Finita la guerra, tra le macerie della Germania sconfitta, le potenze vincitrici mettono alla sbarra, in un tribunale militare internazionale, i crimini del nazismo. Un racconto che comincia con il ritratto dei protagonisti in aula

no, non è un gioco di parole ma una formula utile in trigonometria sferica

It is a key principle of the Toyota Production System. The principle is sometimes referred to as "go and see."

mirabilia graphica

Il 28 agosto di 110 anni fa nacque uno scienziato dalla storia straordinaria, che fondò il Centro internazionale di fisica teorica di Trieste

Ora, dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, era venuta la democrazia, ossia l’andare ai bagni l’estate d’intere cittadine. Una parte d’Italia, dopo un incerto quinquennio o giù di lì, ora aveva il benessere, un benessere sacrosantamente basato sulla produzione industriale, ma pur sempre difforme e disorganico data l’economia nazionale squilibrata e contraddittoria nella distribuzione geografica del […]

Il reporting dell’Articolo 12 della Direttiva Uccelli (2013–2018), le condizioni per un prelievo sostenibile e la valutazione del disegno di legge 1552

Il reporting dell’Articolo 12 della Direttiva Uccelli (2013–2018), le condizioni per un prelievo sostenibile e la valutazione del disegno di legge 1552

Making only the assumption that you are a random intelligent observer, limits for the total longevity of our species of 0.2 million to 8 million years can be derived at the 95% confidence level. Further consideration indicates that we are unlikely to colonize the Galaxy, and that we are likely to have a higher population than the median for intelligent species.

 Le ragioni del rinvio, dovuto alla totale carenza presso il Tribunale, per la giornata del 28 maggio, della pur minima risorsa di personale che potesse attendere all’assistenza del magistrato in udienza, verranno dalla sottoscritta meglio specificate in una prossima comunicazione, pur dovendosi evidenziare, fin da ora, la circostanza dell’assenza, per tale giorno, di tutti i funzionari dell’Ufficio per il processo, uniche risorse disponibili ad attendere a tali incombenti (seppure, a norma di legge, nemmeno a ciò destinati, ma utilizzati quale extrema ratio per sopperire ad una situazione di carenza di personale prossima a determinare la paralisi di ogni attività giurisdizionale).

Iliade (Monti)/Libro II - Wikisource

Assumiamo come punto di riferimento per il testo del frammento l’edizione di Alcmane curata da A. Garzya (Alcmane, I Frammenti, a cura di A. Garzya, Napoli 1954, fr. 49, pp. 126 ss.):

Months after promising help for “hundreds of thousands of kids,” the FDA approved the decades-old medicine for a disease documented in less than 50 people.

On December 27, 2025, Anthropic’s lead engineer Boris Cherny posted on X: “In the last thirty days, 100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code.” 259 pull requests. 497 commits. 40,000 lines added. 1.3 million views. The tech world applauded.

Three months later, a packaging mistake exposed 512,000 lines of that code to the public. Leaks happen. Companies recover. The leak isn’t the story.

NUTS stands for “No U-turn Syndrome”. This is SWH’s observation in Singapore where drivers only do a U-turn if a U-turn sign is present whereas drivers in other countries do not U-turn only if a sign prohibiting is shown. SWH explains this as a “no-rule = no-do” phenomenon where this subtle difference inhibits the creativity and initiative of Singaporeans.

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

Sixty-eigth years of highly defective people

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

An examination of the technical and historical literature concerning the discovery and development of antibiotics suggests the possible existence of an era of discovery. This era appears to have a well-defined beginning (about 1940) and a well-defined close (about 1960). It is the purpose of this dissertation to examine the various strands of evidence that support the thesis that a definable antibiotic discovery era does indeed exist. An examination of several antibiotics discovered and developed during the period 1940-1960 support the thesis. One antibiotic in particular, vancomycin, discussed in depth is shown to be exemplary of the trends established about 1940 and which ceased to function about 1960. In concluding, a definition for the discovery era is proposed.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

How a $610 Billion Circular Financing Architecture, the Laws of Physics, and the Ghosts of Railway Mania Are Converging to Reshape Global Finance

Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.

