Una bibliotecaria spiega la "regola del 50" che ha creato per decidere se abbandonare o no la lettura di un libro: leggi le prime 50 pagine e se ancora non ti piace, mollalo. Ma c'è anche una interessante variazione per chi ha superato i 51 anni...

Money quote: "Mine was also a family of readers, with a house full of books, and my childhood library was virtually a second home to me, so I certainly didn't lack for choices in my early reading life. But to my way of thinking back then, I had to finish the book I was reading, even if I already knew that I didn't especially like it, before I could start another one, one that I might love.

It wasn't until I became an adult, and a librarian, that I began to question my commitment to finishing each and every book that I began. Now that I really was living a major portion of my life in the library, I literally found myself surrounded by books, tempting me, calling to me from the shelves. How could I - in one lifetime - ever get through everything I wanted to read if I had to finish those books that I discovered to be (at least to me) boring, badly written or just plain bad?"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropping-a-bad-book/article565170/

Senza tempo. I critici usano questa espressione come alternativa per "classico". Ma applicarlo al design è possibile? E se sì, qual è un design senza tempo, cioè che non invecchia?

Money quote: "But what if I want my product or brand to be timeproof?

I want to design my product once and I want to keep that design for the long run - and by long run I mean that 15 years from now it will still look good; it won't look outdated and out of touch.

Is it even realistic?"

https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/timeless-classic-ui-design/

1.1.1.1, l’app gratuita di Cloudflare per il DNS sicuro su iOS e Android - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/1111/

Tex fra scienza e fantasia - Il mio lungo e appassionato racconto di un lato forse sottovalutato decranger texano, ovviamente per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/11/tex-mefisto-scienza-fumetti/

Finalmente uno di quegli articoli che sogni di trovare quando ti stai documentando su un argomento. Uno di quelli che indica le cose giuste, in questo caso sul software di controllo di versione. Bello!

Money quote: BitKeeper aside, the version control systems that came before Git worked according to a fundamentally different paradigm. In a taxonomy offered by Eric Sink, author of Version Control by Example, Git is a third-generation version control system, while most of Git’s predecessors, the systems popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, are second-generation version control systems.2 Where third-generation version control systems are distributed, second-generation version control systems are centralized. You have almost certainly heard Git described as a “distributed” version control system before. I never quite understood the distributed/centralized distinction, at least not until I installed and experimented with a centralized second-generation version control system myself.

https://twobithistory.org/2018/07/07/cvs.html

Invece, questa è la pagina di storia analitica dei sistemi di controllo di versione del codice indicata nell'articolo precedente. È una sola pagina di un libro per esempi pratici su come si usano i sistemi di versionamento che potrebbe cambiarvi la vita nel caso dobbiate documentarvi per sceglierli o imparare ad usarli.

https://ericsink.com/vcbe/html/history_of_version_control.html

È morto Stan Lee - http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/11/stan-lee-morto/

Storia delle torte che si lanciano in faccia (ovviamente con la prospettiva del cinema americano)

Money quote: "This phenomenon can be traced back before the earliest days of pre-1920s silent film. Tossing a pie into someone’s face for comedic effect first existed on the vaudeville circuit. The hilarity of seeing an elegant dessert hit an an actor, and watching them react with either anger or bewilderment, soon made its way to the screen. In 1913, Sennett’s muse Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle “launched the first such missile in a Keystone film,” notes The Oxford Companion to Food. Soon, the studio became known for pie-tossing shenanigans, and the high-flying desserts flew so freely that the studio needed its own bakery to make them."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-do-people-throw-pies

Il New Yorker si prende tempo per raccontare la storia e indagare la plausibilità di Candy, un libro del 1958 (poi fu fatto anche il film, nel 1968, con Marlon Brando e Walther Matthau e un miliardo di altri attori in vari cameo), che predata molto della controcultura e delle rivolte studentesche. È una satira sul settore dei libri-spazzatura, è un libro-spazzatura, è un libro volgare, sporco, inutile, peraltro in parte anche una parodia sexy (as in: commedia sexy all'italiana) del Candido di Voltaire, nientedimento. Però anche un libro fuori dall'ordinario, anzi "straordinario", di quella straordinarietà che a quanto pare non invecchia. È stato anche tradotto in italiano. Se lo trovate, magari è una interessante lettura per l'estate.

Money quote: "Candy begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book’s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, naïveté, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, “daddy issues,” sexual repression, sexual liberation—as one review suggested, sex itself—and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book—a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not."

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/11/destined-for-the-dirty-book-bin/

Disegnare facce con l'intelligenza artificiale. Cioè, se le inventa lei. Impressionante.

