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

localghost: 127.0.0.o.o.o.O.O.o.o.0.1

Pensavate che la depressione fosse il male del nostro tempo, soprattutto se siete persone ragionevoli che votano a sinistra e rispettano l’ambiente. E invece c’è di peggio: ecco a voi l’accidia: demone medievale (i monaci che vivevano sulle colonne nel deserto ben la conoscevano) che si aggira ancora tra di noi.

Money quote: ““The demon of acedia — also called the noonday demon — is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all…He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and…he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.”

Many of the desert monks found themselves in the same place as my friend. Work in the morning, but by noon, they despised the repetitive nature of chores or work. After some time in this condition, they felt little zeal for life. Prayer stopped, sleeping increased, and they felt numb. Eventually, they despised life itself as they spiraled into a dark hole.”

https://blog.heartsupport.com/you-might-not-actually-be-struggling-with-depression-8ce57ab41f66

Fenomenologia della vita e metafisica di Hemingway. Non necessariamente in quest’ordine.

Money quote: “My point in showing this part of Hemingway’s process isn’t just to definitively disprove the myth — partly of Hemingway’s own making — that great writing is something that flows intuitively from the brain of a genius (no, great writing is a slow, painstaking process, even for geniuses). My point is to give some perspective on one of Hemingway’s most profound insights, one that he, considering his tragic suicide some 32 years later, struggled to fully integrate into his life.

The world is a cruel and harsh place”

https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-recover-when-the-world-breaks-you-94a423b7586d

Storytelling come se non ci fosse un domani

Money quote: “Essentially, when you start telling a story, your reader’s brain snaps to attention and becomes re-engaged in your writing. The more detailed and denoscriptive the language you use, the better.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-strengthen-your-writing-with-one-simple-technique-37ab13eaf83c

Abbiamo un problema anche con le banane: rischio estinzione. Mai un gioia, eh.

Money quote: “However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture”

https://aeon.co/ideas/bananas-nearly-went-extinct-before-dont-let-it-happen-again

Gli Electric Scooter dell’articolo sono i monopattini elettrici. Avevo già condiviso una storia qualche settimana fa sul servizio di sharing Birdie o come si chiama. Attenzione, secondo me questa diventa una cosa seria (da noi, norme sull’utilizzo nel codice della strada permettendo).

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/561440/

Internet è un posto strano. Anche il mondo analogico lo è, solo che l’accesso e lo storytelling nella realtà degli atomi hanno una frizione maggiore di quella dei bit. Il combinato disposto del digitale è veramente singolare, almeno rispetto all’esperienza di un maschio bianco nato in Italia quando i bit erano pochi e grossi come mosconi che li potevi quasi vedere a occhio nudo. (In questo frangente, è proprio il caso di dirlo)

Money quote: “This isn’t your garden-variety revenge porn story. I wish a disgruntled ex had posted a video of me masturbating on the internet. That would be easier to explain. But this is more deviant. More shameful.”

https://medium.com/s/darkish-web/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-make-peace-with-my-revenge-porn-b47a164eee59

Questa persona è semplicemente folle. Ma lucida, eh.

Money quote: “This practice became my new UI. As soon as I started using it, everything changed: this system prompts me to set goals and track my progress, and broadens my perspective of the overall process. At the same time, it turns my emotions into fuel, giving me motivation, aesthetic pleasure and fun”

https://betterhumans.coach.me/draft-how-to-hack-your-brain-to-achieve-consistency-that-lasts-7f5fdc520d28

Compare il porno in Super Mario Odyssey, lo racconta Polygon

Money quote: “DevMenu appears to have been leaked to the public after a member of the Switch hacking community purchased a developer kit on eBay. A poster on the Switch Haxing subreddit and GBAtemp forums said they bought a “defective” Switch from a seller, which turned out to be an EDEV unit — a console intended for software developers. The buyer has since deleted their original Reddit post in which they asked what they should do with it; multiple posters suggested sending it or dumping its software data so homebrew developers and hackers could study it. It appears that shortly afterward, a torrent containing the EDEV unit’s data was uploaded to an anonymous storage service”

https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/6/22/17494552/nintendo-switch-hack-super-mario-odyssey-luigis-balloon-world

Lui era orrendo prima ed è orrendo adesso. Però adesso ha una nuova consapevolezza: così, in questo modo, potrebbe fondare il “culto degli orrendi” senza problema. Secondo me c’è gente che lo seguirebbe.

Money quote: “My appearance no longer controls me because I’m in control of my life. I’ve changed the way I think not the way I appear. This has led to happiness rather than the appearance game that can never be won.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-not-let-your-appearance-control-your-life-1d8ddad85bf9

Una nota a margine: ma sono io che sto andando in burnout di letture su Medium oppure questi scrivono tutti uguali? Frasi corte e sincopate, argomentazioni meccaniche da terza media, ripetizione di concetti a blocchi per rafforzare i blocchi precedenti. Boh.

Storia di un pallone da calcio che è l’unico sopravvissuto all’esplosione dello shuttle Challenger e poi è tornato nello spazio, della sua famiglia di origine e di un tremendo e drammatico incidente che è rimasto come una luce troppo brillante guardata troppo a lungo inciso per sempre nella retina di una generazione.

