Tom Wolfe è morto, viva Tom Wolfe. Ecco la sua epica intervista per la Paris Review. Lunga ma assolutamente necessaria. Soprattutto se scrivete.

Money quote: “For eight months I had sat at my typewriter every day, intending to start this novel and nothing had happened. I felt that the only way I was ever going to get going on it was to put myself under deadline pressure. I knew that if I had to, I could produce something under deadline pressure. I found the only marvelous maniac in all of journalism willing to let me do such a thing. That was Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. This book would have never been written if Jann Wenner had not said, OK, let’s do it. Let’s see what happens.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2226/tom-wolfe-the-art-of-fiction-no-123-tom-wolfe

La televisione sta morendo ma, nel suo canto del cigno, produce le sue cose più belle: i telefilm. Sono il ritratto di una epoca, e producono una ulteriore spinta per quanto riguarda l’atomizzazione della nostra società. Al centro del cambiamento: la famiglia.

Money quote: “How might we understand new television’s invocation of the family? The first thing to note is that these invocations are not commitments to traditional ‘family values’, where what’s being affirmed is a nuclear family: the range of families for which characters act are quite broad and often not traditional. We are not dealing here with reproduction or property. Yet, we shouldn’t think that these invocations aren’t potentially regressive. Most new TV presents and responds to the increasing atomisation and the breakdown in our world by withdrawing into and idolising the institution most representative of it.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/our-golden-age-of-tv-amid-collapse-a-new-family-emerges

Invitate gli amici a cena. Anziché cercare di emulare Vissani, perché non gli fate un bel piatto di tagliatelle fatte in casa?

Idea Smart, a parte mettere l’olio nell’acqua...

Money quote: “Eggs… and fucking Flour. Seriously.

Apart from a pinch of salt, that’s ALL THERE IS TO IT. You’ve already got all the ingredients for pasta and you didn’t even realise it.”

https://medium.com/@chazhutton/stop-buying-pasta-you-idiot-1f90bf761b60

Tornato ma già pronto per ripartire: oggi vado negli Stati Uniti. Questione sostanzialmente di fusi orari, tema intrigante. Trovo infatti i dibattiti sul tempo (e sugli orologi) affascinanti. Questo sull'ora legale è fantastico.

Money quote: "Studies link the lack of sleep at the start of DST to car accidents, workplace injuries, suicide, and miscarriages.

The early evening darkness after the end of the DST period is linked to depression.

The risk of suffering a heart attack is also increased when DST begins. However, the extra hour of sleep we get at the end of DST has in turn been linked to fewer heart attacks."

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/daylight-saving-debate.html

Ripensare l'interfaccia del Kindle. Perché no?

Money quote: "My ideal Kindle interaction model isn’t too different than the current one. But the sanding away of small frictions pays huge dividends in interfaces. As a user performs the same actions hundreds or thousands of times they feel those marginal changes. And even if they don’t understand them, you must believe they appreciate them."

https://medium.com/@craigmod/reconsidering-the-hardware-kindle-interface-3c54088bed9e

Di nuovo in partenza, questa volta per la Silicon Valley, ma non temete: Mostly, I Write prosegue imperterrito!

La morte, da un punto di vista fisiologico, è strana. Molto strana.

Money quote: "Not only do cells survive for a while after an organism dies, they may actually fight to live. The activity of some genes increases after death, as cells apparently sense that something has gone horribly wrong. It’s like an astronaut in deep space who suddenly gets silence on the radio and frantically beams signals home to Earth, unaware that a nuclear holocaust has wiped out everything she holds dear."

https://medium.com/neodotlife/gene-expression-lives-on-on-after-death-63b204727591

Le ragioni per le quali il web deve morire, secondo questo signore

Money quote: "Web apps. What are they like, eh? I could list all kinds of problems with them but let’s pick just two.

Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's.

Web apps are impossible to secure."

https://blog.plan99.net/its-time-to-kill-the-web-974a9fe80c89

Un poster spettacolare, peccato costi così caro. Fotografie ai raggi X delle macchine fotografiche, per apprezzare la dimensione interiore dell'evoluzione della tecnica fotografica, intesa come macchine. Insomma, più "meta" di così...

Money quote: "“This work uses x-rays to explore the micro-evolution of cameras and is a metaphor about the limits of evolution,” Krugh writes. “While form and media may have changed, the camera is still a camera: a tool to create images by capturing photons of light.”"

https://petapixel.com/2018/05/02/x-ray-photos-reveal-the-evolution-of-cameras-through-history/

Qui il progetto originale

http://www.kentkrugh.com/home-page/speciation/

L'ultimo tuttologo.

Money quote: "It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson's dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.

One really does mean everything. The Victorian parson's interests included but were not limited to philology, anthropology, folklore, children's stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater. Among the 130 books he published were an anthology of Old Testament apocrypha; biographies of Napoleon I and the Caesars; histories of Germany, Iceland, North and South Wales, Cornwall, Dartmoor, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees; a guide to surnames; a 16-volume collection of saints' lives and a compilation of medieval superstitions beloved by H.P. Lovecraft among others; numerous volumes of sermons and dozens of novels; a theological treatise on the problem of evil; numerous works on ghosts; a surprisingly scholarly Book of Were-wolves. He also composed some 200 short stories and thousands of essays, prefaces, and magazine articles; he produced two collections of original verse and two memoirs and left behind a vast correspondence, thousands of pages of diaries, and a remarkable quantity of half-digested research."

http://theweek.com/articles/763465/last-man-who-knew-everything

Spiegare #Bitcoin con un infografica non è certo possibile. Nonostante siano passati 10 anni dall'invenzione di Bitcoin, ancora oggi l'interesse prevalente del grande pubblico è legato alle oscillazioni di prezzo, in pochi conoscono in cosa consista davvero la rivoluzione promessa da Satoshi Nakamoto.