Money quote: "However, the other way around, generating realistic images based on denoscriptions, is much harder, and takes years of graphic design training. In machine learning this is a generative task, which is also much more challenging than discriminative tasks, as a generative model has to produce much richer information (like a full image at some level of detail and variation) based on a smaller seed input."

https://blog.insightdatascience.com/generating-custom-photo-realistic-faces-using-ai-d170b1b59255

Perché il vetro del vostro nuovo smartphone si danneggia proprio come quello di cinque anni fa - il mio articolo per La Stampa

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/11/15/tecnologia/perch-il-vetro-del-vostro-nuovo-smartphone-si-danneggia-proprio-come-quello-di-cinque-anni-fa-EPpFIYUKu3kfv6HBc9A0CL/premium.html

Come si costruisce una comunità di lettori? Telecom italia intervista Federico Ferrazza direttore di Wired italia.

Money quote: “Personalmente credo che la qualità, la varietà e l’affidabilità dell’informazione che offriamo sia il modo migliore per costruire e coltivare una comunità di lettori che possa riconoscersi in quello che facciamo, indipendentemente da come sono arrivati su una nostra pagina. Penso anche che sia molto importante essere predisposti ad ascoltare e imparare dai propri lettori e patrocinare un clima di dibattito, tra loro e con noi, il più costruttivo possibile.”

https://www.lemacchinevolanti.it/approfondimenti/qualita-e-affidabilita-come-costruire-una-comunita-di-lettori

Non sono l’unico a essere ossessionato dagli zainetto, allora

Money quote: “When Eric Ushiroda moved to a tiny Japanese village in the mid-1990s to work as a teacher, there was one thing he learned almost immediately: His middle-school students in this chilly, forested town were obsessed with L.L. Bean backpacks”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/570211/

La nascita di professioni inedite in redazione. Trasformazione digitale o morte anche per la stampa? Se ne parla da tempo a quanto pare.

Money quote: ““In 2018, it’s important we start seriously thinking about how these roles — and the people in them — can evolve. These jobs are not easily categorized and are difficult to explain not only during a dinner party or in conversations with our parents — even colleagues battle to grasp their peculiarities.””

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-rise-of-bridge-roles-in-news-organizations/

Recensione iPad Pro, la nostra pagella - la mia lunga analisi per Wired

https://www.wired.it/mobile/tablet/2018/11/16/ipad-pro-pagella/

C’è un problema con l’idea della dignità umana. Ed è che si tratta di un concetto molto recente, in qualche modo ambiguo nelle sue fondamenta e debole.

Money quote: “Beyond its youth, there is another reason our concept of dignity is tenuous: it comes with a peculiar existential challenge. To appreciate this challenge, start by considering that the relative youth of our concept of human dignity is juxtaposed by its present ubiquity. The moralised concept of dignity is a cornerstone of our contemporary Western ethos, standing shoulder to shoulder with other fundamental ideals such as liberty and equality”

https://aeon.co/essays/human-dignity-is-an-ideal-with-remarkably-shallow-roots

Nostalgia dell’iPod? Basta un Apple Watch e un case un po’ particolare...

Giocare a Space Invaders con alieni che evolvono...

Money quote: "You are the last hope of the human kind as the defense against the InvaderZ. They are deployed by their mothership with the sole purpose of entering earth's atmosphere. Although they are not a danger for you as an individual, if 5 of them gets through, everything is doomed. You can only shoot one projectile at the time, so be mindful, as you are not getting another shot until the last fired projectile disperse into the space or hits a target"

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/invaderz

Semplice ma completa spiegazione di cosa è successo e cosa sta per succedere con la Brexit. La mia personale idea è che prima - quando bisognava costruire una coscienza collettiva - ci sia stata invece davvero molta separazione e ignoranza, della quale internet ha fatto pulizia finendo nelle mani sbagliate. Insomma, poi riflettiamo anche sulle responsabilità di chi non ha costruito, anziché puntare solo il dito sui populisti che invece stanno distruggendo.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-brexit-fantasy-goes-down-in-tears/

Money quote: “Contrary to the claims of the Brexiteers, Britain already had substantial flexibility within the E.U. Having long ago opted out of the common currency and other E.U. initiatives, it retained the freedom to set its own interest rates and fiscal policies, check visitors at the border, and reject some of the legislative directives from Brussels, but it enjoyed all the advantages of the single market. To the extent that any E.U. member country was having its cake and eating it, Britain was the one. Now it has spent two and a half years trying to sabotage its future. As Bill and others are discovering, this can be a painful truth to contemplate.”

Nel cuore di Manhattan c'è un'ultima fattoria sopravvissuta all'esplosione urbana. Costruita a metà del settecento in stile olandese (che poi erano i coloni originari di Manhattan) una volta era al centro di un chilometro quadrato di campi. Oggi ha un giardino di poche decine di metri.

Money quote: "Rapid development in the area was quickly turning the land from rural to urban, and with it many of the old farmhouses were being demolished. Seeing their old home under threat, Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch bought the property in 1915 specifically to save it from being swallowed up by the urban sprawl."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dyckman-farmhouse