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 …