A volte ci si ingegna a trovare dimostrazioni matematiche “inutili”, perché più complicate, ma con un loro interesse.

da un bel po’ di tempo, ma non cambia in realtà molto.

In an Industrial Technical High School in Tuscany, the last working example of the first computer produced by Olivetti with which Ettore Sottsass won his first Compasso d’Oro in 1959.

by Gian-Carlo Rota

MIT, April 20 , 1996 on the occasion of the Rotafest

Scatterplot matrices are one of the most practical direct visualization of unstructured data sets—provided that the dimensionality does not become too large. Despite their prominence in the visualization community, there are few non-commercial tools out there that are able to produce scatterplot matrices for publication-ready visualizations.

In this post, I want to briefly explain how to use a recent version of gnuplot, one of my favourite plotting tools, to create something that resembles a scatterplot matrix. In this example, I will use “the famous Iris data set”, which I am sure everyone is familiar with by now.

Fosco Maraini è stato un geniale avventuriero, uno scrittore straordinario. Claudio Cardelli, amico ventennale, ce lo racconta.

For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real.

Virtually nobody is pricing in what's coming in AI. I wrote an essay series on the AGI strategic picture: from the trendiness in deep learning and counting the OOMs, to the international situation and The Project.

When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception.

The history and future of the motorway from infrastructure to a socio-cultural device of technological innovation and integration with the landscape.
The exhibition, realized in collaboration with Autostrade per l’Italia on the occasion of the centenary of the construction of Italy’s first motorway in 1924, presents historical projects and construction sites in progress.

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.

The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.

Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.

So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.

In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:

abuse of the passive voice,
weasel words, and
lexical illusions.

Maria Tipo da oltre venticinque anni vive nei dintorni di Firenze, in una splendida villa che domina un paesaggio da mozzafiato della città con l'Arno a gomito. Ci accoglie con affabilità e franchezza tutta napoletana nel grande salotto di casa, accanto allo studio in cui troneggiano due pianoforti a coda letteralmente coperti di fotografie di grandi artisti, maestri, colleghi, amici, allievi. Sorseggiando lievemente un thè, comincia il racconto.

Starboard Value, the activist investor agitating for change at Pfizer, called on the pharmaceutical giant’s board of directors to hold the company’s executives responsible for what it described as a yearslong pattern of underperformance.

Nei recenti giorni passati sono successe un paio di cose, sconnesse ma in qualche modo correlate, che mi hanno stimolato qualche pensiero che provo a sistematizzare. Mettendo a posto la cantina di casa ho ritrovato un po’ di vecchie foto degli anni di servizio scout (tra cui quella della Route Nazionale del 1997 di cui ho parlato anche qui) e proprio in quei giorni si è tenuta a Verona la Route Nazionale 2024 della Co.Ca. AGESCI, la prima da quella del 1997 a cui avevo partecipato. Ecco: il passato che fa capolino, il presente che si impone, e in mezzo un uomo di mezza età che pensa al futuro.

At the start of WWII, the US armed forces used various means for enciphering their confidential traffic. At the lowest level were hand ciphers. Above that were the M-94 and M-138 strip ciphers and at the top level a small number of highly advanced SIGABA cipher machines.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the odds of this decay occurring are less than one in 10 billion.

NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords.

Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System is credited, perhaps apocryphally, with taking new graduates to the shop floor and drawing a chalk circle on the floor. The graduate would be told to stand in the circle, observe and note what he saw. When Ohno returned he would check; if the graduate had not seen enough he would be asked to keep observing. Ohno was trying to imprint upon his future engineers that the only way to truly understand what happens on the shop floor was to go there. It was where the value was added and waste could be observed.

Gennaro Sangiuliano si mostra ancora una volta per quello che è.

