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

I diari di un diplomatico. Interessante.

Money quote: "My Diplomatic Life – True Stories gives you an in-depth look, warts and all, at the varied work, I as a diplomat had to carry out in various conflict posts including the so-called “Axis of Evil” posts around the world. I volunteered for the posts my colleagues avoided.

Below are some of the exciting and sometimes quite unbelievable situations and experiences I met with during my diplomatic career. There are more, but space is limited so these are some of the highlights. These I will expand in posts in the coming weeks and months. Enjoy!"

https://www.mydiplomaticlife.com

"Venom - La furia di Carnage" è un film sgangherato - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/10/venom-furia-di-carnage-recensione-film/

Il grande tema dell'onboarding.

Money quote: "The answer: start your report doing real work as soon as possible. If they’re a software engineer, they should be committing code week one (ideally day 2 or 3); If they’re a product manager, they should be attending meetings and picking up supporting activities on a similar time frame. Then the tone has been set - working here means getting things done."

https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/08/28/Optimize-Onboarding.html

La molto strana e molto affascinante storia dell'entrata dimenticata alla Clinton Hall in una vecchia stazione di Manhattan (una delle 28 originali). Da leggere.

Money quote: "The address, named after America’s once-richest man, was the site of one of the most bizarre events in New York history. The library building’s previous tenant was the Astor Place Opera House, and in 1849 there took place an evening of violence, whose after-effects are still felt today: the Shakespeare Riots!"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-forgotten-entrance-to-clinton-hall-new-york-new-york

Un po' di tempo fa la rivista scientifica Nature ha indagato quali possibili scenari plausibili ci avrebbero atteso per il coronavirus. Un buon benchmark per vedere dove invece siamo oggi.

Money quote: "“The future will very much depend on how much social mixing resumes, and what kind of prevention we do,” says Joseph Wu, a disease modeller at the University of Hong Kong. Recent models and evidence from successful lockdowns suggest that behavioural changes can reduce the spread of COVID-19 if most, but not necessarily all, people comply."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5

È morta a 88 anni Myriam Sarachik, una delle scienziate più importanti del pianeta non solo per la sua ricerca (notevole) ma per la sua vita e il ruolo che ha avuto nel definire il ruolo delle donne nel mondo accademico e della ricerca in America.

Money quote: "The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year"

https://web.archive.org/web/20211012190222/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/science/myriam-sarachik-physics.html

C'è un villaggio in Slovacchia che per secoli ha girato intorno a se stesso. E non sono gli unici.

Money quote: "These buildings were put up roughly once every 30 or 40 years, and each time the skew was counterclockwise—a pattern that occurred consistently over the course of 300 years."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/slovakia-neolithic-rotating-buildings

Il Wall Street Journal ci regala un singolo articolo che è contemporaneamente una delle cose più importanti da capire anche in Italia e un esempio di giornalismo da manuale. Senza spocchia, anzi in maniera piacevole.

Money quote: "What do the wealthy pay in federal taxes? On paper, the top marginal income-tax rate is 37% on ordinary income and 23.8% on capital gains. Government estimates put high-income filers’ average rates in the mid-20s.

A new Biden administration analysis, however, pegs the average tax rate for the 400 wealthiest households at 8.2% from 2010 to 2018. If that is right, the administration has a firmer case to raise taxes on the ultrarich.

But it isn’t so simple. To understand why, we’ll get to tax policy, but let’s start with fourth-grade math. Fractions!"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-income-tax-rate-on-the-rich-8-or-23-depends-on-whose-math-you-use-11633874400

L’incredibile successo della Southwest, la prima, vera low cost del pianeta: la “love airline”

Money quote: “Fifty. Five-O. No one who was there for the start-up of Southwest Airlines can quite believe that much time has passed. No one can believe how successful their irreverent little company has become, either. “I wish I’d had enough money to buy the stock in the early days,” says Gene Van Overschelde, one of the original pilots and the first head of Southwest’s pilots union. If he’d put just under $1,000 into the company’s stock in 1978, he would have more than $1.5 million today.”

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/southwest-airlines-50-anniversary/

La morte di Kenzo ha lasciato un grande vuoto, anche un anno dopo

Money quote: "One of our biggest tributes to Kenzo was the spring 2018 show, where we designed for his muse and frequent collaborator Sayoko Yamaguchi and our muse Ryuichi Sakamoto. We cast 83 Asian models to walk the show. We used our time there to tell the younger versions of “us” that we matter and that we can reach these high places, just as his existence had told me. Kenzo came to all of our shows, and he was the celebrity I cared most about. I always ran up to him afterward, and he always told us how much he appreciated our efforts to keep the past alive."

https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/kenzo-takada-showed-me-a-different-way.html

"The Last Duel" racconta un Medioevo spietato - la mia recensione di un film da vedere scritta per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/10/the-last-duel-recensione-film-ridley-scott/

Altro che olandese volante. Negli oceani da quarant'anni gira una balena che parla in falsetto. E questo ha generato una vera e propria leggenda tra gli umani. Chissà fra le balene.

Money quote: "Watkins and his team tracked the whale for more than a decade. They published a paper about the potential of underwater sound systems such as the Pentagon’s for tracking individual whales in 2004, but when the paper received mainstream media coverage, the whale entered the popular imagination. People began to wonder: if the whale was vocalizing on a different frequency to others, could other whales hear him? Could he hear them? Was he swimming the ocean, plaintively calling into the darkness? Was he alone? Was he … lonely?"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/13/loneliest-whale-in-the-world-search