Qui secondo me finisce male...

Money quote: “According to a pool report, President Trump responded by pointing to a window in the White House residence, and said: “She’s doing great. She’s looking at us right there.”

Reporters turned to look at the spot he indicated, but there was no sign of the first lady.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-says-the-first-lady-is-doing-great-she-hasnt-been-seen-in-public-for-two-weeks/2018/05/25/b9107c60-5f97-11e8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html

Elon Musk vuole aggiustare il giornalismo con la nuova Pravda. Sito web in cui i lettori votano gli articoli.

Vox riflette sul problema che solleva Musk.

Money quote: “The implication of his post appears to be that journalists are shaping their content in order to cater to advertisers, which … isn’t really how journalism works. Sure, publications rely on advertising dollars as a funding source — but journalists themselves aren’t in charge of getting that money or catering content to advertisers.

Plenty of journalists have spoken out saying as much.”

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2018/5/24/17389388/elon-musk-twitter-pravda

Commoventi foto di piccoli, piccoli treni tedeschi

Money quote: “The island of Nordstrandischmoor is connected to mainland Germany by a tiny narrow gauge railway, on which residents (at least those 15 years of age and older and holding a moped license) can drive private trains back and forth to and from Lüttmoorsiel. Each island house has its own wagon — some used to be wind-powered, using sails, but today they run on diesel.”

https://weburbanist.com/2018/05/08/tiny-trains-neat-narrow-gauge-rail-connects-german-island-to-mainland

Se siete anche voi persi dentro Westworkd, questa timeline è una mano santa

Money quote: "To help "Westworld" fans better understand the events that have led up to the current season, INSIDER has put together a chronological timeline."

http://www.thisisinsider.com/westworld-timeline-spoilers-2018-4

Non seguo il calcio, ma se lo dovessi seguire, terrei d'occhio questa previsione automatica di chi vincerà...

Le valutazioni quantitative sono una cosa molto, molto brutta.

Money quote: “Contrary to commonsense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Osama bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, the productivity of those analysts would have been zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 per cent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of the superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not pan out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks.“

https://aeon.co/ideas/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires

La verità ha un suo luogo fisico? Per molto tempo, sì, l'ha avuto. Ma il rapporto tra verità e spazio è molto più sottile e articolato di quanto non si possa credere. Alle volte la difficoltà del viaggio per arrivare al posto in cui ha sede la verità la rende più forte, altre volte l'avvicinarsi della verità ai posti dove vive la gente la rende più democratica.

Money quote: "We ought not to forget possibly the most important lesson from the Oracle at Delphi. After a thousand years as the mythic centre of the universe, a spot where mortals once connected with the gods and received credible prophecies about the future, the sanctuary at Delphi vanished from the side of Mt Parnassus. Starting after the fourth century AD, stones previously used to hold up sacred temples and treasuries were refashioned by local residents to build mundane houses and shops in a place they called Kastri – largely oblivious to the oracular history of the site. Only in the 19th century did archaeologists rediscover the location where the legendary activities of Delphi had taken place. No truth-spot is forever (but some are more fleeting than others)."

https://aeon.co/essays/labs-courts-and-altars-are-also-traveling-truth-spots

La fantastica parabola di Vice. Ottima lettura

Money quote: "Vice employees like to divide the company’s history into Old Vice and New Vice, with the only disagreement being the precise moment of the shift. If an investment from Rupert Murdoch hadn’t buried Vice’s claim to countercultural cachet, a year later, the company received $250 million from TCV, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, and another $250 million from A&E, which is jointly owned by Disney and Hearst. The investment valued Vice at $2.5 billion. “We were like, Whoa! What are we doing that’s worth that much money?” remembers one former editorial employee. “There was also this moment of realization: I have just built this really valuable brand, and I’m making like $32,000.”"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-shane-smith.html

Un'altra teoria su come sia nato (e a che cosa serve da un punto di vista evoluzionistico) il linguaggio umano.

Money quote: "Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/

Siamo liberi di credere quel che vogliamo? No, decisamente no. Non è una posizione moralmente ed eticamente sostenibile.

Money quote: "But belief is not knowledge.

Beliefs are factive: to believe is to take to be true. It would be absurd, as the analytic philosopher G E Moore observed in the 1940s, to say: ‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining.’ Beliefs aspire to truth – but they do not entail it. Beliefs can be false, unwarranted by evidence or reasoned consideration. They can also be morally repugnant. Among likely candidates: beliefs that are sexist, racist or homophobic; the belief that proper upbringing of a child requires ‘breaking the will’ and severe corporal punishment; the belief that the elderly should routinely be euthanised; the belief that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a political solution, and so on. If we find these morally wrong, we condemn not only the potential acts that spring from such beliefs, but the content of the belief itself, the act of believing it, and thus the believer."

https://aeon.co/ideas/you-dont-have-a-right-to-believe-whatever-you-want-to

Il trucchetto con cui, a quanto pare, Amazon tira avanti i suoi centri di logistica (lo segnalo da cliente Prime super-soddisfatto, casomai più infastidito degli spedizionieri che fanno l'ultimo pezzo, BRT e gli altri).

