Mostly, I Write

E per concludere la serata. Un bel video realizzato da Spike Jonze per l'HomePod di Apple: quattro minuti di goduria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=305ryPvU6A8

Una cosa alla quale non avevo mai pensato. La ricchezza e l’intelligenza-merito non corrispondono. E c’è modo scientifico per esprimere il concetto. Money quote: “ The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role. But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.” https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/

Stiamo rimettendo in dubbio il determinismo genetico e un approccio piuttosto strumentale e dogmatico alla complessità dell’esistenza degli organismi biologici. E adesso chi glielo dice a quelli di Repubblica? Money quote: “Twentieth-century biology was dominated by a strongly reductionist agenda even before James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins revealed the structure of DNA in 1953. Early geneticists knew perfectly well that they were studying statistical correlations (if one makes such-and-such a change in gene x, then allows the organism to develop in a fixed environment e, one will observe alteration f, etc). In later generations, however, the language of causation started to creep in, and with it the idea of a fixed relationship between genes and body features. Every reader of this essay will have read or heard phrases such as ‘the gene for breast cancer’, ‘the gene for autism’ or even ‘the gene for intelligence’ (try typing any of those phrases into a search engine). The cultural idea that went with this slip of meaning – that bodies are made according to a genetic blueprint – placed genes at the centre of mainstream biological thought. The discovery and progressive unravelling of the double helix seemed only to confirm their place there” https://aeon.co/essays/the-feedback-loop-is-a-better-symbol-of-life-than-the-helix

Due mesi di notizie solo su carta, niente internet. Com'è andata? Ecco cosa ha capito il giornalsita del New York Times che ha tentato l'atroce e pericoloso esperimento... Money quote: "I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I'm embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

“Il problema dei tre corpi” di Cixin Liu - romanzo molto bello: ecco la mi recensione per Fumettologica http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/03/il-problema-dei-tre-corpi-di-cixin-liu/

Due siti su tre sono fatti con Wordpress: benvenuti nell’era del web tutto uguale - i miei pensieri sull’argomento per La Stampa Money quote: “Viviamo come terremotati digitali tutti negli stessi prefabbricati online: casette fatte di bit organizzare sempre alla stessa maniera. Una monocoltura senza scampo e senza possibilità di fuga” http://www.lastampa.it/2018/03/08/tecnologia/idee/due-siti-su-tre-sono-fatti-con-wordpress-nata-la-monocoltura-del-web-ybL0F7x6zcdpt5gBnNaPCP/amphtml/pagina.amp.html

L’idea che ci debba essere solo sesso consensuale è un po’ meno ovvia e semplice di quel che sembra Money quote: “Like informed consent to medical procedures, sexual consent is a contested legal construct that has evolved over time. It is a concept that the law uses to distinguish between criminal and non-criminal sex. But how do we determine whether consent is present or absent? Even the most affirmative consent-based sexual-assault jurisdictions, where consent is understood as the subjective product of the complainant’s mind at the time of the alleged assault, rely on judicial constructs of consent” https://aeon.co/ideas/how-do-we-understand-sexual-pleasure-in-this-age-of-consent

Gli indizi che Amazon possa avviare la sua struttura di logistica e spedizioni per tutti si sommano. E costituiscono un argomento circostanziale interessante, oltre a quello logico, che Amazon prima o poi effettivamente lo farà. Money quote: "Considering the decades FedEx and UPS have had to build out their networks, it will be an uphill climb for Amazon to make a dent in the industry. That said, Amazon has reportedly been working on making its own logistics network a reality after a disappointing holiday season in 2013 during which countless packages were delivered late." https://bgr.com/2018/02/09/amazon-delivery-service-swa-fedex-ups/

Avevo questa idea, come tanti, che una buona dormita ti aiuta a staccare un attimo e a vedere un problema, che cerchi di risolvere con fatica, a mente fresca magari per trovare una bella soluzione. E poi arriva il solito guastafeste con il suo mumbo-jumbo. Money quote: "Sleep is also critical to problem solving. When my students are stuck on a maths problem, sleep on it is often the only wisdom I have to offer. This adage has served me well in the past and now enjoys a strong neurological basis thanks to the research Walker draws on. Walker relates problem solving to the REM phase of sleep, demonstrating that it is in this critical stage of unconsciousness that we form novel connections between individual chunks of knowledge. REM sleep is where our ideas crystallise and recombine into new, creative thoughts. The link is so pervasive that the phrase sleep on it exists in most languages." https://medium.com/@fjmubeen/why-sleep-on-it-is-the-most-useful-advice-for-learning-and-also-the-most-neglected-86b20249f06d

Sono affascinato da Malta e dai racconti sulle tre piccole isole al centro del Mediterraneo. Come il reportage che segue. Money quote: "Maltese politics were also fascinating: always raucous, occasionally violent. Labour and the Christian Democrat-style Nationalists were invariably closely matched with entrenched tribal support: more like United vs City than left vs right. And small-country back-scratching was part of the fun, especially because so many jobs were government ones. This was intensified by the single transferable vote system, more or less as in Ireland, which encourages competition between candidates of the same party. You get elected by knowing everyone, and doing Tammany Hall-style favours. “There’s always been clientelism. Poor people trying to pressure politicians to get them a job or promotion,” explains Henry Frendo, professor of modern history at the University of Malta." https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2018/02/malta-island-secrets-and-lies

