Ma voi sapete cos'è Vim? Da dove viene? Perché è fatto com'è fatto? No? Ecco, non chiedervelo oltre, e invece leggete La storia di Vim

https://antoniodini.com/storia-vim/

Avete presente le villette monofamiliari dei sobborghi americani? Quei dormitori infiniti, che un po' di tempo fa sono stati raccontati da *Desperate Housewives*? Beh, quel modello urbanistico ha una data di nascita e un creatore. E una storia, nata in un campo di patate. Si chiamano Cookie-Cutter Suburb (noi diremmo "sobborghi fatti con lo stampino) o più propriamente Tract housing.

Money quote: "The idyllic ideal of modern suburbia in the United States was born in 1947 with the creation of Levittown, a large housing development in Long Island, New York. Businessman Abraham Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, turned some potato fields into a neighborhood bearing their name, with more than 17,000 uniform, boxy, detached homes spaced equally along carefully meandering and manicured streets. The project, which reduced the building of each home to an assembly-line system of 26 steps for speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, catered in particular to returning World War II veterans looking for safe and stable homes during a national housing shortage. The affordable cost allowed thousands of families to become homeowners, but only certain families."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/levittown-new-york

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tract_housing

Lasciar vagare la propria mente e meravigliarsi, ponderando l'esistente e con essa l'esistenza. È fondamentale, no? Soprattutto per i bambini.

Money quote: "If you ask yourself what it is like to experience wonder, or curiosity, or awe, I hope you’ll agree that the answers differ. Wonder is a mode of consciousness, a way of being aware of the world, both in perception and feeling, that differs from our ordinary perception of things in a unique way. We perceive the object of our wonder as in some way strange or puzzling, even mysterious, beyond our understanding, yet worthy of our attention for its own sake. It might be accompanied by a drive to enquire and seek explanations, but even then it is primarily a receptive state, in which the object takes centre-stage. Wonder is other-oriented, open to what reveals itself to us. It often leaves us lost for words, but it doesn’t pronounce awe’s definite judgment that its object is great – we are confronted first and foremost by mystery, not power or greatness."

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-good-teachers-allow-a-childs-mind-to-wander-and-wonder

Vecchi classici sempre attuali

https://youtu.be/CtVc0QTYv9w

Mi ricordavo che era da qualche parte nel mio archivio per due motivi: il titolo che avevo trovato (Dimmi quanto quanto quanto) mi piaceva da morire e il prof che avevo intervistato è un amico geniale. Adesso, dopo che ha vinto il premio Nobel per la fisica, mi pare l'occasione giusta per tirarlo fuori.

Money quote: "Qualunque interferenza, infatti, e il gioco non funziona più. "Per questo - dice Parisi - il primo posto dove potremmo mettere un calcolatore quantistico è lo spazio esterno, magari a metà strada fra due galassie. Là c'è una ragionevole assenza di interferenze tale da poterlo far funzionare"."

https://antoniodini.com/dimmi-quanto-quanto-quanto/

Da anni faccio una fatica incredibile a leggere cose lunghe (che credo si chiamino "libri"). Per dire, faccio molta meno fatica a scrivere, anche se non riesco più a scrivere cose lunghe (che per combinazione credo si chiamino sempre "libri"). C'è un motivo, però. Segue il motivo.

Money quote: "A few nights a week, I’d make a feeble attempt at proving the world wrong, swimming up through my exhaustion to pick up a novel and push through its pages. Sentences were newly terrifying; tiny minefields of meaning where I might miss a principle I’d later be called upon to produce, freshly plucked. I labored for months over what had once taken me days. I told myself that this was pleasure; that these motions were sufficient proof that I hadn’t allowed myself to be drained of joy and filled with something else."

https://longreads.com/2018/08/14/on-not-being-able-to-read/

BGP spiegato con i Flintons. Geniale!

Money quote:

Dino tells Fred & Wilma where he is. They tell Barney & Betty where they are, and that they know where Dino is.

To find Dino ask Barney/Betty, who send you to Fred/Wilma, who show you Dino.

If Dino wants to hide & not tell anyone, you can’t get to or find Dino!

https://twitter.com/bindul/status/1445484903387176963?s=20

Voi non ci crederete, ma è quello che vorrei fare anche io e trasformare il mio sito statico (che non riesco a ridurre) in un sito alimentato a energia solare e che vive su un RPi. Ma non riesco a fare neanche la prima parte, ahimè, eppure mi accontenterei di far stare tutto sul Raspberry. Il progetto qui sotto invece è fantastico (e utilizza una batteria da auto come accumulatore, pensa te).

