La drammatica e traumatica bellezza dei grandi monumenti e delle grandi opere mentre vengono costruite

Money quote: "The construction of great landmarks is often thought of in terms of statistics—how high, how big, how wide—or hyperbole: the tallest, the longest, the most amount of concrete. But there’s always more to the story than just figures. Many landmarks are built under clouds of controversy. In February 1887, just after construction began on the Eiffel Tower, a group of artists and writers published a letter in Le Temps newspaper, “Protest Against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel,” proclaiming their distaste for what they called a “stupefying folly.” A more humorously cutting criticism came from the French writer Léon Bloy, who called the tower a “truly tragic street lamp.”"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/landmarks-under-construction

Instapaper è tornata indipendente (è uscita da Pinterest e se la sono ricomprata i suoi creatori). E ha tagliato via l'Europa...

Money quote: "Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information."

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/16/instapaper-unpinned/

Huawei: nel 2018 venderemo 200 milioni di telefonini e supereremo Apple - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/07/26/tecnologia/huawei-nel-venderemo-milioni-di-telefonini-e-supereremo-apple-ZhM4Pzofek7YwOzMe3nUiK/pagina.html

Si può argomentare tutto, per carità. Ma sostenere che oggi la gente non risponda più al telefono, e farlo portando se stessi come esempio, mi sembra un po' eccessivo anche per uno spirito aperto al mondo.

Money quote: "No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/ring-ring-ring-ring/561545/

Volete partecipare al programma di protezione super avanzata del vostro account con Google? Se rientrate nelle categorie giuste, potreste farcela (ma in generale, secondo me è possibile: casomai fatemi sapere). In pratica, vi danno il generatore di codici "fisico", la chiavetta della banca, e vi blindano le app.

Money quote: "Il programma di protezione avanzata tutela gli account Google personali di figure professionali come giornalisti, leader aziendali e candidati politici che sono ritenuti maggiormente a rischio di attacchi mirati."

https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

Sono praticamente degli Ape e degli Ape Poker a motore elettrico. Ma in Germania stanno diventando una cosa notevole. E ne producono sempre di più.

Money quote: "The WORK and WORK L StreetScooter models have been available to external customers since summer 2017. Industries that have a need for customized electric vans include - in addition to municipalities and craft workshops - energy suppliers, waste disposal companies, airports, facility management enterprises, and catering companies. StreetScooter will produce variants tailored to serve a variety of individual needs with such features as variable loading volumes that include power supply, refrigerated containers, and tilting load platforms.

StreetScooters have been being deployed successively in Deutsche Post DHL's delivery fleet since 2013. At present, the Group is already using around 6,000 of these electric vehicles, which have covered over 26 million kilometers and save around 20,000 tons of CO2 per year. With these vans and the 12,000 or so electric e-bikes and e-trikes, Deutsche Post DHL is operating the biggest electric fleet in Germany."

http://www.dpdhl.com/en/media_relations/press_releases/2018/streetscooter_opens_second_manufacturing_facility_dueren.html

Ritrovare e studiare i font che hanno fatto la storia: ecco "Chicago" del Macintosh originale

Money quote: "I’m a huge fan of Susan Kare’s Chicago bitmap typeface. If you’re older than about 25, you know it as the Macintosh system font from the 1980s into the 1990s, or from its encore run on the little screens of the early iPods. But its celebrity obscures solid craft. It’s hard for small bitmap letters to project a unique and coherent personality, but Chicago does it: a high-contrast sans serif with a handful of key flourishes creating a friendly affect. It looks like this:"

https://medium.com/@bzotto/hidden-sheep-and-mac-typography-archaeology-efce770da76c

Avete presente la pioggia di email che chiedevano il rinnovo esplicito o implicito del vostro consenso al trattamento dei vostri dati personali ai sensi della GDPR? Erano frutto dell'ignoranza, della paura o di cattivi suggerimenti legali. E potrebbero pure portare a multe perché denotano una condotta illegale.

Money quote: "Like Vitale, Wood emphasised that asking for marketing consent from people who had not given it initially could be illegal. “It’s also important to remember that in some cases it may not be appropriate to seek fresh consent if you are unsure how you collected the contact information in the first place, and the consent would not have met the standard under our existing Data Protection Act,” he said."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/21/gdpr-emails-mostly-unnecessary-and-in-some-cases-illegal-say-experts

Non poche polemiche per un bacio dato dal presidente delle Filippine Rodrigo Duterte a una elettrice sul palco di una conferenza di qualche tempo fa. La cosa è meno grafica di quel che più sembrare, ma la parte agghiacciante è la simbologia e il senso di quel che è successo.

Money quote: "Filipino Senator Risa Hontiveros also said President Rodrigo Duterte "acted like a feudal king" after he kissed a married woman in front of 3,000 people in Seoul, South Korea. The woman involved later said that there was "no malice" in the kiss."

https://twitter.com/i/moments/1003716098599084033

Questo presidente degli Stati Uniti si sta dimostrando sempre più strano, veramente atipico, e anche straordinariamente umano e normale nelle sue piccolezze e nella sua totale mancanza di senso dello Stato. Un uomo medio, un perfetto grillino d'Oltreoceano, direi. Chi non simpatizzerebbe con il suo sistema di archiviazione dei documenti, suoi e altrui? E con il lavoro di chi deve recuperare e ricucire il tutto, per preservarlo ai fini della normativa sulla trasparenze e sull'accesso ai documenti pubblici?.