Grosso guaio a San Francisco: guerra tra gang, utenti VIm contro utenti emacs. Feriti negli scontri, la polizia opera degli arresti. Indagata la Church of Emacs, guidata dal controverso programmatore e "guru" Richard Stallman. Sospetti legami con il crimine organizzato degli editor. Money quote: "As police officers cleared away yellow tape from the crime scene, a nearby eyewitness sighed and shook his head. “I never knew that editing text could be that controversial. Maybe if those guys were indenting with spaces instead of tabs, all of this could have been avoided.”" https://medium.com/halting-problem/dolores-park-assault-linked-to-vim-vs-emacs-gang-war-3fb666d72051

Stanno tornando di moda i plotter con penna/pennarellino. Una volta erano un prodigio tecnologico, oggi sono una cosa hipster per fare arte digitale/analogica vintage. Fico! Money quote: "You might wonder what's so special about pen plotters? Well, let me tell you. Pen plotters are friendly robots from a not so distant past. They're the missing link between pencils and laser printers. They're lovely pieces of high precision technology that nobody cares about anymore. They're computer controlled machines that use regular pens to draw on regular paper with incredible speed and precision. They would draw blueprints for tweedy engineers and turtlenecked architects back in the 70's and 80's, they would draw colorful charts on transparencies for slick investment bankers to present on overhead projectors, and they probably also drew the schematics for the laser- and inkjet printers that replaced them a decade later. They were expensive, beautifully engineered, high quality machines. Which means that there are still plenty of them around, fully working and very cheap. You can, for instance, pick up an HP 7475A on eBay for roughly $50, it's a great starter machine and I can't recommend it enough." http://www.tobiastoft.com/posts/an-intro-to-pen-plotters

Social e app varie che ci fanno dipendenza grazie alla dopamina. Il Guardian si lancia Money quote: “The capacity for so-called “persuasive technology” to influence behaviour in this way is only just becoming understood, but the power of the dopamine system to alter habits is already familiar to drug addicts and smokers. Every habit-forming drug, from amphetamines to cocaine, from nicotine to alcohol, affects the dopamine system by dispersing many times more dopamine than usual. The use of these drugs overruns the neural pathways connecting the reward circuit to the prefrontal cortex, which helps people to tame impulses. The more an addict uses a drug, the harder it becomes to stop” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Dyson Cyclone V10, l’iPhone degli aspirapolvere -il mio articolo per La Stampa http://www.lastampa.it/2018/03/06/tecnologia/news/dyson-cyclone-v-liphone-degli-aspirapolvere-6fb4tEjSC9jTrukRTu9I8I/pagina.html

Se siete amanti della cucina, vera o televisiva che sia, o semplicemente curiosi, questo articolo è inevitabile Money quote: “Noma, as you've probably heard, is the Copenhagen restaurant considered by many people, including me, to be the most influential in the world, the place where the dominant strains in world cooking — localism, seasonality, sustainability and science — came together into a whole, aided by Redzepi's strong sense of narrative” http://www.latimes.com/food/jonathan-gold/la-fo-gold-noma-copenhagen-20180302-story.html

Una bella intervista di The Believer a Laurie Sheck, scrittrice. Money quote: "THE BELIEVER: Are you genre-fluid? LAURIE SHECK: With Gertrude Stein, we say she is a writer. We don’t label her in terms of genre. I love that. Too often, fluidity makes people nervous. If they can’t label one thing or another, they crack. It’s bad enough with people, but with books, it’s the same thing. To me, it’s about liberty of mind. Labeling is the opposite of thinking. As if prose is not poetry as well? And a lot of poetry is not poetry—it’s just lines. The whole thing’s all messed up." https://logger.believermag.com/post/anti-particle-woman

Quello di cui si parla in questo articolo sono i designer, la loro "generazione perduta", quella allevata dagli hippie e avida, rapace, priva di spina dorsale. Una generazione che, nella Silicon Valley, non si farà rimpiangere. Ma questo ragionamento secondo me scavalca l'oceano e arriva fino a noi. Perché no? Money quote: "The current generation of designers have spent their careers learning how to work faster and faster and faster. And while there’s certainly something to be said for speed, excessive speed tends to blur one’s purpose. To get products through that gate before anyone noticed what they were and how foul they smelled. Because we broke some things. It’s one thing to break a database, but when that database holds the keys to interpersonal relationships the database isn’t the only thing that breaks." https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac7289549017

Negli Usa sta succedendo una cosa strana: la domanda di energia elettrica per la prima volta è piatta, cioè i consumi non stanno aumentando. Le conseguenze saranno estremamente interessanti, anche perché negli Usa le utility sono pubbliche e hanno l'imperativo di fare (sempre più) soldi per i propri azionisti. Money quote: "Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became “decoupled”:" https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/2/27/17052488/electricity-demand-utilities

I cellulari sono una protesi o addirittura un pezzo di noi, almeno secondo la nostra mente (e la giurisprudenza americana) Money quote: “In 2014, the United States Supreme Court used this observation to justify the decision that police must obtain a warrant before rummaging through our smartphones. These devices ‘are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy’, as Chief Justice John Roberts observed in his written opinion.” Are ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/are-you-just-inside-your-skin-or-is-your-smartphone-part-of-you

La vita media dei prodotti Apple è quattro anni e tre mesi - il mio articolo per Wired https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2018/03/05/la-vita-media-dei-prodotti-apple/