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Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
Per contatti su Telegram: @antoniodini
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L'università ha fame di sistemi scalabili per la gestione e diffusione dei dati. Ed ecco che arriva la soluzione: Academic Torrents. Usare BitTorrent per condividere i file in maniera distribuita e sicura. Stiamo parlando finora di 27.31 Terabyte di dati sulla rete P2P "pulita" (niente pirateria) del servizio.

Money quote: "This service is designed to facilitate storage of all the data used in research, including datasets as well as publications. There are many advantages of using bittorrent technology to disseminate this work.

Distributed storage and content delivery provided by anyone. Files can be securely downloaded from other users of the system. They can share the file for a day or a year.

Mirroring the content can be done from a desktop computer anywhere. Everyone surrounding this computer will have local access to the data automatically and securely.

Bundles of files, not just papers, or any size can be disseminated in this way as long as at least one person can become a seed for that data."

http://academictorrents.com/
Secondo me passerà alla storia come la rivolta delle spie. Coalizzate contro la presidenza di Donald Trump.

Money quote: "“Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation needs. … Your leadership, however, has shown little of these qualities. Through your actions”—which he later described as “McCarthy-era tactics”—“you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and worst of all, divided us as a nation.”"

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/the-nations-top-former-intelligence-officials-issue-a-stunning-rebuke-to-trump.html
Quanto potrebbe essere alta la torre più alta di tutte? Il problema nel rispondere non sono le tolleranze dei materiali, ma le regole che applichiamo in quella che gli architetti chiamano scienza delle costruzioni.

Money quote: "This led to a sub-discipline known as ‘reliability engineering’. Designers started to make structures that were much stronger than the maximum possible load they needed to bear – which meant the stress on the materials stayed within a range where the probability of breakage was very low. Once structures turn into megastructures, though, calculations show that this risk-averse approach places a cap on their size. Megastructures necessarily push materials to their limits, and remove the luxury of weathering comfortable levels of stress."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-would-it-take-to-build-a-tower-as-high-as-outer-space
L'auto che esce dal parcheggio e ti viene a prendere: il video in fondo all'articolo è spettacolare.

Money quote: "Enhanced Summon enables Tesla vehicles to autonomously navigate much more complex parking lot situations than just moving forward or back.

In the beta release notes, Tesla describes Summon as “a parking assist feature that helps you bring your car towards you or towards the destination of your choice by navigating out of parking spaces and maneuvering around objects as necessary.”"

https://electrek.co/2019/05/06/tesla-model-3-autonomously-pickup-owner-iparking-video/
Lettura lunga per la domenica. La competizione maschile figlia letterlmente del testosterone: è il mito della corsa degli spermatozoi, una gara a chi arriva prima (vi ricordate Woody Allen?) che ci dice molto non tanto del processo riproduttivo (l'immagine è infatti sbagliata) ma della nostra cultura, dell'idea di macho, della supposta passività femminile.

Money quote: "It was in the relatively recent year of 1991, long after much of the real science had been set in stone, that the American anthropologist Emily Martin, now at New York University, described what she called a ‘scientific fairy tale’ – a picture of egg and sperm that suggests that ‘female biological processes are less worthy than their male counter-parts’ and that ‘women are less worthy than men’. The ovary, for instance, is depicted with a limited stock of starter eggs depleted over a lifetime whereas the testes are said to produce new sperm throughout life. Human egg production is commonly described as ‘wasteful’ because, from 300,000 egg starter cells present at puberty, only 400 mature eggs will ever be released; yet that adjective is rarely used to describe a man’s lifetime production of more than 2 trillion sperm. Whether in the popular or scientific press, human mating is commonly portrayed as a gigantic marathon swimming event in which the fastest, fittest sperm wins the prize of fertilising the egg. If this narrative was just a prejudicial holdover from our sexist past – an offensive male fantasy based on incorrect science – that would be bad enough, but continued buy-in to biased information impedes crucial fertility treatments for men and women alike."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-sperm-race-to-the-egg-is-just-another-macho-myth
Inchiestona di Pro Publica su una delle aziende che svuotano i cassonetti di New York (il servizio è appaltato ad aziende private). Non soltanto perché è interessante leggerlo, ma perché vi dà anche la misura di come sia fatta un'inchiesta.

Money quote: "An investigation by Voice of America and ProPublica, drawing on thousands of pages of public documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former workers, depicts a workplace environment in which concerns about safety, as well as workers’ rights and compensation, are flouted despite years of complaints from workers to regulators.

Records show that more than three-quarters of Sanitation Salvage trucks have been ordered off the road after federal safety checks. Yet the company has paid lobbyists to fight local legislation that backers say would compel haulers to improve on working conditions and safety.

The Department of Labor several years ago found that Sanitation Salvage had cheated workers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages. Today, the New York State Insurance Fund is suing the company for $780,000 in unpaid workers’ compensation insurance obligations for on-the-job injuries."

https://features.propublica.org/sanitation-salvage/sanitation-salvage-accidents-new-york-city-commercial-carting-garbage/