2018, preparatevi alla nuova Apple - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/2018-preparatevi-alla-nuova-apple/

Un ricordo di Mimmo Candido

Money quote: “Ho vinto parecchi premi giornalistici (e ne sono orgoglioso quasi quanto per i titoli da campione che, da ragazzo, vinsi nella scherma, nell’atletica e nella pallacanestro). Ho scritto alcuni libri. Insegno all’università.

Ho vissuto.”

http://www.cattivamaestra.it/2018/03/mimmo-candito/

Deleuze e Guattari, la strana coppia della filosofia

Money quote: “Before that first encounter, though, few could have predicted the powerful personal chemistry that existed between these men. At the age of 44, Deleuze must have seemed much older. Unwell and with difficulty breathing, he was reluctant to travel and comfortably settled in his post at the University of Lyon. Guattari, meanwhile, was a committed activist, who’d recently split from his previous mentor, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, after refusing to toe the party line. He was now 39 and employed at La Borde, an unconventional psychiatric clinic in the Loire Valley, where his work on group fantasy had piqued Deleuze’s interest. But Guattari was also suffering from writer’s block; he hoped the philosopher might help him overcome it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari

⚖👨🏻‍⚖ #Migranti #Diritti
La situazione di povertà prodotta anche dai cambiamenti climatici giustifica la protezione umanitaria dei richiedenti asilo.
Con una interessante e innovativa ordinanza del Tribunale dell'Aquila, datata 18 febbraio 2018, è stata riconosciuta la protezione umanitaria ad un cittadino del Bangladesh il quale aveva dichiarato di essersi irrimediabilmente indebitato dopo aver perso il suo terreno agricolo a causa di un alluvione.
Il giudice, nel motivare la propria decisione che farà scuola in Italia, in primo luogo fa riferimento alle problematiche legate ai cambiamenti climatici che interessano il Bangladesh, tra cui evidenzia il land grabbing e la deforestazione. Inoltre, ricorda che l’Italia ha ratificato il Patto internazionale sui diritti economici, sociali e culturali e il Patto Internazionale sui diritti civili e politici che riconoscono il diritto di ogni individuo ad un livello di vita adeguato e il diritto alla libertà dalla fame.
Infine il giudice aquilano, citando una circolare emessa dal Ministero dell’Interno nel luglio 2015 che evidenziava tra i motivi della concessione umanitaria anche le gravi calamità naturali o altri gravi fattori locali ostativi ad un rimpatrio in dignità e sicurezza, ha riconosciuto al cittadino bengalese la protezione umanitaria.

Viviamo immersi nelle reti ma, salta fuori, una vera teoria organica delle reti non esiste

Money quote: “A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world—from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell—are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/power-laws-networks/553562/

Apple alla conquista del mercato aziendale: diventerà la nuova Microsoft? - il mio articoo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/apple-alla-conquista-del-mercato-aziendale/

Il 99,9% delle mie foto sono scattate con luce naturale. Adesso finalmente trovo una giustificazione per la mia avversione alla luce artificiale

Money quote: “In addition to its somatic repercussions, flash can also enact a form of ethical violence. What, if anything, might justify flash’s unexpected interruption into daily lives? This is a question that has exercised documentary photographers since the mid-20th century. Among those who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression in the United States, Dorothea Lange saw its use as invasive, and Ben Shahn expressed his doubts – both about photographing someone else’s private space, and about flash’s aesthetics. ‘When some of the people came in and began to use flash I thought it was immoral,’ he said. ‘You know, you come into a sharecropper’s cabin and it’s dark. But a flash destroyed that darkness.’ His dislike of artificial illumination was to be echoed by art photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, who firmly adhered to the doctrine of using only available light. To use flash, said Cartier-Bresson, was ‘impolite … like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand’.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/blinded-by-the-light-the-violence-of-flash-photography

