Scaviamo dietro all'ideologia dell'urbanesimo ipertecnologico contemporaneo. C'è una profonda, tremenda distorsione che passa attraverso gli ultimi trent'anni. E fa probabilmente prendere fischi per fiaschi. Ad esempio, parliamo di SimCity...

Money quote: "Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today."

https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/

Negli Usa c'è parecchio dibattito sul tema dell'allattamento al seno, considerato molto più sano ed igienico di quello con latte artificiale: risulta che le donne di colore sono meno educate e usano il latte artificiale più spesso, mentre l'allattamento al seno avrebbe numerosi vantaggi, inclusa la riduzione dei tassi di obesità che sono molto più alti nella popolazione di colore.

Money quote: "What is surprising is one of the solutions the Department of Health offered to combat obesity: promoting breastfeeding among Black women. Ameliorating the racial breastfeeding gap, the report found, would increase breastfeeding rates and decrease obesity. Breastfeeding would help postpartum Black women lose weight and instruct Black infants on how to develop healthier relationships to satiety. New York’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program had been offering enhanced food packages for exclusively breastfeeding mothers since 1994, but was newly ordered to create “breastfeeding-friendly environments,” physical spaces that would promote breastfeeding."

https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/the-real-reason-black-mothers-are-being-pushed-to-breastfeed.html

Storia di gente che si stufa di Amazon, li fa secchi e vende direttamente con i piccoli negozi indipendenti. Succede anche questo. Storia lunga e che parla di biciclette (e delle loro componenti) ma molto interessante.

Money quote: "The COVID-19 pandemic affected supply chains everywhere. By the end of March 2020, there was a global shortage of bikes and bike parts, while demand surged. Most bike manufacturing is based in Asia, and as the pandemic wore on, PNW parts that used to take 45 days to ship from Taiwan took up to 200 days to arrive. By the start of 2021, Kerson heard of bike shops on the brink of closing down due to such high demand and low inventory. Pulling his products from Amazon, he thought, could help those independent bike shops — and rid PNW of an ongoing frustration.

Amazon had been posing serious customer service problems for PNW. Shopping for bike parts is complex, Kerson says, because choosing the right item depends on specifics about the customer and their bike. Amazon offers no way to provide that kind of expertise, so the rate of returns is high."

https://www.theverge.com/22618306/pacific-northwest-components-bike-company-quit-amazon-support-indie-shops

L'utilizzo del Green Pass da oggi diventa più frequente: ho preparato un articolo in cui spiego come usarlo con il Wallet di Apple se avete un iPhone (ma anche un iPad e magari un Apple Watch) oppure con Stockard (sia sugli iPhone che nei vari Android) e anche con un altro, piccolo trucco.

Fate girare, perché gli amici a cui sto consigliando questi modi sono entusiasti e si trovano molto meglio rispetto alle app della pubblica amministrazione.

Money quote: "La prima modalità, e di gran lunga la mia preferita, è usare il Wallet di iPhone, che permette di raccogliere documenti molto diversi: carte di credito e bancomat, carte di fedeltà, biglietti di treni e di aerei"

https://antoniodini.com/green-pass-wallet/

Il feeling di questo settembre…

L'America si è svegliata, stamani, e si sta scoprendo di nuovo Puritana

Money quote: "In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

L’uragano e New York City. Una raccolta di video (non verificati da me) su cosa sta succedendo in queste ore alla città.

https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1433264955248234499?s=21

Un sacco di tempo per cercare di smontare quella che viene considerata una verità incontrovertibile ma che forse è un mito: più larghe sono le ruote della bicicletta più fanno attrito e meno veloce va la bici.

Money quote: "What about the aerodynamics of wider tires? Many riders believe that wider tires will be slower, because they have more wind resistance. We tested this in the wind tunnel and found that the difference between 25 and 32 mm tires was too small to measure reliably in a real-world scenario."

https://www.renehersecycles.com/12-myths-in-cycling-1-wider-tires-are-slower/

Ogni Pnrr è diverso: mentre la Germania ha optato per il consolidamento della finanza pubblica, l’Italia ha puntato tutto sulla speranza che investimenti e riforme abbiano un effetto positivo duraturo sulla crescita. Indovinate chi è la formica e chi la cicala?

Money quote: "L’Italia ha presentato un piano per 191,5 miliardi di euro – circa il 7,4 per cento del Pil – di cui 68,9 miliardi in trasferimenti e 122,6 in prestiti, che include 142 progetti di investimento e 87 riforme. A questi si aggiungono circa 13 miliardi provenienti dal programma React-EU e 30 miliardi che il governo Draghi ha messo a disposizione attraverso la creazione di un Fondo complementare, portando così il piano di rilancio italiano a circa 233 miliardi.

