4,5 megabyte in 62.500 schede perforate. USA, 1955.

Sul come si scrive un libro, se a penna o con il computer

Money quote: "Ultimately, you will have to decide the best way for you to write a novel. I’ve experienced both and I will say that I type my novels directly into the computer now."

https://writingcooperative.com/writing-a-novel-longhand-b1e1a0d450e2

Una coppia di comici americani praticamente sconosciuta da noi, "Tim and Eric". Deliranti. Bellissimi. Da cercare, dopo aver letto l'intervista.

Money quote: "A show filled with hair snacks and too-tight shorts may not sound all that hilarious on the page. Off the page, maybe even less so. But the secret to Tim and Eric’s comedy is in the details. It’s not so much what their characters are saying, but the vacant look in their eyes, the extended silences, their clumsy attempts at sincerity. Even at its most bizarre, there’s something very human about Awesome Show’s cast of eccentrics and weirdos. There’s a frailty behind the madness that only becomes more evident the closer you dare look."

https://www.believermag.com/issues/200809/?read=interview_tim_and_eric

Facile facile, un giochino per rilassarsi. Sì, sì...

Money quote: "3 o'clock is the strange puzzle game where you try to figure out who or what killed the Canderwalt family. This game will take you through a 15 minute journey in the house where it happened. You will be able to point and click through the entire story, but there's a catch! You must uncover what happened by doing the crime yourself! Will you be able to solve the mystery?"

http://www.mind-circus.org

Apple prepara Star, l’ibrido Mac-iPad Pro - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/05/30/tecnologia/apple-prepara-star-librido-macipad-pro-0licpgZ45L9KSD5rLmvY2I/amphtml/pagina.amp.html

La storia di Anna Delvey, l’influencer miliardaria che stregò vip, potenti, multimiliardari e mezza Manhattan distraendo tutti spostando sempre gli stessi pochi soldi come in un gioco delle tre carte, riuscendo così per qualche anno a pranzare nei migliori ristoranti e dormire nei migliori hotel, raccontata da un lungo pezzo del New York Magazine da non perdere.

Link: http://bit.ly/2L3oeWc

Questo tizio odia Slack. E non solo

Money quote:
"trello & jira
Are also things I hate."

https://abe-winter.github.io/plea%27s/help/2018/02/11/slack.html

GDPR

In Papua Nuova Guinea sono usciti da Facebook tutti insieme (per un mese). Me lo segnala il poeta residente R.R.Corsi.

Money quote: "The government aims to use the month-long ban to analyse how Facebook is being used and prosecute those breaching the country's 2016 cyber-crime law.

Mr Basil told the country's Post-Courier: "The time will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images, users that post false and misleading information.""

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44290012?SThisFB

È uno di quegli articoli geniali e idioti al tempo stesso. Ma tutta la categoria dell'auto-aiuto è costruita così: acqua fresca e gocce di limone. Ti fregano con il limone, ma poi ti vendono sostanzialmente acqua fresca.

In particolare, i suggerimenti su come leggere un libro al giorno - ma poi perché leggere un libro al giorno? - vanno dall'idiota al geniale. Come da premessa, insomma.

Money quote: "Don’t start your reading marathon with a caffeinated beverage, unless you absolutely feel like you must. Save it for when you really start to drag and need a pick me up. It’s like a race in the “critically-acclaimed” film The Fast and the Furious: if you hit the nitrous too early, you’ll crash and you won’t win this race."

Money quote: "Naps vs. Coffee: Which Is Better When You're Exhausted?"

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-read-an-entire-book-in-a-single-day-1749070044

Seneca fra tutti è uno quelli che ha studiato di più la morte, come peraltro ha predicato costantemente. È al centro della vita, fa parte di noi, è oltretutto un punto di arrivo inevitabile e, nel caso dei consiglieri di gente come Caligola, Claudio e Nerone, è meglio abituarsi all'idea che ti possa toccare in qualsiasi momento. (Il Lamphams Quarterly si dimostra ogni numero fatto sempre meglio)

Money quote: "“Study death always,” Seneca counseled his friend Lucilius, and he took his own advice. From what is likely his earliest work, the Consolation to Marcia (written around AD 40), to the magnum opus of his last years (63–65), the Moral Epistles, Seneca returned again and again to this theme. It crops up in the midst of unrelated discussions, as though never far from his mind; a ringing endorsement of rational suicide, for example, intrudes without warning into advice about keeping one’s temper, in On Anger. Examined together, Seneca’s thoughts organize themselves around a few key themes: the universality of death; its importance as life’s final and most defining rite of passage; its part in purely natural cycles and processes; and its ability to liberate us, by freeing souls from bodies or, in the case of suicide, to give us an escape from pain, from the degradation of enslavement, or from cruel kings and tyrants who might otherwise destroy our moral integrity."