Money quote: "When a Fulfillment Center opens, the expectation is that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,200 positions will become available overnight, each providing 40 hours of work per week at a minimum. In reality, the labor hours Amazon needs to power its brutally efficient supply chain appear to be far fewer. To reduce overhead but continue to sop up performance-based incentives from the local governments it operates in, Amazon has become increasingly reliant on a work scheduling scheme that often coerces workers into leaving their shifts early or turns them away at the door without notice."

https://gizmodo.com/on-amazon-s-time-1826570882

Come si fanno gli scoop. La storia di un giornalista che ha affondato un Unicorno, una startup da dieci miliardi di dollari di valutazione.

Money quote: "Several people who have worked at Rupert Murdoch papers have told me that he isn’t above interceding in editorial matters, but in this case, despite his personal interest, he didn’t. A source who has known Murdoch for years explained it, “He’s a newsman — and a good story is a good story no matter what or who the story is about.”"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/john-carreyrous-new-book-on-silicon-valley-bad-blood.html

Oggi, a 30 anni dalla morte, raccontiamo la rocambolesca, bellissima e molto poco conosciuta storia di come Andrea Pazienza evitò il servizio militare:

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/06/andrea-pazienza-militare/

Rosarium, l’app tutta italiana per recitare il Rosario con Apple Watch https://www.macitynet.it/rosarium-lapp-tutta-italiana-per-recitare-il-rosario-con-apple-watch/

Ridefinire il termine "stalking" per applicarlo alla ricerca di un lavoro: usare la profilazione dei social per una campagna Facebook di auto-promozione su misura, mirata a un'unica persona: l'amministratore delegato della società in cui ci si vuole far assumere, cioè Reddit... e ha pure funzionato!

Money quote: "I wanted to work at Reddit. Well, not just work at Reddit, but develop something very cool at Reddit that I think can make a huge impact on the business. So I wrote about it. I knew that the CEO of Reddit was a technical founder, so I put quite a deal of effort into that blog entry to try to impress him. Now, how to get him to see it?"

http://twicsy-blog.tumblr.com/post/174063770074/how-i-targeted-the-reddit-ceo-with-facebook-ads-to

I pubblicitari una volta erano chiamati Mad Men (vi ricordate la serie televisiva, vero?). Oggi a dominare sono i Math Men, quelli che sanno bene la matematica: i ragazzini di Google e Facebook. Il New Yorker, nonostante sia nato come rivista satirica colta e specializzata in cose culturali e letterarie, come sempre tira delle zampate che graffiano molto anche in altri settori.

Money quote: "The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America’s newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/how-the-math-men-overthrew-the-mad-men

Il posto dove seppelliscono (o mettono a dormire per un po') gli aerei di linea, per poi magari cannibalizzarli anche.

Money quote: "Just a few years ago, only about 50 percent of a plane could be recycled; now, following the most up-to-date recycling standards, a facility like the one in Tupelo can find a way to re-use around 85 percent of a plane. It takes a few weeks to break down a plane, and the parking lot for doomed planes is relatively small."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-do-old-airplanes-go

Viaggiando abbastanza spesso (e non solo per questo, temo: comumque sto andando negli Stati Uniti...) sono abbastanza ossessionato dal bagaglio. Soprattutto dal bagaglio a mano. Non dico che per rilassarmi vado a guardarmi i video su Kickstarter delle nuove valigie, borse e borsone, ma insomma, forse ogni tanto lo faccio... Comunque, da tempi a giro si vede questo trolley da cabina, cioè bagaglio che si può portare a bordo senza doverlo imbarcare, dalla forma strana e soprattutto dalle enormi e sottilissime ruote. Si chiama G-ro ed ha una storia molto interessante, oltre a un prezzo per me purtroppo proibitivo, giustificato però da una qualità del prodotto che è anche un attributo necessario se si viaggia molto: quando compri una valigia essenzialmente ottieni quel che paghi (e le cose che paghi molto poco durano pochissimo). Qui una recensione del G-ro:

Money quote: "The version of the bag I tested feels like it can take a beating. With a combination of carbon fiber, Cordura ballistic nylon, and mold-injected plastic polymers, G-RO claims the bag is water resistant and virtually crush-proof. The bag also includes a Tile bluetooth tracker— you can upgrade to a true GPS tracker built by G-RO — and features a built-in TSA-approved lock to secure the office and main compartments.

Both versions of the bag are pricey — the original ballistic nylon version is $449, while the carbon fiber version is $699 — but the build quality means they can be seen as an investment. The wheels are guaranteed for life, and the bag itself is sturdy and efficient."

http://www.businessinsider.com/g-ro-carry-on-luggage-review-2018-3

Donald Trump e il rapporto (malsano) che ha costruito con il conduttore radiofonico dlela Fox, Sean Hannity.

Money quote: "Senior staffers worried about this pattern of behavior: By the time his day was formally under way with the daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office — scheduled as late as 11 a.m. — the whole world was often thrown off course, wondering whether there were “tapes” of his conversations with a fired FBI director (May 12, 2017, 8:26 a.m.) or if a TV host had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at Mar-a-Lago (June 29, 2017, 8:58 a.m.)."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/sean-hannity-donald-trump-late-night-calls.html