David Galbraith graphs the population of Rome from 300 BC to the present.
The population [of Rome] during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K); Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees); the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome.
David, you should check out The Inheritance of Rome; I'm about 100 pages in and pretty interesting so far. Also, it would be instructive to do the same graph but Rome's population as a percentage of world population.
David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP.
The top floor of Corbusier's Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.
In terms of signaling, it's difficult to hang a house on one's parlor wall...buying a Corbusier means living in it wherever it happens to be located, at least part of the year.
I didn't watch the clip he links to but I can't imagine anything is more entertaining than David Galbraith's scathing goodbye to Dubai. He opens with:
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world's worst business idea, and there isn't even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
What's the biggest problem with Dubai? It doesn't have the cultural bedrock needed to support a destination city.
It looks like Manhattan except that it isn't the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
Why would you want to live in Park Slope with children? So ponders David Galbraith, who notes that Brooklyn schools look like prisons.
This is the local elementary school -- which looks like a Northern Irish prison, before the ceasefire, with a sarcastic multi colored sign by Banksy.
A recent study shows that the human brain reacts differently to people that seem like us than to those who don't.
The experimenters used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of Harvard and other Boston-area students while showing them pictures of other college-age people whom the researchers randomly described as either liberal northeastern students or conservative Midwest fundamentalist Christian students.
The study concludes that the secret to getting along with someone that you perceive as an outsider is to find some common ground so that your brain will accept them as someone with similar circumstances.
This is not new advice. Yet it is heartening to see that it is firmly grounded in distinct patterns of neural activity. There may be a brain basis for reacting with prejudices for those that seem different. But there's also a brain basis for overriding those differences and seeing outsiders as more like us.
David Galbraith expands upon what this means for society at large:
In other words, a civilized society depends not on the people who are currently the most civilized, but those who are most willing to accept change, as social or cultural groupings change, split or coalesce. Inevitably this means reasonable people rather than faithful people.
In discussing a popular conspiracy theory film (Zeitgeist), David Galbraith coins a new acronym: FEBL for Fucking Entertaining Big Lie.
FEBL media usually means nothing and is patently false but incredibly seductive. It is the perfect scaffold to hang propaganda and acts like a bit-borne, pernicious narcotic. Although films like Zeitgeist are mildly entertaining, due to their unbelievable popularity (more than 5 Million people have watched it on YouTube), they must be taken seriously. I suspect they might actually be dangerous, and therefore, as someone who does not believe in censorship it is important to make fun of Zeitgeist as the tired piece of po-faced, visually illiterate, polemically challenged, pornographic bullshit that it is.
(thx, bbj)
My friend David Galbraith just launched a gadget site called Oobject. The gadgets are organized into hierarchically ordered collections and you can vote on the position of a particular gadget within the collection. Two of my favorite collections are the iPod knock-offs and revolting gold gadgets (it's interesting that gold makes technology look vulgar and therefore cheap).
Oh, and David's Smashing Telly is still cranking along nicely. I wish I had time to watch all the shows featured recently.
David echoes my reaction to seeing a Zune in person for the first time this weekend: "I just saw a Zune, and guess what? Its a piece of shit." I usually give people a hard time for making snap judgments about technology that takes time to get to know (comments like "this interface sucks" after 20 seconds of use make my eyes go rolling), but the Zune...it's like the story of the Getty's Greek kouros that Gladwell tells in Blink: one look and you know it's wrong. Andre has been trying a Zune out for the last couple of weeks and doesn't mind it even though he's giving up on it.
It's sad that the Silicon Valley tech scene and press is so fixated on building companies to flip that people need to write about sustainable companies as "a new and better model for Internet startups". Good luck, Ev and company, in finding success on your own terms.
David Galbraith notes that several of the top sites on the web don't validate: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, and even "Web 2.0" newcomers Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us. "Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?"
If you want to sell your web startup, don't take that much money from VCs or bootstrap the whole thing yourself. Too much money invested means that no one wants to buy your company for what your VCs require you to sell it for...especially if your business has limited prospects to begin with.
In addition to weblogs.com, Verisign's acquisition of Moreover was also announced this week. Two of the companies founders, Nick Denton and David Galbraith, have thoughts. Nick reveals that Moreover almost bought Pyra once upon a time, a little tidbit I didn't reveal in my piece on Moreover from a couple years ago.