Money quote: "I've put a solar panel on my balcony, which is connected to a solar charge controller. This device charges an old worn-out car battery and provides power to a Raspberry Pi 3b+, which in turn powers this (static) website."

https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html

Il primo vaccino della storia contro un parassita, cioè la malaria. Stiamo vivendo tempi incredibili e ci accapigliamo come degli imbecilli.

Money quote: "Malaria kills about half a million people each year, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa — including 260,000 children under 5. The new vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, rouses a child’s immune system to thwart Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of five malaria pathogens and the most prevalent in Africa.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday endorsed the vaccine, the first step in a process that should lead to wide distribution in poor countries. To have a malaria vaccine that is safe, moderately effective and ready for distribution is a historic event, said Dr. Pedro Alonso, director of the W.H.O.’s global malaria program."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/health/malaria-vaccine-who.html

Il tema della cosiddetta protofantascienza, cioè gli inizi della fantascienza quando ancora non era tale, è affascinante e molto dibattuto. Si ritrovano temi che verranno sviluppati molto dopo, addirittura tropi fatti e finiti. Pochi conoscono però questa Lady Margaret Cavendish, duchessa di Newcastle-upon-Tyne, che è nata nel 1623 e ha pubblicato più di venti libri, tra i quali questo *The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World* del 1666. Pura fantascienza.

Money quote: "In the story, a woman is kidnapped by a lovesick merchant sailor, and forced to join him at sea. After a windstorm sends the ship north and kills the men, the woman walks through a portal at the North Pole into a new world: one with stars so bright, midnight could be mistaken for midday. A parallel universe where creatures are sentient, and worm-men, ape-men, fish-men, bird-men and lice-men populate the planet. They speak one language, they worship one god, and they have no wars. She becomes their Empress, and with her otherworldly subjects, she explores natural wonders and questions their observations using science."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/one-of-the-earliest-science-fiction-books-was-written-in-the-1600s-by-a-duchess

La ricetta perfetta del club del libro (occhio è un thread su Twitter, e why not?)

Money quote: "I’ve run dozens of deep reading club sessions by now, and I’m kind of obsessed with the format. It’s doing something new and wonderful in a subtle way I want to try and explain.

Why deep reading clubs are fucking rad, a thread"

https://twitter.com/utotranslucence/status/1285415881120481280

Il sogno bagnato di un matto amante dei computer: il laptop ultraleggero (ma bello squadrato) perfetto.

Money quote: "I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere."

https://habr.com/en/post/437912/

Dicono che stiamo entrando in una nuova epoca d'oro per i Podcast. Ecco perché

Money quote: "The survey confirmed that 23-25% of US adults listen to podcasts daily or a few times a week. Using the latest US Census data, that represents an audience of around 60 million people listening a few times a week or more, and 91 million people listening at least once a week."

https://chartable.com/blog/golden-age-of-podcasts

Il numero ~136 di Mostly Weekly è appena uscito e si può leggere qui di seguito. Ma se vi abbonate vi arriva sempre nella vostra inbox e, oltre che gratuito, è anche più comodo.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/136/

C'è chi fa sul serio con i moduli per fare login.

Money quote: "Let’s walk through some login patterns and why I think they’re not ideal. And then let’s look at some better ways of tackling login. TL;DR; create login forms that are simple, linkable, predictable, and play nicely with password managers."

http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/dont-get-clever-with-login-forms/

Strane storie della domenica. Caccia amatoriale ai satelliti spia

Money quote: "Many of the astronomers Molczan contacted weren’t keen on the idea of spending hours outside in the freezing, pre-dawn darkness trying to track a satellite that was designed to avoid detection. So Molczan tried a different approach. He told the astronomers that this would, in all probability, be the only time they would ever be able to see a shuttle in orbit. A few stargazers who were unable to resist this once in a lifetime opportunity agreed to help."

https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/meet-the-amateur-astronomers-hunting-for-spy-satellites

Un ritratto senza tempo di John McPhee scritto nel 2017 da Sam Anderson per il New York Times. McPhee è un giornalista incredibile, ormai molto anziano, una specie di monumento che tutto accetterebbe tranne che essere definito tale. Da leggere (e da leggere anche McPhee, che in Italia è stato tradotto).

