La più improbabile delle macchine da guerra, il più popolare mezzo da combattimento del terzo mondo, è Made in Japan: il pickup della Toyota in Africa combatte più di qualsiasi altro veicolo.

Money quote: "The vehicle costs a fraction as much as a modern main battle tank. In fact, you can buy 266 of them for the cost of just one tank. Plus it’s more dependable than a tank—and easier to maintain"

https://warisboring.com/the-toyota-pickup-truck-is-the-war-chariot-of-the-third-world-ea4a121e948b#.4cy7j6cjl

Dopo JFK, panico immotivato anche a LAX. Terrore degli assalitori inesistenti. Gli USA temono sia inevitabile il prossimo colpo

Money quote: "Passenger Scott McDonald said he was getting off a plane in the middle of the incident and was told by the crew to get back on. He said looking out the window he could see many evacuees gathered out on the tarmac, a strange sight even for someone who travels almost constantly"

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/08/28/possible-active-shooter-los-angeles-airport/Svpye75bv84S6wCRRcDHvL/story.html

Wikipedia ha messo in linea una pagina con le "Simple Request Breakdowns", le statistiche di accesso per tipologia di browser e di sistema operativo/apparecchio al suo sito. Molto interessante.

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os-and-browser/os-browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view

Un paper (ho messo il link al pdf) che mostra come, utilizzando gli smartphone, dettare in inglese o in cinese sia fino a tre volte più veloce che non scrivere con la tastiera virtuale.

Questo apre prospettive interessanti, anche perché i telefonini stanno proliferando, gli assistenti digitali diventano sempre più smart e questo tipo di analisi di fa capire che in futuro ci saranno investimenti costanti sui metodi e le interfacce di speech-to-text

Money quote: "In the speech input case, our speech recognition system gave an initial transcription, and then recognition errors could be corrected using either speech again or the smartphone keyboard. We found that with speech recognition, the English input rate was 3.0x faster, and the Mandarin Chinese input rate 2.8x faster, than a state-of-the-art miniature smartphone keyboard."

https://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/paper/speech_paper.pdf

Cade lo smartphone nella toilet e resta “impantanato” https://www.macitynet.it/smartphone-cade-toilet/

Sono passati sessant'anni adesso dal primo disco rigido (il Ramac, commercializzato da Ibm nel 1956) e oggi c'è chi celebra la sua fine. Secondo una società di analisi di mercato, nel 2018 non ci saranno più computer commercializzati con questa tecnologia. Il che potrebbe anche essere un problema, soprattutto per chi ha grandi archivi di dati.

Money quote: "Wags call hard drives "spinning rust," but they still have big advantages over SSDs. For one thing, they're more spacious and cheaper. A top-ranked Crucial MX300 SSD costs $130 for 525GB model, but that much money will get you eight times the storage space for a hard drive. SSDs wear out faster as the data in an individual memory cell is overwritten over and over. And companies buy hard drives by the thousand for cloud-computing services like photo sharing, online backup and document editing."

https://www.cnet.com/news/most-pcs-will-use-ssd-not-hard-drives-in-2018/

La bellezza del brutalismo. Anzi: The Beauty of Brutalism. Il cemento armato come estetica. Un bel saggio su quello che da noi è il prosieguo del razionalismo fascista

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-concrete-buildings-of-brutalism-are-beautiful

Money quote: "The exceptional brilliance of 1960s architecture comes partly from technical improvements. In its versatility and strength, reinforced concrete was vastly superior to any earlier building technology, freeing architects to make the shapes they judged most useful and beautiful. It killed off the millennia-long design tyranny of the loadbearing facade – a structurally necessary vertical plane that left architects little more to decide on than where to put the windows and how to decorate them. With concrete, the load could be carried on a few columns, and decks of accommodation could float where the designer and client wanted them, not where gravity insisted they be placed. There could be more outdoor space, more light, external pedestrian routes at any height, or luxuriantly planted terraces halfway up buildings. With newer, better heating options than open fireplaces, windows could be bigger, and rooms could reach sizes that would in earlier centuries have been unendurably drafty. Architects of the 1960s had a vastly richer palette with which to paint."

Avevo intervistato sia lui che il suo collega e coinventore del laptop (invenzione da un punto di vista di design, interfaccia d'uso e ingegnerizzazione). Mi spiace molto sia morto John Ellenby. Ottimo obituary del NYTimes

Money quote: "The Compass came with advanced, and expensive, data storage capacity called bubble memory and was accordingly pricey, originally selling for $8,150 ($20,325 today). As a result, it found an enthusiastic market not with consumers but rather in Washington."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/technology/john-ellenby-visionary-who-helped-create-early-laptop-dies-at-75.html

La University of Chicago è l'ultima in ordine di tempo e la più grande finora ad aver dichiarato (in maniera un po' plateale) che la via dell'Accademia è quella del politically correct stanno divergendo. Il settore delle scienze hard non è toccato, ma quello delle humanities si, e parecchio.

Money quote: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” John Ellison, dean of students, wrote to members of the class of 2020, who will arrive next month."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/university-of-chicago-strikes-back-against-campus-political-correctness.html

Trovo affascinante l'idea stessa del Beta Testing. Questo articolo la porta molto avanti con aspetti che mi intrigano

Money quote:

"In other words: instead of just asserting that a thing would be better or more popular if done a different way, tell a story with details.