Se l'argomento è di tuo interesse ti invito a cliccare su 👍 in fondo al post.
In caso di feedback sufficientemente positivo, inviterò un Esperto che spiegherà l'argomento individuando le reali potenzialità a lungo termine.

Per coloro che conoscono già la materia, la community di riferimento sul Bitcoin è al seguente indirizzo:
https://news.1rj.ru/str/cryptospecs

Federico Viticci è l'italianissimo creatore di MacStories, uno dei più importanti siti al mondo dedicato al mondo Apple (in inglese, nientemeno) e nell'orecchio dello stesso Tim Cook. La storia di Viticci è notevole di per sé, ne parla lui stesso in questo articolo apparentemente dedicato al fitness ma in realtà molto rivelatorio della strategia di MacStories e di come si possa costruire un modello di informazione ibrida che funziona senza diventare un bazaar di tracker e pubblicità volgari.

Money quote: "Here's what I've learned about cancer as a survivor: even once you're past it, and despite doctors' reassurances that you should go back to your normal life, it never truly leaves you. It clings to the back of your mind and sits there, quietly. If you're lucky, it doesn't consume you, but it makes you more aware of your existence. The thought of it is like a fresh scar – a constant reminder of what happened. And even a simple sentence spoken with purposeful vagueness such as "We need to double check something" can cause that dreadful background presence to put your life on hold again."

https://www.macstories.net/stories/second-life/

Walt Disney come maestro di vita. Insomma, sort of...

Money quote: "1. No Separation Between Work and Life"

https://medium.com/personal-growth/walt-disney-how-to-truly-love-what-you-do-f3449c78ca65

La grande alleanza del caffe tra Nestle e Starbucks

Money quote: "For years, a smoldering George Clooney would sip his espresso and ask: “Nespresso...what else?” Turns out the answer is: Starbucks.

In the third-biggest transaction in Nestle SA’s 152-year history, the Swiss food giant will spend $7.15 billion for the right to market Starbucks Corp. products from beans to capsules, marrying its international distribution network with the allure of arguably the biggest name in java."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-07/nestle-enters-7-2-billion-global-coffee-alliance-with-starbucks

Da oggi MacOS X è più vecchio di Mac OS: una storia che non finirà - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/da-oggi-macos-x-e-piu-vecchio-di-mac-os-una-storia-che-non-finira/

Visto che in questo momento per qualche giorno ancora sono in California, l'argomento mi è più chiaro. Se uno non prova ad andare a vivere negli Stati Uniti, o non segue da vicino qualcuno che lo sta facendo, non si riesce a capire quel paese. Eppure, ha un sua dinamica e tendenze ed evoluzioni che vengono raccontate e ripetute all'infinito.

Money quote: "The advocates for this model point to California as the inevitable result of inaction. If you try to grow without increased density and transit you'll end up with the traffic of Los Angeles and the home prices of San Francisco. Yet the negative effects of political inaction do not make political action inevitable. Another possibility is… Boise."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-18/growing-midsize-cities-like-boise-could-replace-urban-future

Negli Usa la polizia compra, tramite intermediari, la posizione delle persone sospettate e ricercate dalle compagnie telefoniche.

Money quote: "LocationSmart, a California-based technology company, is one of a handful of so-called data aggregators. It claimed to have "direct connections" to cell carrier networks to obtain real-time cell phone location data from nearby cell towers. It's less accurate than using GPS, but cell tower data won't drain a phone battery and doesn't require a user to install an app. Verizon, one of many cell carriers that sells access to its vast amounts of customer location data, counts LocationSmart as a close partner."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/

Gli algoritmi non saranno i medici del futuro. Saranno invece gli assistenti intelligenti dei medici del futuro. E gli sbagli diminuiranno in maniera radicale. (Però è anche vero che i medici diventeranno molto, molto più efficienti e quindi ne serviranno decisamente meno: il problema è questo, più che altro).

Money quote: "Without a doubt, algorithms will play a vital and growing role in health care. However, while they may soon become superhuman at performing certain tasks, algorithms do not have the general intelligence that people do, nor the ability to empathize with patients. It’s this unique combination that enables us, as care professionals, to work together effectively and to draw from clinical and emotional experience to build genuine, healing relationships with our patients. When we’re at our best, this can be powerful medicine."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/doctors-replaced-algorithms-lloyd-minor

Ci siamo, è arrivata la GDPR...

Li chiamano i "divorzi grigi", sono le separazioni di coppie che stanno insieme da venti, trent'anni e sono arrivate alla mezza età. Sono tutti baby-boomers. E dato che le persone di mezz'età stanno aumentando di numero (come il nome della coorte demografica lascia peraltro intendere) oltre che in percentuale (si allunga la vita, aumenta l'educazione delle donne, diminuiscono i nuovi nati) aumentano anche i divorzi grigi.

Per quale motivo accadono? Beh, i motivi sono molto più tradizionali di quel che non si potrebbe pensare, almeno negli Stati Uniti.

Money quote: "For the Baby Boomers I interviewed who grew up during the 1960s, one might guess that most divorces would happen because they were no longer personally fulfilled, but that was generally not the case. While some men and women identified growing apart in interests as the central reason for their split, all of the others, surprisingly, pointed to reasons related to violations of binding responsibilities that they felt were the key foundations of a healthy marriage.

For example, for men and women such as Kathy, physical infidelity proved damning for their relationships. Men and women were also similar in pointing to their partners’ mental-health problems as causing their divorces.

But also interestingly, this is where the similarities ended for men and women."

https://aeon.co/ideas/baby-boomers-are-divorcing-for-surprisingly-old-fashioned-reasons