coming on the new LP
Alberto Manguel writes: “My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life.”
Prediction: Chester French is going to be huge.
- Harvard degrees.
- Great taste in covers (Shangri-Las!).
- Prep aesthetic.
- Pharrell’s blessing.
“Remember (Walking In The Sand)” Live In Richmond, VA
This video has 279 views. I think they’re gonna blow up.
I like this quotation because there’s been a lot of chatter about how the current crop of funded companies are only incremental improvements on things that came before them—and that there is no way they can create the kind of shareholder value that solving big hairy problems can. The truth is, Page is probably right. Perfectly clean energy would be more valuable than Google, Cisco, and Microsoft combined—it would disrupt the entire oil industry.
There’s something appealing about the idea of a technology that shoots for the moon. But the problem is that it’s too obvious. Google wasn’t obvious until it disrupted Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other search-portal hybrids. Big obvious problems attract lots of attention from brilliant technologists. Big obvious problems are usually really hard to solve. Because they’re so difficult to solve, people try and compensate with money, so a lot of really smart people attacking big obvious problems end up doing their research from within the bowels of academia or large corporations (ever look at the amounts of funding biotech companies take?).
But when solutions come out of the bowels of these giants, they’re often squelched—particularly if they’re too disruptive to existing business models (just look at AOL). Big improvements come from the margins. The industrial revolution didn’t happen overnight. It came from strange little improvements like the cotton gin that allowed industries to develop around it organically. That sounds a lot more like YouTube than cold fusion to me.
Twitter does go around calling themselves a social-networking utility…
Returning heroes: The Union Jack and the French Tricolour flutter above the lines of troops marching through Kinghtsbridge during the World War One victory parade in 1919.
New photographs of Britain in colour: 1913-1924.
Corey Arnold, Photographer
Corey recently had a great audio/visual slideshow up on NPR. He’s been doing amazing documentary and artistic work based around the fishing industry.
Originally posted by rach, who’s been on a tear with great posts recently.
Hanging out, drinking coffee on a misty morning in Woodstock, NY in an old barn in the woods.
Matty Charles - Long Gone
Matty is a Williamsburg native and former neighbor. He does a great show, has beautiful sleeve tattoos, and knows how to drink whiskey.
