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

Ha creato il web e adesso soffre a vedere come funziona e viene usato dalle grandi multinazionali digitali e dai governi. Per questo lo vuole rifare. Storia di Tim Berners-Lee e della sua nuova visione del futuro.

Money quote: “This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

L’autrice di questo articolo sul paradosso di Fermi è un personaggio singolare. L’ho incontrata a Las Vegas un po' di tempo fa. Laureata in astrofisica, divulgatrice, personaggio televisivo ma anche campionessa di poker. Sul serio. Fa le gare e le vince (tipo: un paio di milioni di dollari vinti). Risultato? Ti strega e poi ti incanta. Gli alieno? Una bieca scusa per parlare di lei (dal vivo rende molto meglio).

Money quote: “My excitement was short-lived as my mother explained it was a satellite catching the sun as it tumbled along its orbit. I went to bed disappointed: The X-files was on TV twice a week back then, and I very much wanted to believe.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/3/17522810/aliens-fermi-paradox-drake-equation

Block chain come se piovesse. Anche da parte della Borsa Svizzera. L’hype cresce, la bolla si gonfia...

Money quote: “"The first step is to build up a regulated exchange platform. In a second phase we will offer the service to tokenize existing bankable assets which will be followed by the tokenization of non-bankable assets. Following an agile approach to meet the needs of today's dynamic environment, the first services will be rolled out in mid-2019," the company said.”

https://www.coindesk.com/swiss-stock-exchange-to-tokenize-securities-in-new-dlt-platform/

​​Negli aeroporti americani si aggira un anonimo folle genio che attacca adesivi trompe-l’œil: simulano inesistenti prese elettriche. Sta diventando una cosa seria.

40 fumetti da leggere questa estate - la grande ma agile raccolta di consigli di Fumettologica alla quale modestamente ho contribuito anche io

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/estate-fumetti-leggere/

40 fumetti da leggere questa estate, consigliati e commentati dalla redazione e dai collaboratori di Fumettologica, che ne hanno scelti due a testa: una novità pubblicata di recente e un recupero dai loro scaffali.

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/08/estate-fumetti-leggere/

Breve ma significativo articolo che spiega bene non solo l’idea che le popolazioni antiche vivessero più a lungo di quanto solitamente non riteniamo. Ma spiega bene anche i criteri statistici e scientifici per determinare l’aspettativa di vita. Bello.

Money quote: “Studies on extant traditional people who live far away from modern medicines and markets, such as Tanzania’s Hadza or Brazil’s Xilixana Yanomami, have demonstrated that the most likely age at death is far higher than most people assume: it’s about 70 years old. One study found that although there are differences in rates of death in various populations and periods, especially with regards to violence, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again

La Cina digitale in cifre

Money quote: “China has twice as many internet users as the total population of the United States -- and it’s growing fast. This unique collaboration between Abacus, 500 Startups, the South China Morning Post, will break down everything you need to know about China’s thriving tech industry, the big players in each field, and lay out the four overarching trends that have emerged.”

https://www.abacusnews.com/china-internet-report/

La complessità delle cose semplici. Per chi conosce il C e programma, anatomia di printf()

Money quote: "The common questions fit roughly in to two forms:

Easy: How does the printf mechanically solve the format problem?
Complex: How does printf actually display text on my console?"

http://www.maizure.org/projects/printf/index.html

Noise from the net: “My wife and I recently got married and decided that neither of us would change our last names. Some people disagree with this approach, commonly critiquing with "what will you do with your children's last names?? How will they know they're a family?!" My solution: the blockchain”

Le auto che si guidano da sole sono il futuro? Se lo saranno, hanno ancora molta strada da fare. E forse non vogliamo l'esperienza che dovrebbero accumulare per diventare veramente sicure.

Money quote: "“The reality is there will be mistakes along the way,” James Lentz, the CEO of Toyota North America, said at a public event after Herzberg was killed. “A hundred or 500 or a thousand people could lose their lives in accidents like we’ve seen in Arizona.” That week, the company announced that it would pause AV testing on public roads. Recently, when I asked if Toyota has calculated how many casualties it expects to cause in pursuit of AVs, a spokesperson replied that the company is focused on reducing the number of fatalities at the hands of human drivers: “Our goal in developing advanced automated technologies is to someday create a vehicle incapable of causing a crash.”"

https://longreads.com/2018/06/12/the-menace-and-the-promise-of-autonomous-vehicles/

Un progetto iniziato nel 2001 al Mit che sta dando i suoi frutti

Money quote: "When we started Processing in 2001, the goal was to bring ideas and technologies out of MIT and into the larger world. One idea was the synthesis of graphic design with computer science, combining the visual principles of design with ways of thinking about systems from computer science. We also wanted to share a way of working with code where things are figured out during the process of writing the software. We called this sketching with code. A third idea was to share what we had learned about how to teach programming to designers — to share this beyond the people we could teach directly through our workshops and classrooms. We wanted to spread this as far as we could."

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/a-modern-prometheus-59aed94abe85

Simulatore di circuiti logici nel vostro browser. Mai più senza (scherzi a parte, è divertente e, in alcuni rari casi, può essere anche utile).

Money quote: "Only if both switches are on, the LED will go on. Try enabling both(The 'a', this simulator comes with its own letter based notation). Read results from the red 'l' outputs. For example, below is an AND gate I"

https://lodev.org/logicemu/

Cominciamo a rimettere a posto un po’ di cose... i muri per esempio.

Tutti vogliono il trucco per fare le cose più veloci, più efficienti, più efficaci. Tutti vogliono qualsiasi modo tranne che quello che funziona veramente: farle bene.

Money quote: "There’s a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where one man puts out a match with his fingers, and doesn’t flinch. Another man watching tries to do the same, and yells in pain.

“It hurts! What’s the trick?” he asks.

“The trick is not minding that it hurts,” the first man says."

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/useful-hacks/

Una valorizzazione del pensiero di Max Weber: niente di muovo ma molto interessante, perché poi la storia la scrivono i vincitori, no?

Money quote: "We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit. Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’. More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West, and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the noscript would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-max-weber-mean-by-the-spirit-of-capitalism

Un mondo senza più adulti. Un romanzo di crescita e di passaggio. “El último recreo” è un capolavoro anni ottanta dei fumettisti argentini Carlos Trillo e Horacio Altuna. Li ho adorati per anni. La recensione di Golem Cómics.

Money quote: “En ‘El último recreo’, Altuna inaugura un estilo muy personal a la hora de situar los bocadillos de diálogo en la página, guiando con su ubicación el orden de lectura de las viñetas y controlando de esa manera el ritmo interno de cada dibujo, ayudando al lector a detenerse donde debe detenerse y a avanzar por la página cuando debe hacerlo. Hoy en día, ese recurso es aún muy utilizado en todo tipo de cómics de viñetas irregulares y en muchas ocasiones ha conseguido hacernos olvidar la dichosa flecha que nos indicaba el camino a seguir. ¡Alabado sea!“

http://www.golemcomics.com/el-ultimo-recreo-de-trillo-y-altuna/