Uso Scrivener fin dal principio per scrivere libri e altre cose. Mai pensato di usarlo per bloggare. Ma c’è chi lo fa. Interessante.

Money quote: “I used Word files to organize my blog posts for a long time. Why? I have no idea. I thought about using Scrivener, but I didn’t want to take the time to switch my files over and start a new system.

Don’t be like me.

Switch to Scrivener now”

https://www.victoriagriffin.net/blog/scrivener-for-blogging

The end of web is near

Money quote: “That's why the wonder of the web is that it is not subject to the whims of chaotic corporate management. Now, I suppose at some point it will be owned, and then after that it will be shut down. That's how we lose huge amounts of IP, open stuff, non-corporate stuff.”

http://noscripting.com/2018/06/12/140329.html

Un ragionamento prezioso sul senso del lavoro al nostro tempo.

Money quote: “In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them”

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom

Plasma, quarto sconosciuto. Un articolo sul mio stato della materia preferito.

Money quote: “Plasma physics is a rich and diverse field of enquiry, with its own special twist. In some areas of science, intellectual vitality comes from the beauty of grand theories and the search for deep underlying laws – as shown by Albert Einstein’s account of gravity in general relativity, or string theorists’ attempt to replace the Standard Model of subatomic particles with tiny oscillating strands of energy. The study of plasmas also enjoys some remarkably elegant mathematical constructions, but unlike its scientific cousins, it’s mostly been driven by its applications to the real world.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/plasma-the-mysterious-and-powerful-fourth-phase-of-matter

Scrivener è una perla, ma è lontano dal mondo open. Oppure no? Un complesso ma non impossibile dialogo con Pandoc

https://github.com/iandol/scrivomatic/blob/master/README.md#introduction

Storie di gelati, torte e sale per signore come parte di una rivoluzione culturale e sociale per il ruolo e l’autonomia delle donne a cavallo tra otto e novecento. La rivoluzione passa anche così, da là.

Money quote: “Throughout the 19th century, restaurants catered to a predominately male clientele. Much like taverns and gentlemen’s clubs, they were places where men went to socialize, discuss business, and otherwise escape the responsibilities of work and home. It was considered inappropriate for women to dine alone, and those who did were assumed to be prostitutes. Given this association, unescorted women were banned from most high-end restaurants and generally did not patronize taverns, chophouses, and other masculine haunts”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-is-it-called-an-ice-cream-parlor

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

Un ragionamento sulla privacy senza parlare di privacy. Fantastico modo di vedere senza guardare.

Money quote: “Even so, we have handed to private companies the power to set and enforce the boundaries of appropriate public speech. That is an enormous cultural power to be held by so few, and it is largely wielded behind closed doors, making it difficult for outsiders to inspect or challenge.

Platforms frequently, and conspicuously, fail to live up to our expectations. In fact, given the enormity of the undertaking, most platforms’ own definition of success includes failing users on a regular basis.”

https://www.wired.com/story/how-social-networks-set-the-limits-of-what-we-can-say-online/

Jimmy Carter probabilmente non è stato uno dei più efficaci presidenti degli Stati Uniti. Ma tra tutti gli ex ha un carisma e uno spirito straordinari. Ritratto fantastico, un altro articolo notevole di GQ.

Money quote: “About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world's not going to end. Not just yet. Though he's elfin with age, you'd still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.”

https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-carter-for-higher-office

Emacs, che io non uso, appartiene alla centralità del software open e anche alla centralità del software in generale, per come è costruito. La sua storia e affascinante.

Money quote: “Someone posted a chapter from Sam Williams’ book Free as in Freedom (online here), that discusses the early history of Emacs. The chapter, The Emacs Commune, is full of things I didn’t know about how Emacs evolved from the TECO editor”

http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7308

Darsi agli acidi: è l’unica risorsa.

Money quote: “It’s 7 a.m. on the U-Bahn. Eyes still puffy from the night before. A woman slowly nibbles her morning brötchen while staring into the static on the broken TV above. Everyone is silent. And in this crowd of straight faces, there I am, grinning like an idiot.