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/23902766/nasa-astronaut-ellison-onizuka-soccer-ball-survived-challenger-explosion

👣 Da militanti ad attivisti: come cambia il volontariato

Scrive Stefano Laffi su Che Fare: “C’è una dimensione politica intatta, ovvero l’urgenza di cambiare in meglio qualcosa nel mondo, e di attivisti continuano ad essercene. Buon segno, vuol dire che non si è persa la speranza, che le persone continuano a sognare”.

Ma "Se il volontariato diventa l’occasione per fare esperienza, cambia tutto: saltano le appartenenze, le adesioni morali e ideali, perché a quel punto vale la pena provare un po’ tutto; saltano le fedeltà pluriennali, i tempi lunghi, a favore delle stagioni, del mordi e fuggi, cioè di una strategie di sperimentazioni di sé per il tempo necessario a capire."

Lo scriveva anche Beth Kanter nel suo The Networked Non Profit, nel 2010: “Millennials are passionate about causes, but non passionate about non profit organizations”.

Per approfondire: https://www.che-fare.com/volontariato-militanza-attivismo/

Sorpresa: abbiamo aggiornato la nostra piattaforma e il nostro aspetto. Per offrirvi un sito più vivace, più veloce e visivamente ancora più pimpante. Buona nuova Fumettologica:

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/fumettologica-sito-grafica/

Era ovvio che dovesse succedere. Manovalanza al posto di algoritmi, perché non sempre il computer funziona e comunque alcune cose si fa prima (e costa meno) farle a mano. La domanda però è un’altra: in questi casi c’è davvero valore? Perché le startup si giudicano da quello...

Money quote: “It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans”

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies

A me non piace il calcio né la cultura che ha costruito attorno a sé. Ma una storia come questa non è legata tanto al tipo di ascensore sociale da prendere: la chiave ovviamente non è quella. Il calcio era il frutto maturo che pendeva più in basso tra le fronte dell’albero della vita. Per altri magari è un altro frutto velenoso, illegale. Per altri chissà, un altro sogno, un altro frutto. Ma è esemplare il gesto della mano, la sua fermezza, la volontà che c’è dietro, la motivazione e l’azione: quello conta.

Money quote: “I was six years old, and I came home for lunch during our break at school. My mum had the same thing on the menu every single day: Bread and milk. When you’re a kid, you don’t even think about it. But I guess that’s what we could afford.

Then this one day I came home, and I walked into the kitchen, and I saw my mum at the refrigerator with the box of milk, like normal. But this time she was mixing something in with it. She was shaking it all up, you know? I didn’t understand what was going on. Then she brought my lunch over to me, and she was smiling like everything was cool. But I realized right away what was going on.”

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/romelu-lukaku-ive-got-some-things-to-say

Il 2018 è l’anno degli smart speaker - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/08/04/tecnologia/il-lanno-degli-smart-speaker-4WMtA4DV1ie88rovH5wSkJ/premium.html

Storia di Snoo, la mascotte aliena di Reddit. A me fa pensare a quelle cose strane ma istantaneamente simpatiche che sembrano facili ma sono in realtà molto complesse e fenomenali.

Money quote: “This creative canvas was, in some ways, illustrative of the early web, where nobody knew you were a dog. The closest thing to verification on Reddit, even now, is a confirmation that the email attached to your account is real. Anonymity is accepted, even encouraged. You can have multiple accounts, fake accounts, throwaways for posting the kinds of deep, dark musings that absolutely must not, under any circumstances, get traced back to the real you. (I have three usernames: one for lurking, one for reportage, and one for purposes I would never share in print.) Identities are fragmented; each version of you, a new Snoo.”

https://www.wired.com/story/the-transformative-power-of-reddits-alien-mascot/

Se questo fine settimana siete a Mountain View, andare al Computer History Museum perché succedono cose alquanto interessanti. Sennò, immaginatevele a distanza...

Money quote: “The exhibits include everything from floptical disks, a fully restored and operation PDP-11/45, home computers from the UK and Japan, typewriters converted into teletypes, a disintegrated CPU, and LISP machines. The talks are equally spectacular, with a keynote from Tim Paterson, the creator of 86-DOS, the basis of MS-DOS. You’ll also hear about PLATO, the Internet before the Internet, PDP-1 demonstrations, and if we’re lucky they’re going to fire up the ancient IBM 1401”

https://hackaday.com/2018/08/01/this-weekend-the-vintage-computer-festival-west/

Sapete che sono fissato con homebrew. Ma lui è più fissato di me...

Money quote: “I’m using OSX most of the time (you know, developer AND sales, plus being CEO) and this is the noscript I use to update it all the time, can be useful for some…”

https://medium.com/@waxzce/keeping-macos-clean-this-is-my-osx-brew-update-cli-command-6c8f12dc1731

Altri convertiti sulla via dell’iPad. Arrivano dopo ma arrivano bene, direi

Money quote: “I recently traded in my trusty iPad 2 against a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Not only has it become my primary work device, on many days I don’t turn on my laptop at all”

https://medium.com/@mrstevegold/the-year-was-2011-a708b7c76a17