Alla fine, è più umana la mente dell'autocrate che non quella del burocrate. È questo il segreto del suo successo?

Money quote: "It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”"

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164

Fotografare la Luna e i gabbiani con un Game Boy e un obiettivo Canon. Meraviglia.

Money quote: "I took my abomination out for a walk to the beach to shoot some nature and wildlife. (see gallery below.)"

http://ekeler.com/game-boy-camera-canon-ef-mount/

Long read: droni a vela che permettono di andare là dove praticamente nessuno è mai andato prima e scoprire cose che voi umani... Dopotutto gli oceani sono uno degli spazi più misterioso nell'esperienza umana. Altro che cosmo.

Money quote: "“We’re talking about a place that is a long way from anywhere, that few people have ever been to,” Block says. “Then I’m sitting in my office, and the images start to appear of the sharks doing dives in these day and night patterns. What I saw was almost unbelievable.” The sharks appeared to be diving toward a layer of deep ocean teeming with fish, which suggested they came to the Cafe to dine. Block has since set out with a dozen researchers to sail alongside the robotic scouts and learn whether some special kind of food, or perhaps a romantic getaway, helps draw the sharks to the middle of nowhere. “This is one of the largest migrations, one of the largest stories, and we don’t know enough about it or about what goes on in the ocean overall,” she says. “I think this type of technology will help us fill in the gaps at a crucial time for our planet.”"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/this-man-is-building-an-armada-of-saildrones-to-conquer-the-ocean

In 3 mesi in Italia 120 milioni di numeri di cellulare spostati da un operatore ad un altro - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/portabilita-italia/

La bellezza per l’artista e per lo scienziato, secondo Richard Feynman (magari) e soprattutto per il tizio di Medium che ha scritto il suo compitino.

Money quote: “The artist and the scientist both see and appreciate the aesthetically profound, but they don’t always fully experience what the other person experiences when they look at something.”

https://medium.com/personal-growth/richard-feynman-how-to-not-cheat-yourself-out-of-lifes-beauty-e4c70eee3ab

70 videogiochi giapponesi dati per persi ma ritrovati in rete. Mistero. Fortuna! Complotto?

Money quote: “Since its release in 1998, retro gaming fanatics have scoured the web for this game but come up empty. The game has a listing on Amazon Japan where the cover appears, but where it has never been in stock. A May 2014 post on Hardcore Gamer 101 reads “Labyrinthe is completely lost, and begs the question as to whether it was released at all.”“

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3anja/labyrinthe-japanese-game-discovered-on-private-forum

Una bella storia, da ricordare se già la conoscete. Come Susan Kare ha creato le icone del primo Macintosh.

Money quote: ““Andy Herzfeld wrote an icon editor and that let you see magnified what you were working on and also as you turned the bits on and off you could see it real size. It was a huge asset that it automatically generated the hex values because before that I was taught how to look at each group of four pixels and write down each of those hexadecimal numbers. I made this one the bomb really irreverent because I was told ‘nobody will ever see this icon!’””

https://milanote.com/the-work/the-story-behind-susan-kares-iconic-design-work-for-apple

È una idea. Come spesso succede, le idee tendono a diventare piuttosto estreme quando arrivano dopo e sembra che tutto sia già stato detto e inventato. In questo caso però Zerocracy è davvero una cosa singolare...

Money quote: “We believe that most of the above is caused by broken management, not technical incompetence. To solve this, we recommend replacing empowering a human project manager with Zerocrat, a hosted chat bot. To make a project manageable by a computer we use a strict Policy which derives the following principles from the eXtremely Distributed Software Development methodology”
http://www.zerocracy.com/toc.html

Il WSJ racconta un storia interessante, che spiega come mai alle volte cose apparentemente sensate possono essere utilizzate per fare il loro esatto contrario.

Money quote: “As Amazon has cracked down on fake reviews, some sellers are leaving five-star, fake-looking reviews on rival listings so they trigger Amazon’s scam-detecting algorithm and get the rival seller suspended”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sellers-trick-amazon-to-boost-sales-1532750493

Basta la parola: l’Interpol riconosce le persone dalla voce - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/07/30/tecnologia/basta-la-parola-linterpol-riconosce-le-persone-dalla-voce-ut5dSwrwgBP3Xo0oUtBM8N/pagina.html

Le etichette mentali ci fanno semplificare molte cose. Alcune volte anche troppo. Come in questo caso: quando è che open è davvero open.

Money quote: “"I believe that open source doesn't just mean the code is readable without authorization. It means something much bigger." What do you mean by "open source"? “

https://www.yegor256.com/2018/05/08/open-source-attributes.amp.html

Un’intera letteratura, anzi quel che resta di una letteratura. Codificata con Excel. Anzi, con degli abachi. Anzi, con corde e nodi. Benvenuti tra i misteri poveri degli Inca.

Money quote: “Using locally available materials such as camelid fleece and cotton, the khipukamayuqs (Quechua for ‘knot-makers/animators’) encoded administrative data such as census figures and tax allocation in the twisted strings of these ancient spreadsheets. The Inka bureaucrats used these data to keep tabs on the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas. We have known for about a century that the accounting khipus follow a base-10 knot scheme (imagine an abacus made out of string). However, these quantitative khipus account for only about two-thirds of the samples remaining today. The remaining third of these devices – the so-called narrative khipus – appear to contain encoded non-numerical, narrative information, including names, stories and even ancient philosophies. For those who love puzzles, the narrative khipus are a godsend.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-khipu-code-the-knotty-mystery-of-the-inkas-3d-records