Donald Trump, la retorica della politica e il valore manipolativo del teleprompt

Money quote: “We tend to think of speech as a less contrived medium than writing. Yet the assistive technology of the teleprompter is a routine feature of contemporary speechifying. It relies upon an unstated contract between the speaker and listener. We, the audience, know that we are hearing a pre-written presentation; but somehow we forget the artifice, and feel as if the speaker is creating something for us afresh. Even when we know the text is being read from a screen, our perception of what counts as ‘true’ speech seems to be bound up with a particular rhetorical style that suggests spontaneity and self-confidence: a direct gaze, no cue cards, a natural pace.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-the-teleprompter-tells-us-about-truth-trump-and-speech

La vita media dei prodotti Apple è quattro anni e tre mesi - il mio articolo per Wired

https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2018/03/05/la-vita-media-dei-prodotti-apple/

I cellulari sono una protesi o addirittura un pezzo di noi, almeno secondo la nostra mente (e la giurisprudenza americana)

Money quote: “In 2014, the United States Supreme Court used this observation to justify the decision that police must obtain a warrant before rummaging through our smartphones. These devices ‘are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy’, as Chief Justice John Roberts observed in his written opinion.”

Are ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you? | Aeon Ideas
https://aeon.co/ideas/are-you-just-inside-your-skin-or-is-your-smartphone-part-of-you

Negli Usa sta succedendo una cosa strana: la domanda di energia elettrica per la prima volta è piatta, cioè i consumi non stanno aumentando. Le conseguenze saranno estremamente interessanti, anche perché negli Usa le utility sono pubbliche e hanno l'imperativo di fare (sempre più) soldi per i propri azionisti.

Money quote: "Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became “decoupled”:"

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/2/27/17052488/electricity-demand-utilities

Quello di cui si parla in questo articolo sono i designer, la loro "generazione perduta", quella allevata dagli hippie e avida, rapace, priva di spina dorsale. Una generazione che, nella Silicon Valley, non si farà rimpiangere. Ma questo ragionamento secondo me scavalca l'oceano e arriva fino a noi. Perché no?

Money quote: "The current generation of designers have spent their careers learning how to work faster and faster and faster. And while there’s certainly something to be said for speed, excessive speed tends to blur one’s purpose. To get products through that gate before anyone noticed what they were and how foul they smelled. Because we broke some things. It’s one thing to break a database, but when that database holds the keys to interpersonal relationships the database isn’t the only thing that breaks."

https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac7289549017

Una bella intervista di The Believer a Laurie Sheck, scrittrice.

Money quote:

"THE BELIEVER: Are you genre-fluid?

LAURIE SHECK: With Gertrude Stein, we say she is a writer. We don’t label her in terms of genre. I love that. Too often, fluidity makes people nervous. If they can’t label one thing or another, they crack. It’s bad enough with people, but with books, it’s the same thing. To me, it’s about liberty of mind. Labeling is the opposite of thinking. As if prose is not poetry as well? And a lot of poetry is not poetry—it’s just lines. The whole thing’s all messed up."

https://logger.believermag.com/post/anti-particle-woman

Se siete amanti della cucina, vera o televisiva che sia, o semplicemente curiosi, questo articolo è inevitabile

Money quote: “Noma, as you've probably heard, is the Copenhagen restaurant considered by many people, including me, to be the most influential in the world, the place where the dominant strains in world cooking — localism, seasonality, sustainability and science — came together into a whole, aided by Redzepi's strong sense of narrative”

http://www.latimes.com/food/jonathan-gold/la-fo-gold-noma-copenhagen-20180302-story.html

Dyson Cyclone V10, l’iPhone degli aspirapolvere -il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/03/06/tecnologia/news/dyson-cyclone-v-liphone-degli-aspirapolvere-6fb4tEjSC9jTrukRTu9I8I/pagina.html

Social e app varie che ci fanno dipendenza grazie alla dopamina. Il Guardian si lancia

Money quote: “The capacity for so-called “persuasive technology” to influence behaviour in this way is only just becoming understood, but the power of the dopamine system to alter habits is already familiar to drug addicts and smokers. Every habit-forming drug, from amphetamines to cocaine, from nicotine to alcohol, affects the dopamine system by dispersing many times more dopamine than usual. The use of these drugs overruns the neural pathways connecting the reward circuit to the prefrontal cortex, which helps people to tame impulses. The more an addict uses a drug, the harder it becomes to stop”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Stanno tornando di moda i plotter con penna/pennarellino. Una volta erano un prodigio tecnologico, oggi sono una cosa hipster per fare arte digitale/analogica vintage. Fico!