Unito dal 1940 al 1945 e dal 1951 al 1955. La storia di Winston Churchill, la storia di un primo ministro capace di fare le scelte giuste per combattere con tutti i mezzi la minaccia nazifascista, è una storia formidabile che può offrirci le coordinate giuste per orientarci in un mondo come quello di oggi in cui le democrazie cercano di contenere le nuove minacce totalitarie e in un mondo come quello di oggi in cui non sempre i partiti che si dicono antifascisti sembrano trovare la convinzione giusta per combattere il fascismo non solo a parole. Abbiamo chiesto a Carlo Nordio, ministro della Giustizia e appassionato di Churchill, di scrivere quattro puntate sulla storia dell’ex primo ministro inglese per il Foglio. Nordio ha accettato. Questa è la prima puntata.

Probabilmente conoscete il quizzino che vi chiede di usare una moneta truccata, che se lanciata esce testa con probabilità compresa strettamente tra 1/2 e 1, per ottenere una probabilità del 50% esatto di vincita. La risposta, che si dice essere dovuta direttamente a John von Neumann (ma non ne sarei così certo) è la seguente: “Lanciate la moneta due volte: se il risultato è prima testa poi croce (nel seguito, TC) vince il primo giocatore; se è prima croce e poi testa (CT) vince il secondo giocatore; altrimenti si ricomincia da capo”. L’idea, come avrete capito, è di trovare due combinazioni simmetriche, in modo che la loro possibilità di uscita sia la stessa.

Inspired by this thread on Hacker News about the C++ diff-pdf tool I decided to see what it would take to produce a web-based PDF diff visualization tool using Claude …

"Il matto" - una storia vera Per un periodo il Noir Festival, quello nato a Cattolica e poi trasferito a Courmayer, si svolse a Viareggio. ...

Eight or so years ago, young filmmaker Colin Levy got an opportunity of a lifetime. He got a one-on-one meeting with Martin Scorsese.

Allo zoo di Osaka, in Giappone, ci hanno messo sette anni ad accorgersi che Gen-chan non è un maschio ma una femmina: era piuttosto complicato osservare i suoi genitali

Last night I estimated the distance to the planet Jupiter using nothing more than my eyes and a simple calculator.

A New Zealand MP performed a haka in a powerful speech for her first appearance in parliament, resurfaced video shows. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, 21, first spoke in parliament on 12 December. She is the youngest MP to be elected to New Zealand's parliament in 170 years, after James Stuart-Wortley, who was elected in 1853 aged 20 years and 7 months. Maipi-Clarke was emotional in the chamber as she said: "We have arrived. We are here. We are sailing. We are navigating, just like our ancestors once did, in the biggest ocean in the world."

FDA held a Non-prescription Drug Advisory Committee meeting Sept. 11-12, 2023, to discuss the effectiveness of oral phenylephrine as an active ingredient in over-the-counter (OTC) cough and cold products.

Permettetemi di richiamare alcuni ulteriori aspetti che riguardano la vicenda di Holostem, della sua ricerca di punta e dei suoi ricercatori, tutti messi a rischio dalla decisione del suo principale investitore, in realtà dell’azienda farmaceutica Chiesi, di procedere alla liquidazione.

Beginning on Thursday, November 2, 2023 at 11:43 UTC Cloudflare's control plane and analytics services experienced an outage. Here are the details

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La sua é; una fotografia che prova a confrontarsi con i giganti del pensiero antico e contemporaneo. Ora vede tutto e non ha piú; bisogno di fotografare

This one is a bit roundabout but stick with me. I've exchanged a few emails with the science.org website technical support people about the RSS feed for the excellent chemistry/pharmacology blog "In the Pipeline". It's not Derek's fault at all, but his science.org/aaas hosts have basically blocked native RSS feed readers and they only allow corporate service websites that do the feed reader part for you like Feedly.org. They consider using a native application feed reader to be scraping their website and ban them.

Born in Naples in 1933, Carotenuto studied in Rome and Turin, earning a degree in philosophy. He then lived for a period in the US, where he attended the School of Experimental Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he made the acquaintance of Edward Whitmont. Upon his return to Italy, he became Professor of Psychology of the Personality in the new faculty of Psychology at Rome’s University “La Sapienza”, as well as President of the Associazione di Psicologia e Letteratura, dedicated to the study of the relationship between psychoanalysis and artistic creativity.

