In un capitolo del suo "A spasso con il cane Luna" (lettura consigliatissima) Giorgio Vallortigara ci racconta dell'arcipelago St. Kilda "un luogo ai confini del mondo". Come ha scritto Borges ("le rovine circolari" ) "Quel cerchio è un tempio che gli antichi incendi divorarono..."

(Oggi, per la prima volta da quando insegno, non sarò in classe. Niente lavagna, niente gesso, niente matematica. Credo fermamente nella parola, ma come molte e molti ho deciso di portare la mia assenza come argomento di lezione. Una piccola cosa, indubbiamente. Ma dovuta.)

“L’io, io!… il più lurido di tutti i pronomi!… I pronomi! Sono i pidocchi del pensiero. Quando il pensiero ha i pidocchi, si gratta come tutti quelli che hanno i pidocchi… e nelle unghie, allora… ci ritrova i pronomi: i pronomi di persona.” [Carlo Emilio Gadda]

Happy birthday to Glenn Gould, born on this day in 1932! A Canadian piano prodigy whose love for music, ignited at age three in Toronto, revolutionized classical performance. His breathtaking, idiosyncratic takes on Bach, especially the Goldberg Variations (1955), blended

Legend says Aristotle once went to the registry 🏛️ for an important certificate. Clerk: Name? Aristotle (A): Ἀριστοτέλης Clerk: Place of birth? A.: Stagira Clerk: Year? A.: 384 BC Clerk: Before… WHAT??? 🤯😯🤯

Such deep sadness. Milan’s San Siro — a symbol of the city — is set to be torn down for a “modern” arena. Built in 1925, it’s part of our collective memory, a civic monument that deserves protection. What’s next? La Scala as a shopping mall? The Colosseum as a catwalk?

Overheard: the wife says "You're always wrong" and the husband replies "You're right".

'La jetée' Chris Marker 1962

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Every parallelogram that you draw around an ellipse whose sides are tangent to the ellipse at their midpoints has the same area for a given ellipse: 4 a b, where a and b are the semi-axes of the ellipse.

youtu.be/nFNhk80aA9s?si… June 17th Karachi

Teaching electrical current. In the Drude model, electrons move like little balls, bouncing off ions at random. With an applied electric field they drift, on average, and create a current. Soundtrack: Pinball Wizard (The Who). youtu.be/hHc7bR6y06M?si…

SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL '66 "Night And Day"

Stasera si va di Montale

What are multi-agent systems with reinforcement learning, and why does "diversity" help them develop "collective intelligence"? This Cambridge PhD thesis by M.Bettini offers a clear and insightful overview. (Open access - download from): repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7d168345…

My little tribute to the great Italian singer Ornella Vanoni: One of her oldest( and rare) video (Sanremo 1968) Good-bye Ornella. And yes, there will always be a white house... credit teche.rai.it/2021/09/ornell…