Why? I have a little secret. There’s acid under my tongue.”

https://medium.com/s/story/the-mental-and-metaphysical-effects-of-microdosing-lsd-72819896215d

Sono critico nei confronti degli uffici open space (open office plan, in inglese) a prescindere da chi li organizza. Soprattutto, non li tollero quando lo spazio personale diventa virtuale e l’ufficio viene gestito in modalità provvisoria istituzionalizzata. Ogni mattina si cerca lo spazio dove lavorare e il posto di lavoro diventa l’armadietto.

Adesso ci sono anche delle valutazioni empiriche a supporto del mio stato d’animo.

Money quote: “Knowing that others are watching us limits the degree to which we might creatively solve a problem, and therefore be more productive, according to a study he conducted with factory workers. ‘Do I look busy?’ becomes more important than ‘Am I doing my best work?’”

https://work.qz.com/1322146/a-harvard-business-school-study-found-open-plan-offices-have-a-surprising-effect-on-our-collective-intelligence/

Il gusto per l’Art Deco è forse ancora più strano di questo stile eclettico e trasversale, nato in laboratorio (per l’esposizione universale di Parigi del 1925), diventato il precursore del modernismo (nonché un elemento di base del nostro razionalismo) e poi rivalutato negli anni sessanta e in seconda volta negli anni ottanta.

Moda, design, tessuto, materiali (il legno laccato!) arte povera e arte africana. Mi piace, ne ho letto tanto e visto anche un bel po’ (dal Radio City Hall di New York al concomitante Chrysler building), lo mangio con gli occhi. Ma l’idea che Bombey (Mumbay) sia la seconda città al mondo per architettura in stile e con gusto Art Deco mi intriga e intristisce al tempo stesso. Già. Chissà.

Money quote: “But in Mumbai, believed to host the world’s second-largest collection of Art Deco buildings, such interest is hard to find. Tourists tend to focus on established landmarks, such as the Gateway of India, while residents, some of whom even live in Art Deco apartments, are hardly aware of their historical significance. Besides, in a city starved for space, conservation efforts haven’t always been able to save these heritage structures from damaging restoration or repair work, or even outright demolition”

https://qz.com/1014414/mumbai-has-the-worlds-second-largest-collection-of-art-deco-buildings-but-no-one-notices-them/amp/

Questo articolo di Aeon è fenomenale. Più del solito. Tratta due argomenti che adoro, la cultura hacker e la gentrificazione. E li incrocia in modo magistrale. Se potessi prendermi qualche anno per scrivere un libro, magari un dottorato, questo sarebbe esattamente uno dei pochissimi argomenti che vorrei seguire.

Money quote: “This is not just about property. In cosmetics shops on Oxford Street in London you can find beauty products blazoned with pagan earth-mother imagery. Why are symbols of earth-worship found within the citadels of consumerism, printed on products designed to neutralise and control bodily processes? They’ve been gentrified. Pockets of actual paganism do still exist, but in the mainstream such imagery has been thoroughly cleansed of any subversive context.

At the frontiers of gentrification are entire ways of being – lifestyles, subcultures and outlooks that carry rebellious impulses. Rap culture is a case in point: from its ghetto roots, it has crossed over to become a safe ‘thing that white people like’. Gentrification is an enabler of doublethink, a means by which people in positions of relative power can, without contradiction, embrace practices that were formed in resistance to the very things they themselves represent.

We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture”

https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos

Altro che dinosauri. Cloniamo cani da salotto in Corea del Sud.

Money quote: “Then, last March, Barbra Streisand came out as a cloner. In an interview with Variety, the singer let slip that her two Coton de Tulear puppies, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, are actually clones of her beloved dog Samantha, who died last year. The puppies, she said, were cloned from cells taken from “Sammie’s” mouth and stomach by ViaGen Pets, a pet-cloning company based in Texas that charges $50,000 for the service. “I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way,” Streisand explained in a New York Times opinion piece, after the news provoked an outcry from animal-rights advocates. “It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew that I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA.””

