La fine di Olap cube (che peraltro era iniziata con un bel conflitto di interessi) è in realtà l'inizio di un fantastico viaggio nell'evoluzione dei database al tempo dei big data.

Money quote: "Online Analytical Processing (or OLAP) is a fancy term used to describe a certain class of database applications. The term was invented by database legend Edgar F. Codd, in a 1993 paper noscriptd Providing OLAP to User-Analysts: An IT Mandate.

Codd’s creation of the term wasn’t without controversy. A year before he published the paper, Arbor Software had released a software product called Essbase, and — surprise, surprise! — Codd’s paper defined properties that happened to fit Essbase’s feature set perfectly.

Computerworld magazine soon discovered that Arbor had paid Codd to ‘invent’ OLAP as a new category of database applications, in order to better sell its product. Codd got called out for his conflict of interest and was forced to retract his paper … but without much fallout, it seems: today, Codd is still regarded as ‘the father of the relational database’, and OLAP has stuck around as a category ever since."

https://www.holistics.io/blog/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-olap-cube/

In America vanno più in biblioteca che non al cinema o allo stadio. Però va detto che in America c'è una infrastruttura di biblioteche pubbliche che da noi ce la sogniamo.

Money quote: "Visiting the library remains the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far. The average 10.5 trips to the library U.S. adults report taking in 2019 exceeds their participation in eight other common leisure activities. Americans attend live music or theatrical events and visit national or historic parks roughly four times a year on average and visit museums and gambling casinos 2.5 times annually. Trips to amusement or theme parks (1.5) and zoos (.9) are the least common activities among this list."

https://news.gallup.com/poll/284009/library-visits-outpaced-trips-movies-2019.aspx

I giochi di strategia, la cui storia si intreccia tra mondo fisico e mondo digitale. Sarebbe una bella chiave per rileggere la storia dei video game: evidenziare i fili di continuità con oggetti culturali appartenenti all'ambito ludico fisico e, perché no, anche ad altri ambiti. In questo caso, una bella storia-etnografia di Master of Orion.

Money quote: "The roots of the strategic space opera can be traced back to the tabletop game known as Diplomacy, designed by Allan B. Calhamer and first published in 1959 by Avalon Hill. Taking place in the years just prior to World War I, it put seven players in the roles of leaders of the various “great powers” of Europe. Although it included a playing board, tokens, and most of the other accoutrements of a typical board game, the real action, at least if you were playing it properly, was entirely social, in the alliances that were forged and broken and the shady deals that were struck. In this respect, it presaged many of the ideas that would later go into Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. It thus represents an instant in gaming history as seminal in its own way as the 1954 publication of Avalon Hill’s Tactics, the canonical first tabletop wargame and the one which touched off the hobby of experiential gaming in general. But just as importantly for our purposes, Diplomacy‘s shifting alliances and the back-stabbings they led to would become an essential part of countless strategic space operas, including Master of Orion 34 years later."

https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion

Non a tutti è piaciuto "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" (a me invece si).

Money quote: "There’s a lot of wasted talent onscreen. Michaela Coel’s character, Aneka, is missing the tricksy magnetism the writer-actor displays everywhere else. The look of Namor is beguiling — as are the ideas behind his Talokan lineage (he was born in the 16th century and witnessed, as a young child-king, the morally repugnant, heartbreaking violence of Spanish conquistadors). "

https://www.vulture.com/article/black-panther-wakanda-forever-review.html

Uno dei problemi di chi si occupa di fare comunicazione strutturata o no, è che tende ad essere autoreferenziale. Ad esempio, le mille recensioni dei MacBook Pro e degli iPad Pro fatte da youtuber che lamentano la mancanza di uno slot per le schede SD è più comprensibile se si pensa che è una specifica esigenza degli youtuber, che fanno video e hanno un sacco di schede sd in mano tutti i giorni, anziché del resto del mondo.

Per questo, in ambito "nuovi modi per lavorare" questo articolo di Ars Technica è sospetto: il "miracolo" della creazione di un ambiente di lavoro senza ufficio, totalmente remoto, è generalizzabile o stiamo parlando di una cosa che riguarda solo chi di lavoro fa il giornalista tech? (Le foto dei diversi ambienti di lavoro casalinghi sono fantastiche: è un genere che mi piace molto)

Money quote: "Ars Technica has been around for a while—the site was started in 1998, which is several epochs ago in computer time. As founder & Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher added writers to the staff, the model he followed was to treat Ars almost like an institution of academia, with "professors" (the writers) functioning as dedicated subject-matter experts who undertook their own research and story development. This is a model the site retains to this day; while there is obviously central oversight, writers generally are expected to be the experts in their areas, to find most of their stories, and to manage their own output."


https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/no-office-no-problem-how-ars-technicas-remote-workers-work/

L'ho scoperta per caso pochi giorni fa e, a parte che è proprio bella, è anche dannatamente brava. Lindsay Ell nasce facendo country che più country di così si muore, nonostante sia canadese dell'Alberta. Ma nei suoi dischi cambia passo e mette anche del blues e qualcosa di jazz appena accennato, e tanto Bluegrass.