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/study-death-always

Argomentando la liceità delle tasse, c'è un commentatore di Aeon che è andato letteralmente fuori di testa

Money quote: "In addressing the question of whether taxation is theft, it is important to distinguish two senses of ‘theft’: legal and moral. In 18th-century North America, it was possible to ‘own’ a slave, in the legal sense of ownership. If someone deprived me of my slave in order to give that slave liberty, then this constituted ‘theft’ in the legal sense. But of course the laws underpinning slavery were morally abhorrent, and hence few these days would class liberating a slave as ‘theft’ in any moral sense. Conversely, we can have cases of moral theft that are not legal theft. The laws of Nazi Germany enabled the authorities to seize the property of Jews who had been deported; although strictly speaking legal, such actions constituted ‘theft’ in a moral sense."

https://aeon.co/essays/if-your-pay-is-not-yours-to-keep-then-neither-is-the-tax

La morte degli album, ancora

Money qoute: "Jeremy Skaller, who produced Jay Sean's No. 1 hit "Down" and is also a manager at The Heavy Group, cites technology as a major factor behind the death of the LP. Thanks to Spotify, Pandora, Google Play and the dozens of other streaming services available, consumers don't have to commit to buying an entire album to hear the tracks that strike their curiosity."

http://toofab.com/2017/09/22/7-reasons-the-album-is-dead-fergie-visual-album-double-duchess-beyonce-lemonade-one-republic/

Gomblotto degli alieni: il nostro cervello cabbllato millenni prima per vedere il montaggio senza esplodere

Money quote: "It would seem that our evolutionary history did very little to prepare us for film cuts – so why don’t our brains explode when we watch movies?"

https://aeon.co/videos/for-millennia-wed-never-seen-anything-like-film-cuts-how-do-we-process-them-so-easily

Apple ha scelto di stare con i cattivi: “Apple non permette a Telegram di aggiornare l'app sul sistema operativo iOS in tutto il mondo da quando le autorità russe hanno ordinato ad Apple di rimuoverlo da App Store", ha denunciato il fondatore Pavel Durov.

Link: http://bit.ly/2J45zsq

Con il Fictional Design i colosso di internet si trasformano in delle specie di Casaleggio d’Oltreoceano.

Money quote: “At the core of speculative design, however, are unsettling visions, in the tradition of Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Blade Runner, or Black Mirror. Speculative dystopia is a tradition that can be traced back 200 years, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but it’s a tradition limited, mostly, to the world of novels and fiction. Speculative designers work a similar vein but do so in the world of designed objects, be they physical or digital.”

https://www.wired.com/story/the-creepy-rise-of-real-companies-spawning-fictional-design

Come riscaldare e rendere più umano il legame debole di una relazione digitale: cartoline automatiche. Un tocco umano reso squisitamente meccanico.

Money quote: “SumAll automates thanking your biggest followers, making your life easier”

https://sumall.com/thankyou

Cosa succede quando gli uomini tradiscono le proprie partner incinte. Perché -uno su dieci- lo fanno (e uno su cinque tradiscono in generale). Questa è la prospettiva post-femminsita.

Money quote: “But we are at our most vulnerable when we are pregnant. No one, other than our partner, wants us in this state of painful engorged breasts, stretch marks, and leaks in all the wrong places. He knows this. He has claimed us and he has no competition. This leaves us susceptible to his acts of sexism and misogyny. What can be more minimizing and belittling than being cheated on by your partner while pregnant?”

https://theestablishment.co/when-men-cheat-on-pregnant-women-c05dd96be736

La matematica infiltra la musica, ma anche la musica influenza la matematica

Money quote: “The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, active during the 6th century BCE, might have been the first to uncover a quantitative relation between music and mathematics. Experimenting with taut strings, he found that shortening the effective length of a string to one-half its original length raises the pitch of its sound by an agreeable interval, an octave. Other ratios of string lengths produce smaller intervals: 2:3 corresponds to the musical interval of a fifth (so called because it is the fifth note up the scale from the base note); 3:4 corresponded to a fourth; and so on. Pythagoras also discovered that multiplying two ratios is equivalent to adding their intervals: (2:3) x (3:4) = 1:2, so a fifth plus a fourth equals an octave. In doing so, he unknowingly came up with the first logarithmic law in history”

https://aeon.co/essays/ringing-the-chords-of-the-universe-how-music-influenced-science

Il potere delle parole è quello di cambiare il nostro modo di percepire, rappresentare e quindi comprendere le cose. Dunque: e se ripensassimo le tecnologie come "instruments" e non come "tools"?

Money quote: “Using the word “instrument” instead of “tool” is a small intervention, but I think it’s an important one. The ideas and images that come to mind when you think of technology as an instrument are more useful than if you think of it as a tool. Instruments — I’m specifically talking about musical instruments — are a way to create culture.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17405998/tech-instrument-tool-metaphor

Un po' di giorni fa Apple ha formalente ritirato dal commercio i suoi router wireless, le basi Airport (che peraltro erano "ferme" da anni). A parte che è stata Apple praticamente da sola, nel 2001, a far partire la rivoluzione senza fili dei computer, va detto anche che le conseguenze sono non di poco momento. Così come la mancanza di visione in questa area.

Money quote: "If Apple wants to get out of the wireless router business — a business they helped kickstart — fine. The problem is that they could have — and I’d argue, should have — been fundamentally changing this business for the better, in a way basically no other company can."

https://500ish.com/errorport-a5c0e8783d04