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/08/dog-cloning-animal-sooam-hwang

Qui si parla di Tokyo, di lunghe code e di ramen. Cosa volete di più?

Money quote: “Leah and I were at Fuunji to eat tsukemen, the specialty of the tiny restaurant. The place is presided over by a wiry ramen master rocking a blond, boy-band coif, who dances around behind the counter, boiling and draining and plating his food with the percussive flamboyance of a flair bartender. Tsukemen is a type of ramen in which the cold, cooked noodles are served separately, on a plate, with a bowl of broth on the side—a dish meant to be eaten with precision, in deliberately constructed bites of noodles dipped in the broth, then slurped up”

https://www.afar.com/magazine/tokyos-long-lines-lead-to-magic-and-life-changing-ramen

​​La mia estate low-tech con la banana gialla: il Nokia 8110...

Elogio della moderazione, una virtù che abbiamo perso da tempo. Anzi, direi che abbiamo smarrito il concetto stesso che sta alla base dell’idea di moderazione.

Money quote: “What did the ancients think about all this? For one thing, they didn’t share our present skepticism toward moderation. On the contrary, they praised it and thought that the alleged ‘barbarians’ were also incapable of moderation, that is, of following a rational middle course. If classical authors agreed on the importance of moderation, they also insisted that it is not an easy virtue. Tacitus called it, in fact, ‘the most difficult lesson of wisdom’, while Horace linked moderation to the golden mean and balance, all good things in his view, but difficult to achieve in practice. Plato highlighted both the importance and difficulty of moderation in The Republic, where he defined it as the virtue that allows us to control or temper our passions, emotions and desires”

https://aeon.co/ideas/moderation-may-be-the-most-challenging-and-rewarding-virtue

Ma quelli che stanno assieme per decenni, andando ben oltre la fase romantica ed erotica dell’amore, come fanno? Forse chissà, c’è una spiegazione (sono abbastanza vecchio perché mi sfugga?)

Money quote: “I must admit that these findings puzzled me. Are we actually victims of romantic ideology? Should we cease striving for true love or hold out until a soul mate appears? In our modern times, these questions do not have an easy answer. After all, it is painfully hard to fulfil the romantic ideal while staying inside our culture’s boundaries and social norms; only dead fish swim with the stream”

https://aeon.co/essays/how-can-romantic-love-last-a-lifetime

Ammettiamolo, le città sono la nostra vera ossessione. La prova che siamo diversi da come veramente siamo. Il nostro stato di natura interiore, quello che alcuni chiamano inconscio, ci travolge e configge con l’intelligenza razionale dell’uomo debole ma coraggioso e civilizzato.

Quel che stiamo scoprendo però è che il processo che ha portato alla creazione dell’uomo che vive in città, e quindi della città stessa, è meno lineare, più lungo e più ramificato del previsto e dell’immaginato.

Money quote: “According to Scott, we know that “our ancestors did not run headlong” into the civilized life for a few reasons. First, archaeological research shows that sedentary populations existed in Mesopotamia as far back as 12,000 BCE. But it took until around 3,100 BCE before the very first stratified, tax-collecting states popped up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.
This massive lag proves that, once settled, cities didn’t naturally flourish as Civilization VI indicates. The collapse of ancient settlements was actually very common. Fatal disease spread rapidly in these settings, brought about by the cohabitation of animals and people. Add in the potential for crop failures, taxes, and getting sent away to fight a war for some grain-rich despot and you’ve got some legitimate concerns about abandoning your “primitive” life to hop on the human progress train.”

https://civicskunk.works/why-did-we-start-living-in-cities-5d3e21d5b28c

Quando l’estetica ti mangia dentro. La sfortunata scelta nel mondo tecnologico del blu come colore dell’interfaccia luminosa e le sue orribili conseguenze.

Money quote: “The bright blue light of flat, rectangular touch screens, fans, and displays may be appealing from an aesthetic perspective (more on that below), but from a health standpoint, it is fraught with problems. Blue light inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep cycles. Blue light before bedtime can wreak havoc on our ability to fall asleep”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90177573/how-blue-became-techs-favorite-color-and-why-it-shouldnt-be