Maybe that’s not right for every beta test, but that’s what works for me. I like stories. A single person can convince me with a good story. Voting is not necessary or desired"

https://inessential.com/2016/08/27/on_beta_testing

E se fosse vero? Un segnale alieno che arriva dalle stelle... Diceva una famosa ricercatrice alla domanda se credesse all'esistenza di civiltà aliene: "Esistono sicuramente ma spero che non ci trovino mai".

Money quote: "“The signal conceivably fits the profile for an intentional transmission from an extraterrestrial source,” said Alan Boyle, author of The Case for Pluto who reported the story for Geekwire. “In any case, the blip is interesting enough to merit discussion by those who specialize in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”"

https://observer.com/2016/08/not-a-drill-seti-is-investigating-a-possible-extraterrestrial-signal-from-deep-space/

Se n'è andato il più grande degli Incredibles: Joe Sutter, papà del jumbo jet (747) ma anche del 707 e del 737. Aveva 95 anni.

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN116001

Facebook ha licenziato i suoi redattori in carne ed ossa per affidarsi a degli algoritmi, scrivono i nostri giornali. Somma di imprecisioni. Nessun licenziamento: erano freelance e collaboratori esterni (già così nostri giornali cambierebbero tono, se non altro viste le condizioni di lavoro dei giornalisti nostrani). E poi si sottovaluta la notizia più succosa: i sistemi automatici hanno subito sbagliato alla grande, da farsi licenziare, loro sì!

Money quote: "In a post about the changes, Facebook said the early move to eliminate human editors was a direct response to "the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year," an oblique reference to the raging controversy unleashed by the Gizmodo revelations. Facebook explained that the new, non-human Trending module is personalized "based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location (e.g., home state sports news), the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall." Instead of paying humans to "write topic descriptions and short story summaries," the company said "we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories." Which is why millions of Facebook readers this morning saw the "news" that Megyn Kelly is a traitor who has been fired."

https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/facebook-fires-human-editors-algorithm-immediately-posts-fake-news/

Fantastica, essenziale ma completa spiegazione di come funziona la lingua giapponese scritta nei suoi elementi base.

Money quote: "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce, let's use this symbol to encode an entire word instead. I'll pick the word "mouth"."

https://www.candyjapan.com/%E5%8F%A3

Il liceo classico è inutile? Riprendo per par condicio la polemica sulla scuola delle nostre eccellenze da un altro, fenomenale punto di vista...

Money quote: "Sententiam, dixi? Ne "Facebook" nomen quidem Gramellinus recte latine convertit. Considerate. Si lyceum tam efficacem est, ubi sunt latinis litteris docti viri aetatis nostrae?"

https://leonardo.blogspot.it/2016/09/de-inutilitate-lycei-classici-oratio_1.html

Straordinari monumenti più duraturi del bronzo. Templi buddisti in India, vecchi di duemila anni, scavati nella roccia.

Money quote: "Some of the sites are easy to visit and popular with tourists visiting from Mumbai or Pune, the two biggest cities within range of the caves. Others were so remote he trekked for several hours, relying on the directions of local guides or even 19th century maps"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/temples-inside-caves-are-what-remains-of-an-ancient-buddhist-society

Piccolo viaggio di qualche giorno a Los Angeles: fisiologicamente gli aggiornamenti saranno più "sparpagliati", come si dice. Buona giornata a tutti!

Ma prima di partire: pensieri e appunti di Prince sulle sue stesse canzoni.

Money quote: "When liner notes for The Hits were posted on thedawn.com three years later, fans were shocked to see that, rather than simply replicating Leeds’ writing, the notes on the site were clearly Prince’s own thoughts. The notes omit many tracks, include mention of songs that weren’t included in the box set at all, and include what appear to be editorial suggestions for Leeds."

https://medium.com/@anildash/princes-own-liner-notes-on-his-greatest-hits-3a7baf4aec66#.7mv2jx4vf

Fotografare il cibo. Sedici fotograficda oggi provano a reinterpretare le immagini di uno dei principali aspetti della vita. Vale un'occhiata.

Shootfood | A Food Photography Project

https://www.shootfood.it/

I vestiti - e il vestirsi - come forma di pensiero e di cultura. Da buon italiano ero partito prevenuto (dopotutto da noi la cultura della moda, dell'abbigliamento, bla bla bla) ma mi sono subito ricreduto. Spettacolare.

Money quote: "Where language falls short though, clothes might speak. Ideas, we languidly suppose, are to be found in books and poems, visualised in buildings and paintings, exposited in philosophical propositions and mathematical deductions. They are taught in classrooms; expressed in language, number and diagram. Much trickier to accept is that clothes might also be understood as forms of thought, reflections and meditations as articulate as any poem or equation. What if the world could open up to us with the tug of a thread, its mysteries disentangling like a frayed hemline?"

https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-philosophy-hold-clothes-in-such-low-regard

Qualche buon consiglio per l'ascolto di palati fini da BlogRegular

"Un unico disastro che ha nome vita enorme:" Bruckner e dintorni

https://blogregular.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/abruckner/