La storia delle moderne macchine fotografiche con il rullino di pellicola da 35 mm, che poi è diventato il sensore "full frame" (anche se ai tempi era definito il "piccolo formato") è legata a un uomo solo e alla sua particolare condizione fisica. La racconto qui

Money quote: "Barnack era malato: soffriva di asma acuta, che lo aveva reso invalido. Nonostante questo, l’uomo amava la vita all'aria aperta: il suo hobby preferito era la fotografia, ma l'asma gli impediva di portare con sé le fotocamere in legno per il grande formato "da campagna" e tutta l'attrezzatura necessaria (a partire dal cavalletto) che i fotografi del tempo utilizzavano.

Da uomo ingegnoso qual era, Barnack creò una piccola macchina fotografica che utilizzava dei piccoli rullini di pellicola e che poteva essere trasportata più facilmente durante le escursioni in montagna."

https://antoniodini.com/leica-invenzione-fotocamera/

Anobii si sta finendo di trasformare: comincia una vera Vita Nova

https://blog.anobii.com/it/2021/09/13/la-vita-nova-di-anobii/

Ci credete ai pianeti abitabili? Il più grande problema è arrivarci per verificare e toccare con mano. Questo, dopo venti anni, sembra un buon candidato.

Money quote: "That data, combined with archival data from colleagues going back 20 years, confirmed the presence of two orbiting super-Earths sized planets, i.e., planets which have a mass greater than the Earth’s but substantially below those of our local ice giants Uranus and Neptune."

https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/close-and-tranquil-solar-system-has-astronomers-excited/

La storia degli scacchi moderni dal punto di vista degli scacchi stessi. Cioè: perché i pezzi sono fatti come sono fatti? Beh, c'è una storia da leggere, davvero notevole.

Money quote: "The story of how the Staunton chess set came into being has become something of a legend. Like many legends the true facts are debated and there is more than one version of exactly what happened during those fateful days of 1849. There were three key people involved, Howard Staunton, Nathaniel Cook and John Jaques."

https://www.stauntonchesssets.com/staunton_history.html

C'è un che di folle nella società industriale. Uno degli aspetti più folli degli altri è l'omologazione. E l'idea che quello che va bene per un uomo vada bene per tutti (poi gli elitisti dicono l'opposto, ma di quello parliamo un'altra volta). Qual è il ragionamento di fondo? Beh, che per alcuni il lavoro è una missione, per altri una fatica per portare i soldi a casa e fare altro. L'idea di fondo della settimana lavorativa standard allora è veramente strana, no?

Money quote: "Today, we assume the forty-hour week without thanking the generations of socialists and unionists in the Eight-hour-day movement, whose struggle started around 1817 and didn’t bear global fruit until the middle of the twentieth century. ¶

But there’s nothing axiomatic about forty hours. Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions. And John Maynard Keynes, approximately the most influential economist in the history of the world, predicted his grandchildren would enjoy a 15-hour workweek. It seems he was wrong. But maybe only partly.

And of course Keynes himself worked like a madman. As did I, for most of my career. Because some jobs are just jobs, but others are vocations; people doing what they love, and who’d really rather be working than not. Nothing wrong with that."

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient

In California hanno fatto una legge per vietare lattò di togliersi il preservativo "alla vigliacca" cioè fare "stealthing". Io sono vecchio e quindi mi mancano proprio i riferimenti culturali per capire, ma il New Yorker lo spiega meglio.

Money quote: "How one Yale Law School student’s 2017 article addressing nonconsensual condom removal—an act known slangily as “stealthing”—sparked a viral debate that led to California’s recent bill to make the act illegal."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-meaning-of-californias-anti-stealthing-bill

Come mostrare il Green Pass con Siri e Comandi Rapidi su iPhone e iPad https://www.macitynet.it/come-mostrare-il-green-pass-con-siri-e-comandi-rapidi-su-iphone-e-ipad/

General Electric, oggi nota come GE, è nata nel 1892 grazie a Thomas Edison. È stata uno dei più grandi agglomerati negli Usa, poi negli ultimi anni ha cercato di svoltare verso il software ed è stato un disastro.

