomma si scoprono tante cose sulle differenze, sull'autismo, sulle strategie delle ragazze per non farsi scoprire e non nel frattempo negarsi, rifiutarsi di scoprire anche se stesse.

Una storia potente che poteva essere scritta meglio: giornalismo proceduralmente fatto molto bene ma senza anima. Tipico delle journalism school negli Stati Uniti.

Money quote: "Over the past few years, scientists have discovered that, like Jennifer, many women on the spectrum “camouflage” the signs of their autism. This masking may explain at least in part why three to four times as many boys as girls are diagnosed with the condition. It might also account for why girls diagnosed young tend to show severe traits, and highly intelligent girls are often diagnosed late. (Men on the spectrum also camouflage, researchers have found, but not as commonly as women.)"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/women-camouflaging-autism/553901/

Storia di ragazze mantenute da ricconi cinesi, per questione di status. Soprattutto, un articolo con un attacco così, come fai a non leggerlo?

Money quote: “Shanshan’s $550 shoes came from her lover, but the soles of her feet, as hard as leather, came from her childhood. ‘We used to play barefoot in the village,’ she told me. ‘All the girls in the karaoke bar had feet like this.’”

https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-young-rural-women-in-china-become-mistresses

Lacoste mette al posto del coccodrillo una serie di animali in via di estinzione. Il numero di magliette prodottoe per ciascuna serie limitata corrisponde al numero degli animali ancora vivi.

Money quote: “Lacoste, the French polo shirt brand, is replacing its iconic crocodile logo with ten threatened animals in a limited-edition line created in partnership with a nature conservation charity.“

http://creativity-online.com/work/lacoste-save-our-species/53963

Dalla regola del limite di 20 slot per gli investimenti pensata da Warren Buffett alla necessità di impegnarsi in quel che si sta facendo, investendo tempo e passione, anziché "bagnarsi i piedi" e provare un pochino

Money quote 1: "If you take a look around, you’ll notice very few people actually go “all in” on a single skill or goal for an extended period of time.
Rather than researching carefully and pouring themselves into a goal for a year or two, most people “dip their toes in the water” and chase a new diet, a new college major, a new exercise routine, a new side business idea, or a new career path for a few weeks or months before jumping onto the next new thing."

Money quote 2: "Don’t waste your next slot. Think carefully, make a decision, and go all in. Don’t just kind of go for it. Go all in. Your final results are merely a reflection of your prior commitment."

https://medium.com/the-mission/warren-buffetts-20-slot-rule-how-to-simplify-your-life-and-maximize-your-results-760e7109ffe8

Che dite, lo scrivo un romanzo?