Ha fatto due album, "The Project" e soprattutto "The Continuum Project", che mi piace di più. Qui gioca con qualche pedale e la sua Stratocaster Mary Kaye (la ragazza ha gusto) attorno al suo singolo "Criminal"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFcXn2vwPs

Ci sono parti del mondo che non ho fatto in tempo a visitare. Una di queste è la Kowloon Walled City a Hong Kong. Peccato!

Money quote: "The city’s many tall, narrow tower blocks were packed tight against each other—so tight as to make the whole place seem like one massive structure: part architecture, part organism. There was little uniformity of shape, height, or building material. Cast-iron balconies lurched against brick annexes and concrete walls. Wiring and cables covered every surface: running vertically from ground level up to forests of rooftop television aerials, or stretching horizontally like innumerable rolls of dark twine that seemed almost to bind the buildings together. Entering the city meant leaving daylight behind. There were hundreds of alleyways, most just a few feet wide. Some routes cut below buildings, while other tunnels were formed by the accumulation of refuse tossed out of windows and onto wire netting strung between tower blocks. Thousands of metal and plastic water pipes ran along walls and ceilings, most of them leaking and corroded. As protection against the relentless drips that fell in the alleyways, a hat was standard issue for the city’s postman. Many residents chose to use umbrellas."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kowloon-walled-city

Lo ammetto, nonostante l'etica del lavoro che ho appreso e cercato di fare mia fin da bambino (la Costituzione italiano dopotutto la mette come valore centrale della nostra Repubblica) non ci avevo mai pensato. L'idea invece è che il duro lavoro non sia necessariamente quello che porta ad avere soddisfazione o realizzarsi come individui. Insomma, il meritarsi qualcosa perché si è sempre lavorato duro non sembrerebbe una frase legata da un nesso di causa ed effetto, se si definisce quel qualcosa come una cosa rilevante per l'attuale modernità (cioè qualcosa di più di un tozzo di pane o di una baracca in riva al fiume).

Money quote: "Some of the hardest work I can imagine is the lowest-paid labour on the planet. Any kind of construction, customer service, and any job at minimum wage is almost guaranteed to be miserable, have terrible hours, and be managed by a boss that doesn’t seem to understand you’re a human."

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/hard-work-doesnt-matter-here-s-why-15b200bc685e

Il grande problema di Disney con le principesse. Grande veramente.

Money quote: "Audiences anticipated that Disney’s intentions around Elsa’s sexuality would be clarified in Frozen II. Exciting as the /#GiveElsaAGirlfriend campaign was, the more cynical among us did not expect it to actually happen and were unsurprised that it didn’t. The sequel illuminated and confirmed a number of issues, among them a range of already-existing problems within the Disney canon when it comes to the representation of people of color and Indigenous populations, along with a particular desire to have your cake and eat it, too, when it comes to attempting to right the wrongs of colonialism. But what particularly stood out was how uniquely committed Frozen II was to continuing Disney’s overarching project they have taken on with every princess film since their co-production with Pixar, Brave: the relocation of anxiety around women’s agency from romantic relationships to the stability of the nation-state. How much does women’s independence, agency, or bodily autonomy support or threaten the state? This is the project that every Disney Princess movie of the past 10 years has engaged in"

https://longreads.com/2020/01/02/princess-problem-of-frozen-ii

"Diabolik - Ginko all'attacco!", uno spettacolare James Bond all'italiana - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/11/diabolik-ginko-all-attacco-recensione-film/

Uno spettacolare regalo per l'archeologia: milioni di foto scattate dagli aerei spia U2 negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. Questo sarebbe un progetto sul quale varrebbe la pena investire intelligenze e risorse.