Money quote: "To Mr. Immelt, the future of industrial companies was in software and hard-core computing. Even now, that vision is widely considered to be correct and other industrial company leaders, including those who laughed at GE initially, are increasingly following the same path."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dimming-of-ges-bold-digital-dreams-11595044802?mod=djemalertNEWS

Negli USA hanno appena tradotto "Come si scrive una tesi di laurea. Se ne occupa anche il New Yorker. E noi ce lo ricordiamo ancora?

Money your: "“How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-guide-to-thesis-writing-that-is-a-guide-to-life

Secondo me Zoom è il male (solo Teams è peggio). E gli effetti dell'uso di di Zoom lo dimostrano, oltre alle intenzioni di chi lo ha messo al mondo, per così dire. Dopo, c'è l'inferno.

(ho fatto troppe call in questi giorni, lo ammetto)

Money quote: "“What happened with a pandemic is interesting,” Zoom’s chief product officer Odel Gal told me. “All the people that were resistant to using the technology were forced to use it.”"

https://www.vox.com/recode/21314793/zoom-fatigue-video-chat-facebook-google-meet-microsoft-teams

Espressioni regolari? Abbracciamo il potere di Awk

Money quote: "The Power of awk

I love awk. Its assumptions and defaults make parsing files very easy, and because of the way it's built, and awk programs run much faster than their Perl, Python or Ruby counterparts.

Awk's easy to learn."

http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/awk/index.htm

Stiamo vivendo la felice illusione che il futuro sia dei "coders", cioè la versione concettualmente ridotta dei programmatori. In realtà, guardando le cose da una prospettiva più ampia, siamo molto lontani da entrare in un mondo in cui la professione del "coder" sostituisce in maniera "sicura" e socialmente apprezzabile quella, per esempio, del medico o dell'avvocato o dell'ingegnere. Può sembrare, ma non è così. E i "coders" stanno per scomparire, come professione popolosa del futuro

Money quote: "I believe one of the more subtle impacts of this new way of working will be the tech workers losing some of the leverage they have over their employers. This will result in the further commodification of tech work, potentially less collective action by employees, and probably lower the salaries in the long run. Put another way, the technology industry will soon get a taste of what has been going on in other industries."

https://themargins.substack.com/p/software-will-eat-software-in-a-remote

Compiti per la domenica sera. Se a qualcuno dovesse servire, ecco come usare le triadi per fare degli assoli di chitarra decenti (l'istruttore è bravo)

Money quote: "Learn how to string together simple major and minor triads into fretboard spanning solo and lead playing sequences like a true hero. Harness the power of non-boring arpeggios into alternative chord voicing and become a champion of will and skill."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZcKC8EI6ko

La storia del frisbee è più complicata e lunga di quanto uno non possa immaginare. Ma molto interessante.

Money quote: "It starts with Thanksgiving dinner in 1937. Walter Frederick Morrison and his girlfriend (later wife) Lucille started a game of catch with a metal lid from a popcorn container. The pair had a good time with it, but discovered that the popcorn tin lids were easy to dent, and subsequently, no longer great for flying. They started using cake pans to play; they were easier to find, and cheap to buy. Fred and Lucille would even take the pans on outings to public places so they could play. One such outing was to a beach in Santa Monica, California. People watched as they played, and someone even offered the duo a quarter for their cake pan so they could play. Morrison knew an opportunity when he heard it; at that time, cake pans themselves only cost five cents. It stood to reason that there might be a commercial market for a flying disc toy. Dubbed the Flying Cake Pan — yes, Flying Cake Pan — they began to sell them for a quarter a piece at L.A. beaches.""

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/09/the-surprisingly-complicated-history-of-the-frisbee/

Anche da noi le biblioteche possono prestare la copia digitale di un libro per leggersela sul Kindle e sul Kobo. C'è anche il portale per poterlo fare a distanza. Negli Usa sono un po' più avanti, non solo per l'aspetto tecnologico e la capillarità del sistema, ma anche perché sono un popolo di lettori più forti di noi, che usano molto il sistema pubblico. Ma cosa vuol dire che una biblioteca può prestare l'ebook di un libro? C'è un costo e un'intera economia, dietro. E questo articolo del New Yorker la spiega.