Il piano della Germania è molto più modesto. Ammonta a 25,6 miliardi di euro – circa 0,7 per cento del Pil (un decimo del valore per l’Italia) – basandosi solo su trasferimenti e include 40 progetti di investimenti e 27 riforme. Al netto delle dimensioni dei due piani, che riflettono le differenti condizioni macroeconomiche dei due paesi prima della crisi e l’impatto della medesima su occupazione e Pil – la prima sostanziale differenza tra i due Pnrr emerge guardando alla cronologia indicata per il completamento di riforme e progetti di investimento."


https://www.lavoce.info/archives/89297/sul-pnrr-italia-e-germania-hanno-idee-diverse/

Non c'è solo un tema di esclusione dai media per quanto riguarda le persone di colore, ma anche di tonalità. Le femmine tendono ad essere "nero chiaro", mentre i maschi sono "nero scuro". E questo pone accenti discriminatori ulteriori. Una riflessione molto interessante.

Money quote: "All three of the Black actresses starring in Gossip Girl are light-skinned — the kind of Black this industry consistently deems worthy of lead roles. When it comes to this exhausting issue, Black women and teen girls get the worst of it. Oftentimes when you do see dark-skinned characters in desirable roles (or at all), it is Black men and boys. This has bolstered the notion that darker skin is equated to masculinity and lighter skin to femininity"

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/07/10572505/colorism-tv-gossip-girl-black-women-representation

Si tratta di un vero e proprio evento per l’editoria italiana.

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/09/one-piece-libro-piu-venduto-manga/

La ~131 della mia newsletter Mostly Weekly è online. Si parla di tag sbagliate, orologi e livelle, Potete leggerla da qui, ma vi consiglio di abbonarvi, tanto è gratuito e così non perdete nessun numero

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/131/

Certo che sarebbe bello se anziché cazzeggiare ogni tanto qualcuno parlasse del nostro Risorgimento come se fosse una cosa notevole, perché lo è stato. È stato incredibile, come incredibili erano i suoi personaggi. Solo che non è piaciuto a Hollywood e noi ne disprezziamo la retorica datata. Folli.

Prendete Giuseppe Garibaldi, ad esempio.

Money quote: "The man himself was a cocktail of paradoxes: inscrutable but heroic, restrained but inspiring, “the kind of man who has brown eyes but everyone thinks they are blue”, as one observer put it. In 1849, aged 42, he cut an eccentric pose in his gaucho’s poncho and sombrero. So too did his accomplices and followers, known as the garibaldini, in their motley attire. There was Anita, his fearless, pregnant Brazilian wife; Gustav von Hoffstetter, his idealist Bavarian aide-de-camp; the illiterate but genius populist Ciceruacchio; and the diligent 13-year-old Gaetano Sacchi; not to mention the wider band of patriots, thrill-seekers and ne’er-do-wells who accompanied their march from Rome."

https://www.newstatesman.com/tim-parks-garibaldi-heros-way-walking-review

È un po' di tempo che mi chiedo perché la smart home non ha avuto il successo che le aziende ritengono debba avere. Una parte della risposta potrebbe essere in questo articolo: fa schifo.

Money quote: "The CTA says its stagnant forecast is merely a function of competition, as an influx of device makers drive down the cost of hardware. But as someone who’s been living with various smart home gadgets for several years now, I have a different theory: They’re just not worth a big investment unless you have a limitless supply of time and patience."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90660570/the-smart-home-is-flailing-as-a-concept-because-it-sucks

Usare i "device" rende più stupidi del dovuto? A quanto pare, no: non è colpa della tecnologia bensì un talento innato.

Money quote: "Many articles in the popular and academic press assert that digital technology is to blame. Some experts, including those recently featured in stories by major news outlets, state that excessive use of digital technology is clearly linked to psychological distress in young people. To deny this connection, according to a prominent proponent of the link, is akin to denying the link between human activity and climate change."

https://theconversation.com/flawed-data-led-to-findings-of-a-connection-between-time-spent-on-devices-and-mental-health-problems-new-research-162585

Una chicca di più di un secolo fa, però sempre valida

A quanto pare tutti i giochi gestionali ambientati nel Medio Evo sono decisamente sbagliati.

Money quote: "Any gameplay loop that tells a story of linear settlement growth is incongruent with how a medieval economy worked (see Foussier 2004). Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time. For this very reason, the demography of many European villages remained relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century. It may therefore be clear that the gameplay loop of city builders pivots around the concept of doing the historically exceptional (i.e. growing a settlement to a town) and thereby strays far from what actually happened in the lives of our medieval forebears."

https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate

È ora di merenda; Git & cookie… Enjoy!

Vivere il sogno!

Money quote: "I take a lot of vacation. I find it more enjoyable than working.

That's not to say that I don't like working. I write software for a living, which is crazy fun in and of itself. If you'd have told little 14 year old Jason, writing games on his Commodore 64, that he'd one day have a job doing basically the same thing, he'd have been pretty stoked.

But over the years I've found a lot of other stuff that I like doing even more than programming computers. I like to climb rocks, surf and travel through interesting parts of the world, and always found it hard to do that for, say, most of the year every year when I had to work for other people. So I set out to build a business with the heuristic of "Maximize Jason's Vacation Time".

This is a rather long and drawn out account of how I did that (and how you can probably do that too.)"

https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop.html

Grandi classici:

«I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one».

Henry D.Thoreau, Walden; or, Life In The Woods.