Manzanar era il campo di concentramento per gli americani di discendenza giapponese durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. Una delle storie vergognose che scompaiono quando chi le mette in essere risulta poi essere il vincitore. Le foto di Dorothea Lange mostrano una storia che è stata censurata fino al 2006.

Money quote: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”

https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

Una storia che prima o poi cercherò di raccontare anche io: l'aereo della Pan Am che fece il giro del mondo per sfuggire alla guerra scoppiata con Perl Harbour.

Money quote: "The morning of 6th January 1942 was going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the night-shift air controller at LaGuardia’s tower, but it did mean he’d have to wrap up extra warm when he headed home."

https://medium.com/s/story/the-long-way-round-the-plane-that-accidentally-circumnavigated-the-world-c04ca734c6bb

Cosa c'è dietro il comportamento dei repubblicani più radicali in America, in particolare a Nashville? Lo spiega benissimo Dan Rather.

Money Quote: "They are desperate measures from desperate people who fear they have already lost the future."

https://steady.substack.com/p/injustice-in-nashville

Inchiestona del New York Times sul futuro dei libri e delle librerie nell'epoca di Amazon. A questo articolo pre pandemia, che parla di contraffazione, ha risposto poi la stessa Amazon con un suo post

Money quote: "Antimicrobial Therapy, which publishes “The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy,” bought 34 of its handbooks from Amazon and Amazon’s third-party sellers. At least 30 were counterfeits."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/amazon-domination-bookstore-books.html

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/books-and-authors/our-response-to-the-new-york-times-story-on-book-counterfeiting

Auguri di una serena Pasqua a tutti gli iscritti a questo canale!

Le idee di business spesso sono balzane. Questa più di altre.

Money quote: "750 Words is a site that I built on a whim in 2009, and it's still going strong. It turns 10 years old this December! It's a site that allows you to practice a daily habit of private journaling (the opposite of every publishing platform out there). The words you write are saved and locked away, only for you to ever look at, so you can write whatever's really on your mind without fear of it getting out. It's basically a digital version of morning pages, an idea I learned about from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. If you write every day you get badges and analytics, etc. It costs $5/month after the free trial.
As of today, over 400,000 have signed up and over 5 billion words have been written. 968 people have written over 365 days in a row, 265 people have written 1,000 days in a row, and 68 people have written 2,000 days in a row."

https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/063525ef84

Dopo tanti anni Flight Simulator di Microsoft è tornato. È e sarà soprattutto un simulatore ed è e sarà per Windows e poi per Xbox One. Per me è (quasi) la killer app di Microsoft.

Money quote: "The culmination of time, effort, technology, and collaboration was edited into a 1:30 second video shown at the Microsoft Keynote presentation this year to kick off E3 2019.

On behalf of the entire Microsoft Flight Simulator team, we humbly and deeply express our gratitude for such an overwhelmingly positive response to our announce trailer! We recognize that without people like you, we don’t get to make experiences like this that span more than 35 years and maintain such a passionate following. Thank you for being patient enough to weather the turbulence caused by some of our previous missteps. Thank you for being willing to look to the possibilities of the future while asking us to be accountable for the past. We hear you, we value you, we want to make the next generation of Microsoft Flight Simulator for you, with you."

https://fsi.microsoftstudios.com/

https://www.flightsimulator.com

Altre cose divertenti che riguardano la matematica con SymPy, libreria Python

Money quote: "Mathematics is a lot of things. It's fun of problem-solving, it's an excitement of discoveries, it's a pride of accomplishments, and it's a ton of tedious computations, too. I never liked the last part. Couldn't make it right. That's why I'm so happy to live in the XXI century since I can give it away to computers and still enjoy the first three."

https://wordsandbuttons.online/sympy_makes_math_fun_again.html

Che disgrazia Electron: una totale mancanza di rispetto per chi sviluppa i diversi ambienti e soprattutto per i loro utenti.

