Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
Per contatti su Telegram: @antoniodini
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Ecco qua, visto che me la chiedevate: la storia di The Burning Man. Il viaggio straordinario di un'epoca ormai finita.

Money quote: "The paradox was unpacked by Larry Harvey, Burning Man’s primary founder, during a lecture in Minneapolis in 2000. He asked the audience to imagine ‘a place that is no place at all apart from what we choose to make of it’. It was Harvey, the landscape gardener and one-time taxi driver, who had, with his carpenter buddy Jerry James and friends, lugged an eight-foot wooden statue onto San Francisco’s Baker Beach, summer solstice, 1986. They weren’t the first to draw a crowd to a flaming object on that beach. Nor was Harvey the first to torch an anthropomorphic figure as a means to catharsis. He didn’t start the fire, but in the three decades before he died on 28 April 2018 following a stroke, Harvey sure kicked up some dust. The newly-built statue was razed annually at Baker Beach until 1990, when it was deemed a public safety hazard destined to be razed somewhere else.

That elsewhere, it turned out, was an absolute nowhere."

https://aeon.co/essays/what-happens-when-you-set-foot-on-absofreakinglutely-nothing
Ci vorranno decenni prima che la stampa americana riesca a darsi pace per quel mucchio di banditi, profittatori e falliti che Donald Trump ha tirato fuori e portato nei pressi della Casa Bianca.

Money quote: “A handful of former and wannabe administration officials have descended on the Bellagio Hotel to speak at an annual conference put on by one of their own: Anthony Scaramucci, the investment executive whose stint in the West Wing lasted only 11 days. The summit, called SALT, is a kind of reunion for these Trump discards, who either were hired and fired at the president’s behest, or never landed the enticing job that he had dangled.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/scaramucci-christie-sessions-and-kelly-talk-trump/589162/
Ci sono molti modi per definire l'impatto che il lavoro di un singolo può aver avuto sulla collettività (e su quanto grande nello spazio e nel tempo sia questa collettività). Inventare le minifigure del Lego, secondo me è enorme. È il caso di Jens Nygaard Knudsen, scomparso da pochi giorni. Io faccio parte di quella comunità su cui ha avuto un impatto enorme. Penso anche voi.

https://www.ilpost.it/2020/02/24/jens-nygaard-knudsen-lego-inventore/
Gli hacker della Corea del Nord sono dei gran ladroni. Letteralmente.

Money quote: “We should not be surprised that state-sponsored hackers have moved into crypto. According to Nikkei, which obtained a copy of the report, the UN panel said cryptocurrencies have given North Korea a new way to get around sanctions, since “they are hard to trace, can be laundered many times and are independent from government regulation.””

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613099/north-koreas-military-has-stolen-more-than-half-a-billion-dollars-in/
Il voto elettronico è veramente una fregatura. Aspettate e vedete. Anzi, no: non c’è bisogno di aspettare. Dopo l’opinione pubblica manipolata via social, non ci manca altro che il voto digitale senza controprova cartacea e siamo a posto.

Prendi, ad esempio, la Svizzera...

Money quote: ““The vulnerability is astonishing,” said Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University and did not do the research but read the researchers’ report. “In normal elections, there is no single person who could undetectably defraud the entire election. But in this system they built, there is a party who could do that.””

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmakk3/researchers-find-critical-backdoor-in-swiss-online-voting-system
Negli Usa un tizio di 25 anni che ha arrotondato facendo il donatore di sperma è - dice lui - padre biologico di un centinaio di bambini. La cosa sarebbe già folle di per sé, ma se si guarda meglio c’è di peggio: un intero settore che lavora per tirare fuori soldi ai figli della provetta di un qualche donatore. Compresi quelli che vendono libri farneticanti ipotetici legami emotivi-famigliari tra fratellastri e sorellastre.

Un tempo a fare un centinaio di figli era gente come Attila o qualche sultano. Adesso, una macchina per la soddisfazione degli individui infelici impazzita e senza mai controllo.

Money quote: “The U.S. has never considered this issue a necessary one to regulate. While countries like the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands limit how many children a single donor can have, the U.S. only has voluntary guidelines from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, a professional group for fertility specialists. “It’s concerning to have single donors used too much,” says ASRM’s president, Peter Schlegel, adding that more than 100 times is indeed too many. ASRM guidelines suggest no more than 25 births per sperm donor in a population of 800,000 people, to prevent accidental incest. Several prominent sperm banks, which ship material all over the country and even the world, have set their own limits now—sometimes, only in response to news reports uncovering large sibling groups.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/bachelorette-contestant-114-kids-sperm-donor/589258/
Il bello della scienza non sono i risultati, ma il metodo con cui ci arriva. E che consente di avanzare riconoscendo gli errori.

Money quote: “Between them, these 18 genes have been the subject of more than 1,000 research papers, on depression alone. And for what? If the new study is right, these genes have nothing to do with depression. “This should be a real cautionary tale,” Keller adds. “How on earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?””

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/waste-1000-studies/589684/