Money quote: "These images come from a special collection of footage. In the late 1950s, U-2 spy planes flew at around 70,000 feet over Cold War hotspots in Europe and Asia, capturing images that could show details as small as a person."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spy-plane-photos-show-ancient-civilizations

Sul dirompente effetto e sui limiti brucianti della "Perennial Philosophy" di Aldus Huxley

Money quote: "Whatever else it is, The Perennial Philosophy is an extraordinary work of synthesis, and it injected a global spirituality into mainstream Western culture. Huxley condemned the ‘theological imperialism’ that appreciates only Western texts, and introduced many readers to now-familiar non-Western teachings – the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the teachings of the Buddha, Zhuang Zi, Rumi. Still, it’s quite an idiosyncratic selection of quotes. There’s a lot of Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, and plenty of male Christian mystics, but hardly any female mystics, only one line from Jesus, and no quotes from the Quran. In what sense, then, is it universal?"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-perennial-philosophy-of-aldous-huxley

Un vecchio articolo che ha il suo fascino. Foreign Policy fa un'operazione di nostalgia o quasi, facendo sentire gli odori e i sapori di una Shanghai europea tramite le pagine dell'ultimo giornale occidentale sopravvissuto per pochi anni alla rivoluzione maoista che fotografa un momento di profondo cambiamento pochi anni prima che tutto venga definitivamente spazzato via e sostituito dalla stampa cinese in cinese.

Money quote: "Liberation Army marched along its boulevards and Communist Party bureaucrats demanded the keys to its once thriving businesses, one lonely English-language paper still haunted the newsstands.

The Shanghai News was the successor to the North China Daily News, which had once been the most important English-language paper in a country with a thriving multilingual press and four English dailies in Shanghai alone. In anticipation of the closure of the Daily News in March 1951, the owners—the Morris family—launched the Shanghai News. The Daily News staff, at least those who hadn’t already left the city, stayed on, stuck translating and editing copy force-fed to them from Xinhua, the national newswire."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/03/last-tango-in-shanghai-1950s-china-english-language-newspaper/

Meraviglie della psiche. Dalla fine di una storia e conseguente separazione è nata una depressione che, a sua volta, è un modo differente per guardare l'esistenza e il mondo. Interessante poi la generalizzazione che si tratti di un modo migliore di guardare la realtà. Ma forse è anche il suo percorso di terapia che lo spinge a integrare questa parte di sé.

Money quote: "The reason for my depression was a breakup. But what led to depression was not so much the reaction to our split, but the realisation that the one you believed loved you, who was closest to you and promised to be with you forever, had turned out to be someone else, a stranger indifferent to your pain. I discovered that this loving person was an illusion. The past became meaningless, and the future ceased to exist. The world itself wasn’t credible any more.

In that state of depression, I found the attitude of others changed dramatically. Depression is not particularly tolerated in society, and I realised that those around me were of two persuasions. One group of people wanted to fix me, telling me to pull myself together or recommending professional help. The other group tended to shun me like a leper. In hindsight, I understand this reaction: after all, I had become cynical, agnostic and pessimistic, and I hadn’t bothered to be polite."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-voice-of-sadness-is-censored-as-sick-what-if-its-sane

Chissà cosa spinge qualcuno ad approfondire una propria curiosità intellettuale e forse anche esistenziale sino al punto di cambiare radicalmente la propria vita e farne il proprio centro? E se questa attenzione è rivolta a un'altra cultura e a un'altra lingua, per di più molto lontana come sono lontani gli americani e i giapponesi, come fa a ricostruire il suo essere attorno a una nuova identità senza lacerare se stesso e chi è? Perché un discorso è il viaggio, un altro è l'emigrazione.

Negli anni, leggendolo, ho sviluppato una grande stima per Craig Mod. E questo articolo sui "pizza toast" è una finestra che apre su un panorama enorme, a più livelli.

Money quote: "When I first arrived in Japan as an undergraduate 19 years ago, I could hardly eat anything. Sushi and soba and natto (a breakfast staple of fermented soybeans) and eel were unthinkable. I didn’t even really like ramen. I had grown up on fried bologna and Spaghetti-Os, Fruit Roll-Ups and Twix. Japan’s culinary landscape of nuance and texture and procession was lost on my palate. And so I took solace and sanctuary in a small old-style Japanese cafe — a kissaten— near my university in Tokyo. It was there that I first encountered “pizza toast.” The name intrigued, and what was presented seemed like food you might serve a child. Perfect. For me, it became a bridge between where I had been and where I was to go. I didn’t think much of it then; it was just a food I knew I could reliably eat, and the kissa itself acted as a kind of buffer zone, a beacon of comfort, where I could drink black coffee and smoke and read novels.

Years later, in an effort to deepen my connection with the country, I began to embark on a number of exploratory, anthropological walks throughout Japan. I’ve traced the paths of old Japanese haiku poets into the north, and documented some of the pilgrimage paths of central Japan. I’ve partaken in rituals with “mountain ascetics” and walked their secret mountain routes. I speak the language, converse easily with the locals, and have found the combination of language, walking alone, and chatting up strangers to be a kind of skeleton key into the minds and lives of the people of Japan."

https://www.eater.com/2019/12/16/21003452/japan-kissaten-traditional-cafes-pizza-toast-travel

Le bandiere sono una invenzione relativamente recente e poterle incendiare o abusare in altro modo (nel senso che gli diamo adesso) è un'idea altrettanto recente

Money quote: "Flags have several advantages over effigies. They’re cheaper and easier to acquire than a reasonable likeness of a human—and fairly flammable, depending on material. Flag burning really became a go-to tactic in the United States in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, but around the world, burning a flag has long been a simple, effective means of protesting a federal government.