Money quote: "Some people really hate Electron apps. The idea that an app includes an entire copy of the Chrome web browser sounds ridiculous. This feeling is validated when looking at the apps on your machine — they eat up memory, boot slowly, and aren't very responsive. It's hard enough to build good apps on web, why the heck are we bringing the web to desktop and causing even more problems?"

https://jlongster.com/secret-of-good-electron-apps

È il sogno americano: le villette monofamiliari con giardino e parcheggio dell'auto. Un sogno che oggi non è più sostenibile, già da un po' di anni.

Money quote: "But a number of officials across the country are starting to make seemingly heretical moves. The Oregon legislature this month will consider a law that would end zoning exclusively for single-family homes in most of the state. California lawmakers have drafted a bill that would effectively do the same. In December, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end single-family zoning citywide. The Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Julián Castro have taken up the cause, too."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html

Spiegare i supereroi con un podcast - la mia rubrica su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/04/super-chora-media-podcast-supereroi/

Avete presente la porta sull'estate? Una coppia svedese ha costruito una serra attorno a casa propria. Se sopravvivono al puzzo di stantio, il clima è temperato anche d'inverno.

Money quote: "Marie Granmar and Charles Sacilotto literally live in a bubble, insulated from the cold and the harshness of the elements, while taking in the best of what nature has to offer."

https://returntonow.net/2019/03/04/swedish-couple-builds-greenhouse-around-home-to-stay-warm-and-grow-food-all-year-long/

I giornali sportivi e la tv offrono una visione tostissima dei concorrenti vittime di dolorose sconfitte. È facile immaginare un atleta sconfitto: postura prona, occhi bassi e il peso del mondo sulle spalle. E lo spauracchio per moltissime persone. Conosciamo tutti la sensazione di sprofondamento, il vuoto nello stomaco che accompagna il dolore di una sconfitta. La delusione per la sconfitta è universale. Ma come si fa ad accettarla?

Money quote: "A core lesson is that the act of losing is not the problem in itself. The problems often arise in one’s relationship to the concept of losing and in how one responds to losing. Part of what separates truly elite competitors from their counterparts is their ability to respond to losses in ways that lead to growth, rather than to a merging with the pain of loss."

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-a-better-loser-and-grow-from-your-mistakes

La brutta storia di MySpace che ha perso tutto. Ma lo ha davvero perso?

Money quote: "NPR has reached out for comment from MySpace. According to several media reports, it posted a message on its site recently reading, "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace. We apologize for the inconvenience."

"More than 50 million tracks from 14 million artists has been lost," reports The Guardian."

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/704458168/myspace-says-it-lost-years-of-user-uploaded-music?t=1553640319879

L'invenzione dell'aldilà passa da quelli che hanno avuto una Near Death Experience (e sono cioè tornati per raccontarla)? A quanto pare sì.

Money quote: "Is it possible that this type of extraordinary experience that is universally associated with nearly dying is a fundamental source of beliefs about the afterlife? For many societies, there’s no need to speculate. In historical as well as modern accounts, NDEs are often said to lead directly to new beliefs, including the belief that consciousness can separate from the body and that it continues after death. I’ve unearthed more than 70 Native American NDE accounts dating from the 16th-19th centuries, and in more than 20 of them it was stated that the experience was a source of knowledge about the afterlife. Likewise, from the Pacific islands, 19 of the 36 NDE accounts I found had similar claims."

https://psyche.co/ideas/near-death-experiences-have-long-inspired-afterlife-beliefs

Ikea all'assalto del centro della città. Ha saturato il mercato periferico oppure sta capendo qualcosa che ancora noi non vediamo?

