Ho un problema con la meritocrazia da tempo, ma non avevo mai pensato a casi clamorosi in cui funziona molto male. Ad esempio, tra gli orchestrali di musica classica

Money quote: "The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair, though its reputation says otherwise. This is partly because to be classically trained means being regarded among the highest caliber of skilled musicians. Those who achieve such heights are capable of playing the most complex, technically difficult music on equally complex instruments that take decades to master. The prestige that comes with this mastery is, of course, heavily dependent on rankings—orchestra rankings, seating charts, a general fetishization of skill and dedication. And classical music itself is considered the highest echelon of institutional art music, its practice spanning centuries, its history a tapestry of colorful personalities and political upheaval. Like fine art and classical literature, it is considered a high-water mark for culture, a pastime enjoyed largely by the rich, the old, and the snobby. "

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/strike-with-the-band-wagner

Dovremmo prenderla in modo molto, molto meno personale. Ci farebbe bene a tutti. Un articolo lungo ma decisamente interessante.

Money quote: “There are several problems with these errors in thinking. The first, of course, is that they’re inaccurate, driven more by feelings, personal histories, ambiguity and conspicuously negative information than by objectivity. Another is that, if you commit to these biased beliefs, you limit your emotional options to feeling sad about your perceived flaws, anxious about your ability to withstand upcoming social challenges, or angry at others for not being nicer. Finally, they limit your behavioural options. If you accept these thoughts as facts, it can be hard to see past giving up, avoiding or lashing out. In short, these tendencies to take things too personally restrict your emotional and behavioural options and increase the likelihood that you’ll struggle with distress or dysfunction.”

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-take-things-less-personally-and-avoid-mind-reading

Il futuro del porno. No, sul serio

Money quote: "A common criticism of mainstream porn is that it’s unrealistic."

https://onezero.medium.com/the-future-of-porn-is-on-indie-social-media-5f8a2dffbe3

Se siete dentro Emacs, intendo dire se ci vivete dentro, ecco una cosa che potrebbe servirvi

Money quote: "After developing some little Emacs packages for a year or so, I began to notice how I'd forget little things that I learned, and then I'd have to go hunting for that information again. I also noticed how there are some issues for which there doesn't seem to be a "best practice" or "Standard Operating Procedure" to refer to.

So this is intended to be a place to collect and organize information related to Emacs package development. Built with Emacs, by Emacs package developers, for Emacs package developers."

https://alphapapa.github.io/emacs-package-dev-handbook/

Nell'ambito della sterminata letteratura di self-help, questo si distingue per la sua capacità di generare strane suggestioni. Ma la fallacia è sempre dietro l'angolo.

Money quote: "The world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help make decisions and separate good ideas from bad. They're called mental models, and you can find them by scouring dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more.

OR, you can just read Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to the most useful mental models. Check out the full list of mental models here."

https://superthinking.com/

Una ricerca che viene presentata al prossimo Siggraph illustra un metodo per correggere la prospettiva delle foto grandangolari, ma solo parzialmente

Money quote: "In spite of the rapid proliferation of wide-angle cameras on mobile phones, a wider field-of-view (FOV) introduces a stronger perspective distortion. Most notably, faces are stretched, squished, and skewed, to look vastly different from real-life. Correcting such distortions requires professional editing skills, as trivial manipulations can introduce other kinds of distortions. This paper introduces a new algorithm to undistort faces without affecting other parts of the photo."

https://people.csail.mit.edu/yichangshih/wide_angle_portrait/#supp

Tex nel manicomio di Mefisto - continua l'epica saga del ritorno di Mefisto, che sto recensendo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/07/tex-740-bedlam-manicomio-mefisto/

Credo che qualunque commento sia inutile

Money quote: "GOP lawmaker attended gay son's wedding 3 days after voting against same-sex marriage"

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/gop-lawmaker-attended-gay-sons-wedding-3-days-voting-sex-marriage-rcna39863

Forse non lo sapevate ma la Terra non orbita attorno al Sole...

Money quote: ""Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system," writes Cathy Jordan, a Cornell University Ask an Astronomer contributor."

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/technically_the_earth_does_not_orbit_the_sun.html

Negli Usa c’è una lotta al coltello per fare più nuggets di pollo: McDonald e il resto dei fast food presenti in America ci stanno impazzendo. È difficile fare la nuggets perfetta, ma il guadagno può essere miliardario: 40 miliardi nel 2022, per la precisione. Ah, le piccole meteore sono fatte con fette di pulcino pucciate nell’antibiotico.

Money quote: “The burgeoning nugget craze is "largely driven by shifts in Gen Z consumer behavior," says Maeve Webster, president of Menu Matters, a restaurant consultancy.

"Since the pandemic, more consumers in general are snacking and looking for those easier-to-eat, smaller bites," she tells Axios.
Chicken nuggets also lend themselves to a lot of "customization and experimentation," she said — like using them as a pizza topping or as a base for flavorful sauces. (Chicken nugget poutine, anyone?)”

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/25/chicken-nugget-wars

La gravità mi ha sempre affascinato, perché... beh, perché non sappiamo esattamente come funziona.