Money quote: "You might wonder what's so special about pen plotters? Well, let me tell you. Pen plotters are friendly robots from a not so distant past. They're the missing link between pencils and laser printers. They're lovely pieces of high precision technology that nobody cares about anymore. They're computer controlled machines that use regular pens to draw on regular paper with incredible speed and precision. They would draw blueprints for tweedy engineers and turtlenecked architects back in the 70's and 80's, they would draw colorful charts on transparencies for slick investment bankers to present on overhead projectors, and they probably also drew the schematics for the laser- and inkjet printers that replaced them a decade later. They were expensive, beautifully engineered, high quality machines. Which means that there are still plenty of them around, fully working and very cheap. You can, for instance, pick up an HP 7475A on eBay for roughly $50, it's a great starter machine and I can't recommend it enough."

http://www.tobiastoft.com/posts/an-intro-to-pen-plotters

Grosso guaio a San Francisco: guerra tra gang, utenti VIm contro utenti emacs. Feriti negli scontri, la polizia opera degli arresti. Indagata la Church of Emacs, guidata dal controverso programmatore e "guru" Richard Stallman. Sospetti legami con il crimine organizzato degli editor.

Money quote: "As police officers cleared away yellow tape from the crime scene, a nearby eyewitness sighed and shook his head. “I never knew that editing text could be that controversial. Maybe if those guys were indenting with spaces instead of tabs, all of this could have been avoided.”"

https://medium.com/halting-problem/dolores-park-assault-linked-to-vim-vs-emacs-gang-war-3fb666d72051

Sono affascinato da Malta e dai racconti sulle tre piccole isole al centro del Mediterraneo. Come il reportage che segue.

Money quote: "Maltese politics were also fascinating: always raucous, occasionally violent. Labour and the Christian Democrat-style Nationalists were invariably closely matched with entrenched tribal support: more like United vs City than left vs right. And small-country back-scratching was part of the fun, especially because so many jobs were government ones. This was intensified by the single transferable vote system, more or less as in Ireland, which encourages competition between candidates of the same party. You get elected by knowing everyone, and doing Tammany Hall-style favours. “There’s always been clientelism. Poor people trying to pressure politicians to get them a job or promotion,” explains Henry Frendo, professor of modern history at the University of Malta."

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2018/02/malta-island-secrets-and-lies

Avevo questa idea, come tanti, che una buona dormita ti aiuta a staccare un attimo e a vedere un problema, che cerchi di risolvere con fatica, a mente fresca magari per trovare una bella soluzione. E poi arriva il solito guastafeste con il suo mumbo-jumbo.

Money quote: "Sleep is also critical to problem solving. When my students are stuck on a maths problem, sleep on it is often the only wisdom I have to offer. This adage has served me well in the past and now enjoys a strong neurological basis thanks to the research Walker draws on. Walker relates problem solving to the REM phase of sleep, demonstrating that it is in this critical stage of unconsciousness that we form novel connections between individual chunks of knowledge. REM sleep is where our ideas crystallise and recombine into new, creative thoughts. The link is so pervasive that the phrase sleep on it exists in most languages."

https://medium.com/@fjmubeen/why-sleep-on-it-is-the-most-useful-advice-for-learning-and-also-the-most-neglected-86b20249f06d

Gli indizi che Amazon possa avviare la sua struttura di logistica e spedizioni per tutti si sommano. E costituiscono un argomento circostanziale interessante, oltre a quello logico, che Amazon prima o poi effettivamente lo farà.

Money quote: "Considering the decades FedEx and UPS have had to build out their networks, it will be an uphill climb for Amazon to make a dent in the industry. That said, Amazon has reportedly been working on making its own logistics network a reality after a disappointing holiday season in 2013 during which countless packages were delivered late."

https://bgr.com/2018/02/09/amazon-delivery-service-swa-fedex-ups/