Money quote: "The furniture retailer has been working on these small format stores, dubbed Planning Studios, for the last three years. It recently opened two planning studios in Los Angeles, in Arcadia and Long Beach, in August. Ikea also has small-format locations in Paris, Moscow, Toronto and New York City.
Ikea’s Planning Studio was developed to reach shoppers living in areas that its typical big-box stores aren’t located in. These new Planning Studios in the U.S. are around 8,000 to 9,000 square feet and focus on key areas integral to city living, such as kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms. Ikea plans to open more Planning Studio locations in Rome, Tokyo and San Francisco among others.
The new Planning Studios are part of the 3 billion euros (or about $3.2 billion) Ingka Group, Ikea’s largest franchisee, planned to invest in its new and existing stores. The investment also focuses on developing physical stores so they can serve as e-commerce distribution centers. Ikea did not share financial figures on how the Planning Studios are performing so far."

https://www.modernretail.co/operations/inside-ikeas-small-format-store-strategy-the-retail-environment-is-changing/

Come facciamo a costruire la nostra rappresentazione della realtà? Attraverso la società, il che vuol dire attraverso scuola, libri, musica, film, amici e ovviamente la nostra famiglia. Ma molte di queste cose sono decisamente sbagliate.

Money quote: "The notion of “core memories” has become well known in popular culture. First seen in the 2015 movie Inside Out, core memories are thought to be your five or so most important memories. The idea is that some specific events are so important, experiencing them instantly shapes your personality, behaviours and sense of self.

Thousands of TikTok users have made “core memory” posts about salient memories (often from childhood), with more than 880 million views worldwide. Typically these posts have a strong element of nostalgia and focus on small moments: watching Saturday morning cartoons, holding hands with a schoolyard crush, or splashing through the rain.

So, do core memories actually exist? While we do use memories to construct a sense of self, and these memories support our psychological wellbeing, memory science suggests the notion of a “core memory” is faulty in five key ways."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/are-core-memories-real-the-science-behind-5-common-myths

Chi sono i Big Five dell'editoria mondiale, spiegato bene

Money quote: "Per “Big four” si intendono HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan e Penguin Random House: i gruppi più importanti per il mercato dei libri cosiddetti “trade”, cioè quelli di intrattenimento, quindi escludendo l’editoria scolastica e quella che si occupa di testi tecnici. A questi quattro gruppi se ne può aggiungere un quinto – Simon & Schuster – attivo sul mercato statunitense, ed è per questo che spesso si parla dei “Big Five” dell’editoria mondiale. È importante tenere a mente che non si tratta dei gruppi più grandi in assoluto, ma di quelli più grandi nella loro categoria: che comunque riguarda la maggior parte dei libri che si comprano in libreria."

https://www.ilpost.it/2018/01/29/editoria-big-five/

Numeri, sempre più numeri. Il mondo si è trasformato in una montagna di numeri. Appiccicati sopra a qualunque cosa, per creare l'illusione della comprensibilità.

Money quote: "Last year, The Times’s Digital Transition team decided to look at how we could help grow beat reporters’ data knowledge to help cover these issues. Our team’s mission is to “continuously transform the newsroom,” and with a focus on training all desks, we were well positioned to address these issues on a large scale.
We wanted to help our reporters better understand the numbers they get from sources and government, and give them the tools to analyze those numbers. We wanted to increase collaboration between traditional and non-traditional journalists for stories like this visual examination of New York football, our campaign finance coverage and this in-depth look at where the good jobs are. And with more competition than ever, we wanted to empower our reporters to find stories lurking in the hundreds of thousands of databases maintained by governments, academics and think tanks. We wanted to give our reporters the tools and support necessary to incorporate data into their everyday beat reporting, not just in big and ambitious projects."

https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-helped-our-reporters-learn-to-love-spreadsheets-adc43a93b919

Una storia esemplare di truffatori e manigoldi.

Money quote: "Martin died in July 2022 at age 63. Liberty never settled the bills that she had begged them to pay.

What Martin didn’t know when she joined Liberty was that she was sending her money to members of a family with a long and well-documented history of fraud.

For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences."

https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-healthshare-healthcare-sharing-ministries-obamacare