Governments have some stake in this, as flag burning is most obviously a form of protest against them, often conducted by persecuted minority groups as a means to raise awareness (or by irate people in another nation). Governments don’t generally want negative publicity, or people angrily pointing out their shortcomings. In that sense, banning the action is not so different from actively breaking up a protest march with tear gas or worse. “If it’s a crime to burn the flag because it’s the flag, the only reason the government is doing that is because it disagrees with the message the protester is trying to convey,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on free speech issues."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/flag-desecration-laws

Per quelli di noi che passano parte del loro tempo dentro Slack, nel tempo è cambiata l'interfaccia (un po' di volte). Qui il responsabile un po' di tempo fa spiegava come mai si decidono i cambiamenti e come fanno a farli. Più o meno ha senso.

Money quote: "There are emoji for showing your feelings, hashtags for channels and @ symbols for mentions — the kind of visual lexicon that has existed on various social platforms for more than a decade. A text box at the bottom of the interface almost begs to be typed in. For anyone with a half-working FOMO detector, there’s little chance of not jumping into the fray.

Capitalization, and the rules of English grammar, are clearly not Slack’s priority. In style and tone, it reminds one, above all, of an amusing text thread with some college buddies. Office conversations in a channel can quickly morph from the merits of the Oxford comma to weekly goals, to sourdough starters. And when somebody sends something important, a search bar at the top of the interface makes it easy to find later."

https://builtin.com/design-ux/slack-user-testing-redesign

È uscita Tilde ~ 22, la terza puntata della seconda stagione!

Titolo: Allenare la creatività; Twitter e identità online; sceneggiare fumetti, raccontare storie.

"Fare lezione stanca, ma anche scrivere: eppure la creatività non si esaurisce mai. E poi un giro di tavolo sui social, tra quelli che ci piacciono e quelli che anche no."

→ tilde ~ su Spotify
→ tilde ~ su Apple Podcast
→ tilde ~ su Google Podcast

Potete ascoltare il podcast da Spotify, Google Podcast o Apple Podcast, oppure dal sito: tilde.show. Buon ascolto e buon venerdì!

P.S. Anche la copertina di questa puntata è stata generata da Dall-E. Descrizione "two old men in front of a microphone like a moebius paint".

A scuola di clickbait. Questa volta ci pensa la NPR, la radio pubblica americana. Che fa un articolo dall'intrigante titolo "Apple's Scary Buying Power And The Woman Who Named It". Perché se metti Apple nel titolo, la gente clicca. Peccato che poi sia un articolo di storia aneddotica dell'economia, che parla di una donna vissuta decenni prima e che con Apple non c'entra in reltà niente. Ma neanche c'entra niente Apple in quanto tale: ci sono altri diecimila esempi che si possono fare ben più pregnanti. Quella di Apple insomma è solo una scusa.

Money quote: "If the idea of monopoly were Beyoncé, then monopsony would be Solange. They're close sisters, yet their styles are pretty different. And while only one of them has been famous for a long time, the other one seems to be getting a lot of attention more recently.

What does this term actually mean? And where does it come from? The story is actually pretty fascinating."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/06/18/733510647/apples-buying-power-and-the-woman-who-named-it

Ho combattuto e combatto, in modo molto light in effetti, battaglie personali contro la pubblicità che si appropria delle persone e delle informazioni, manipolando le prime e le seconde. Pur avendo fatto un po' di ricerca sul tema della pubblicità in esterna, non ci avevo riflettuto più da parecchi anni (e non avendo l'auto in effetti la vedo anche poco). A leggere qui, però, siamo messi molto male.

Money quote: "In 2014 Grenoble’s then newly-appointed Green mayor Éric Piolle cancelled a contract for 326 outdoor advertisements, including 64 large billboards. Trees and community noticeboards replaced them – or nothing at all. The lost revenue was recouped by reducing allowances, including official vehicles. Despite Piolle’s attempts to make Grenoble Europe’s first ad-free city, bus and tram stops still have adverts, as the contract is controlled by the regional authority."

https://www.equaltimes.org/the-growing-global-movement-to-end

Shining, tutte le ambientazioni ricreate con il Lego a un livello di dettagli epico

https://twitter.com/ATRightMovies/status/1596454438809399296?s=20&t=k75jwfDrWM7_rsQ5SMZUSQ