I wrote this piece after an early-career friend of mine asked some very good questions on how to be useful. Since this is a thing I struggle a bit with myself, I thought it worthwhile to write up my thoughts. Note that I fully understand that not everyone has the luxury to think about their career like this – you first have to take care of yourself and family before you can start fretting about if your working life is saving the world!

A month ago Coleman Hughes, a young writer whose name I recognized from his many thoughtful essays in Quillette and elsewhere, set up a virtual "AI safety roundtable" with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and, err, yours truly, for his Conversations with Coleman podcast series. Maybe Coleman was looking for three people with the most widely…

A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much clearer and more maintainable than they otherwise would be.

[...] la Cassazione ha confermato la destituzione di questa docente bollata di "inettitudine permanente e assoluta" [...]

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Evening in the country, perhaps after skiing. A straight, warm dress of wool and rayon, its waist pulled in with a string, its skirt a new ankle length. By Joset Walker. Jewelry by Seaman Schepps Vogue November 1946 © Frances McLaughlin-Gill

Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

Buone intenzioni, implementazione proposta pessima.

[Warning: This might be the longest Shtetl-Optimized post of all time! But that’s OK; I expect most people will only want to read the introductory part anyway.] As I’ve mentioned before…

A from scratch GPU-free introduction to modern machine learning. Many tutorials exist already of course, but this one aims to really explain what is going on, from the ground up. Also, we’ll develop the demo until it is actually useful on real life data which you can supply yourself.
Other documents start out from the (very impressive) PyTorch environment, or they attempt to math it up from first principles. Trying to understand deep learning via PyTorch is like trying to learn aerodynamics from flying an Airbus A380.

Il mondo è molto più grande del piccolo cerchio che noi chiamiamo Comunità internazionale, avverte il fisico. C’è molto di vero in questa arringa, ma anche un disastroso errore di fatto

Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.

Ethan Tseng, Shane Colburn, James Whitehead, Luocheng Huang, Seung-Hwan Baek, Arka Majumdar, Felix Heide Nature Communications

Stephen Wolfram applies lessons learned from the Wolfram Physics Project to construct a proper framework to explain why--and to what extent--the Second Law of thermodynamics is true.

La Michela è utilizzata dall'Ottocento: è ancora competitiva, ma richiede tanta formazione e ora ci sono alternative più moderne

Recently I came across a piece of code which is nearly 50 lines long, plus several global variables, a state machine, all it does is to debounce two buttons. Button debounce does not to be this complicate, in this article I will show you probably the simplest button debounce solution.

Raffiguravano rane assassine, uccellini stecchiti e scene che oggi sono piuttosto insolite, tra il macabro, il grottesco e l’inquietante

Updates about my life and what I learn about creating software

My thoughts and experiences on how writing a daily journal improved my memory and understanding of myself.

This is a page about some of the mechanics of ‘big data’, specifically how to store, transfer and process perhaps 100s of millions or billions of rows/events.
Although some people think big data starts at 65k rows, at which point Excel used to lose it, I’m talking about gigabytes of data here.
Infrastructure for this kind of thing abounds. Data can however come from lots of sources, and go to lots of different places.

Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go...

 I studied physics in university, and at one point asked a professor if I should learn German, because it seemed all the key texts of early ...

This article attempts to give a sort of ‘orientation tour’ for people whose previous programming background is in high (ish) level languages such as Java or Python, and who now find that they need or want to learn C.

When you resize, rotate, or in any way transform an image; or more generally when you resample some discrete signal, the software you are using must interpolate between the discrete points to produce a result. Linear and cubic interpolation are easy to explain, but Lánczos interpolation, one of the most popular methods, is more interesting. In this post we will build up to how Lánczos interpolation works, pulling in various interesting topics on the way.

Here’s a method that’s new to me – a silver gelatin print printed in the darkroom, using an iPhone to provide the image and the light source. I took this photo a good few years ag…