Money quote: “We then saw the first wrinkle in one copy, one user,” Potash said. In 2011, HarperCollins introduced a new lending model that was capped at twenty-six checkouts, after which a library would need to purchase the book again. Publishers soon introduced other variations, from two-year licenses to copies that multiple readers could use at one time, which boosted their revenue and allowed libraries to buy different kinds of books in different ways. For a classic work, which readers were likely to check out steadily for years to come, a library might purchase a handful of expensive perpetual licenses. With a flashy best-seller, which could be expected to lose steam over time, the library might buy a large number of cheaper licenses that would expire relatively quickly. During nationwide racial-justice protests in the summer of 2020, the N.Y.P.L. licensed books about Black liberation under a pay-per-use model, which gave all library users access to the books without any waiting list; such licenses are too expensive to be used for an entire collection, but they can accommodate surges in demand. “At the time of its launch, the twenty-six-circulation model was a lightning rod,” Josh Marwell, the president of sales at HarperCollins, told me. “But, over time, the feedback we have gotten from librarians is that our model is fair and works well with their mission to provide library patrons with the books they want to read.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/an-app-called-libby-and-the-surprisingly-big-business-of-library-e-books

Oggi è l'ultimo giorno d'estate. Addio e grazie per tutto il pesce.

La Fender Stratocaster, ma fatta di Lego.

Money quote: "It’s one of the most iconic symbols in rock history, famous for birthing the biggest tunes ever recorded, and now the Fender Stratocaster is getting the LEGO treatment. The guitar best remembered for being set ablaze by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock ’69, lovingly shredded by Stevie Ray Vaughan and punished by Kurt Cobain has been reimagined by LEGO Ideas fan designer Tomáš Letenay.""

https://manofmany.com/entertainment/lego-ideas-fender-stratocaster-set

La genialità di una compagnia aerea che in Europa consociamo solo per sentito dire (ma che è stata tra gli altri l'ispirazione di Ryanair). Raccontata da una rivista texana (molto interessante) in occasione dei suoi 50 anni di servizio. La storia della Southwest Airlines è un gran bel leggere.

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/

Se non fosse che è vero, sembrerebbe uno scherzo. Siamo messi davvero male.

Money quote: "Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earmarked $1 billion of his $10 billion environmental philanthropy to conservation efforts Monday afternoon, aiming to protect 30% of the Earth's land and sea by 2030 in an effort to prevent mass extinctions."

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Jeff-Bezos-pledges-1-billion-to-protect-30-16474428.php

Negli Usa l'ascensore sociale è costantemente in moto, almeno all'apparenza. Tuttavia, ci sono rigidità nel sistema. E una certa memoria del passato. Il paese del manifesto destino, nato dalla volontà di pochi figli dell' illuminismo e della rivoluzione francese di sfuggire alle aristocrazie geriatriche (oltre che dai credenti di sette minoritarie per fuggire le persecuzioni e le guerre di religione) però ha una sua ricchezza antica, una sua specie di nobiltà, fatta di gente ricca da più tempo. La "Old Money" della east coast fotografata dal New Yorker.

(Old) Money quote: "You could say that the lives and tastes of so-called old money—old, that is, in the American sense—are the subject of Ellison’s staged photographic tableaux and cheeky, deadpan still-lifes. The markers we’ve come to associate with a particular brand of buttoned-up, Ivy League, East Coast Waspish wealth are omnipresent. His subjects seem to have stepped out of the pages of a J. Crew catalogue, and look as though they probably have names like Bunny and Tripp. They are white and often blond and are situated among gleaming Land Rovers, rolling golf courses, and pristine marble kitchens. The photographs appear, in other words, to be a part of the robust artistic tradition of depictions of the beneficiaries of fabulous dynastic wealth, with the Vineyard Vines fleece taking the place of baroquely ruffled lace and velvet as a mark of distinction. And they would be, if only his subjects were who they seem to be.


https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-old-money-looks-like-in-america-and-who-pays-for-it