Money quote: "McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook. Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects — “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it — but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, called, simply, “Oranges” — the literary cousin of Duchamp’s urinal mounted in an art museum. In 1999, McPhee won a Pulitzer Prize for his 700-page geology collection, “Annals of the Former World,” which explains for the general reader how all of North America came to exist. (“At any location on earth, as the rock record goes down into time and out into earlier geographies it touches upon tens of hundreds of stories, wherein the face of the earth often changed, changed utterly, and changed again, like the face of a crackling fire.”) He has now published 30 books, all of which are still in print — a series of idiosyncratic tributes to the world that, in aggregate, form a world unto themselves."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html

Apache Kafka a fumetti (però si impara e i disegni sono un piccolo capolavoro)

https://www.gentlydownthe.stream

Esiste una categoria (minore) di storici che si occupa di tatuaggi. Una delle sfide che questi ricercatori devono affrontare è che molti proprietari di materiale storicamente significativo non si fanno avanti per condividere le loro scoperte, per paura che gli studiosi e il pubblico in generale possano liquidare l'argomento come superficiale o addirittura ripugnante. Imperterriti, ogni anno questi studiosi documentano strumenti e disegni rari e scoprono le tracce della provenienza di differenti parti del corpo tatuate che si vedono pubblicamente o no. Spesso, tutto questo succede tra grandi controversie e infuocati dibattiti tra esperti del settore. La cosa è diventata rilevante per un motivo molto semplice: la moderna pratica del tatuaggio ha acquisito un appeal che prima non aveva (almeno in occidente) diventando sempre più popolare, anche se le sue origini sono multiformi e multiculturali, e i suoi lati oscuri non sono stati ancora tutti esposti.

Money quote: "“People are curious about it,” says Margaret Hodges, coauthor, with fellow historian Derin Bray, of "Loud, Naked & in Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston". From the 1910s to the 1960s, generations of the Liberty family ran tattoo parlors in downtown Boston, catering to sailors and socialites alike. Hodges and Bray’s densely footnoted book places the family’s trade in the context of harbor towns from Baltimore to Vancouver, particularly wherever military ships were docked. Liberty tattooists advertised pattern repertoires (known in the trade as “flash”) depicting everything from nurses to gravestones, athletes to demons, and martinis with racehorses labeled “Ruin of Man.” Portraits of female vixens were rendered “loud, naked and in three colors,” one Liberty tattooist told a Boston newspaper in 1947, as reporters documented the industry and its postwar decline."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tattoo-historians-and-archives

È inverno, fuori piove: rimanete impastati su un articolo che sembra non finire più e mai lo vorreste: i colori strani, particolari, e la storia di uno di loro. Affascinante, detto da uno che è parzialmente daltonico.

Money quote: "Since I became interested in colors a few years ago, I began amassing a mental collection of in-betweens. Colors that didn’t fall into a clear category. Colors that I felt were misnamed or misunderstood. The majority of them fell into the same bucket as so-called copper green. In here, I threw aqua, cyan, turquoise, teal, and Tiffany. I filed away glaucous and Cambridge Blue. None of them are really blue and none of them are really green. I suppose they’re all shades of turquoise, yet that seems wrong, too. Turquoise is a relatively new name. Before there was turquoise, there was verdigris."

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/11/24/verdigris-the-color-of-oxidation-statues-and-impermanence

C’è una nuova parola che dovete imparare: Zoom dysmorphia. Ed è l’effetto dei quasi due anni passati a vedere il nostro volto ripreso e schiacciato da videocamere frontali grandangolari durante le infinite call effetto secondario della pandemia. Una visione che sta cambiando in profondità il modo con il quale molti di noi si percepiscono.

Money quote: “In the age of Zoom, people became inordinately preoccupied with sagging skin around their neck and jowls; with the size and shape of their nose; with the pallor of their skin. They wanted cosmetic interventions, ranging from Botox and fillers to face-lifts and nose jobs. Kourosh and colleagues surveyed doctors and surgeons, examining the question of whether video-conferencing during the pandemic was a potential contributor to body dysmorphic disorder. They called it ‘Zoom dysmorphia’.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/zoom-dysmorphia