Money quote: "Problem is, particles have quantum properties. They can, for example, be in two places at once. These particles also have masses, and masses cause gravity. But since gravity does not have quantum properties, no one really knows what’s the gravitational pull of a particle in a quantum superposition. To solve this problem, physicists need a theory of quantum gravity. Or, since Einstein taught us that gravity is really curvature of space-time, physicists need a theory for the quantum properties of space and time."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-gravity-breaks-down

Facciamo un viaggio nella mente dei conservatori americani. Qui quelli di National Interest che interpretano la storia in maniera quantomeno singolare e forzata.

Money quote: "Since the early 1970s, American policymakers believed they could avoid such nurturing, cherishing and threatening by making the success of the Communist Party of China a goal of U.S. foreign policy. With interests defined this way, American presidents helped China’s communists at crucial moments."

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/its-time-america-break-beijing-63327

Un cattivo maestro, retoricamente piacevole

Money quote: "A sad fact is that many people are now spending huge portions of their lives at work that, they know, is not benefitting society (see Graeber, 2013). It leads to such cynicism that people begin to stop even thinking that jobs are supposed to benefit society. We have the spectacle of politicians on both sides of the aisle fighting to keep munitions plants open in their states, to preserve the jobs, even when the military itself says the weapons the plant is building are no longer useful. And we have politicians and pundits arguing that fossil fuel mining and carbon spewing factories should be maintained for the sake of the jobs, let the environment be damned."

http://evonomics.com/less-work-job-creation-peter-gray/

Rendere facile una attività per "liberare il talento delle persone" magari facendole collaborare permette spesso di raggiungere ottimi risultati. Ma il concetto non può essere "stirato" all'infinito, soprattutto perché non sempre è prevedibile che ci sia del talento da impegnare.

Questo esempio di videogioco in cui l'obiettivo è divertirsi insieme a realizzare un videogioco, cioè un meta-gioco, è singolare, intrigante ma anche totalmente discutibile sia per gli obiettivi che si dà che per i risultati che raggiunge.

Money quote: "What if creating games could be as easy and fun as playing them? What if you could enter a virtual world with your friends and build a game together in real time? Our team within Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects, took on this challenge. Our prototype is called Game Builder, and it is free on Steam for PC and Mac."

https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/create-3d-games-friends-no-experience-required/

Se state per passare del tempo dentro la shell e dovete trovare delle cose, è arrivato il momento di imparare Grep. Ho li libro che fa per voi.

Money quote: "You are likely to be familiar with using Ctrl+F to quickly locate where a particular string occurs. grep is similar, but much more versatile and feature-rich version of the search functionality usable from command line. Two different implementations - GNU GREP and RIPGREP are discussed in this book."

https://leanpub.com/gnugrep_ripgrep

https://gumroad.com/l/gnugrep_ripgrep

La strana vita dell'Avocado: frutto (e seme fuori scala) che è sopravvissuto all'estinzione dei grandi mammiferi sino ad arrivare ai giorni nostri. Ancora non abbiamo capito bene come abbia fatto a sopravvivere, dato che il nocciolo di un frutto - il seme - ha dimensioni adatte ad essere ingerito e defecato a distanza: è il metodo con il quale la natura permette alle giovani piante di crescere lontano dai loro generatori e quindi non competere per la stessa particella di suolo e rettangolo di luce nel bosco. Solo che se il seme è troppo grosso, chi se lo ingoia?

Money quote: "How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-4976527/

Salman Rushdie su Mattatoio numero 5 e Comma 22, e un paio di altri ragionamenti non male per il New Yorker

Money quote: "It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious. “Catch-22” is crazy funny, slapstick funny. It sees war as insane and the desire to escape combat as the only sane position. Its tone of voice is deadpan farce. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is different. There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye. Vonnegut is a sad-faced comedian. If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton. His predominant tone of voice is melancholy, the tone of voice of a man who has been present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale. The two books do, however, have this in common: they are both portraits of a world that has lost its mind, in which children are sent out to do men’s work and die."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now

Quando arriva il momento - per voi utenti Chrome (io sto con Safari) - di passare a Firefox, serve sapere alcune cose. Sono tutte qui

Money quote: "Switching to Firefox is fast, easy and risk-free. Firefox imports your bookmarks, autofills, passwords and preferences from Chrome."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/

Storia di un addio

https://www.macitynet.it/jony-ive-e-il-lungo-addio-ad-apple/

Uno dei motivi per cui bisognerebbe andare a vivere a Tokyo è che c’erano i Gundam nelle piazze.

Money quote: "Standing at 19.7 meters tall in front of the Diver City shopping complex, this RX-0 Unicorn Gundam is built on a one-to-one scale, features a movable head, and transforms between Unicorn Mode and Destroy Mode (complete with flashing lights and epic anime soundtrack) throughout the day at scheduled times."

https://grapee.jp/en/94345

Tra i tanti sistemi per cercare di reinvetarsi il libro, questo è uno dei più interessanti. (E complicati; il motto è intrigante: "The book is a program").

Money quote: "Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors make functional and beautiful digital books."

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/index.html