Work

I worked as an architect for Norman Foster on projects ranging from the Kings Cross Masterplan & Channel Tunnel Terminal, to Foster’s apartment. In Paris, I worked for Valode et Pistre on a Lyon University scheme and briefly for Jean Nouvel on the Euro Lille project.

Having gotten stuck on large scale projects which take forever and involve doing toilet details for six months, I begged and begged to work for Fisher Park who designed stadium sets for what they called the ‘dinosaur’ bands: Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and U2. What could possibly be more fun.

After Fisher Park, I set up a design practice in London, where we did event & trade sets and retail design, mainly for Levis and Caterpillar. We were featured in Building Design and Blueprint and shortlisted for a Millennium Bridge competition. I knew a bit about computers, so when the web took off in earnest in ‘94 we did some early database driven websites and more wacky stuff such as a 3d search engine.

The Internet stuff became more about technology rather than design, so the practice was split in two and Angus Bankes and myself ran the technology side, where we built the first large scale intranet in the UK, linking staffing between 60 hospitals. Eventually we co-founded Origins.net with my father, a genealogy service which created the first online access to government data and was the largest online database in Europe, at the time and the first pay-per-view website.

Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and myself founded Moreover technologies, a news search engine which powered Yahoo and MSN and Altavista news, before Google had news search. Moreover sold to Verisign.

While at Moreover I co-authored the RSS 1.0 standard.

After Moreover, I worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at MRL Ventures, with Max Levchin, where I helped found Yelp.

I left San Francisco to move to New York and started a series of product blogs, under the umbrella of Curations.com.

Life

I was born in Scotland, in 1966, in Selkirk, lived in Glasgow till I was 3, before moving to London. I lived in Paris for a bit, and went to college in Turin, for a few months. I have been in the US for 9 years, 6 in San Francisco and 3 in New York.

I dropped out of university twice (Economics then Civil Engineering) then trained for 7.5 years to be an architect because I was too frightened to quit. I studied at the Bartlett for both under and post-grad.

Architecture teaches you how to not lose sight of the overall design of a building, while designing a tiny detail and to deal with the whole rather than component features. This ability to zoom in and out, seems to be a skill which could be applied to areas other than buildings.

I once heard that if ‘Brunel were alive today’ he would be building things on the Internet, yet there is a long way to go before software is designed by Brunel types rather than put together by the usual type of engineer. Web design still usually refers to the way things look, rather than the way they work, Web Designer being a title given to a front-end UI designer. Software itself is often built by passing feature requests via a marketing department to the engineering department, with nobody independent in between. This is like tract housing design rather than architecture and it results in junk. If Brunel were alive today, he wouldn’t have a job title. Changing this is what keeps me awake at night.

My Dad is a physicist and I grew up reading popular science books. As a hobby, I have spent the last 3 years working on a physics problem that tries to relate logical entropy to natural selection and shows how systems self-configure to ‘learn’. It sounds pretentious, and it probably is, but if you are interested, some of the notes are in the sidebar. Secretly, this is what really keeps me awake at night.

I have a lovely, infinitely patient, French wife who was born in Switzerland and is a US national, and a completely fantastic baby son. Come to think of it, he literally keeps me awake at night.

7 Responses to “About me”

1. Stewart Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pm

   I just came across your blog through your comments on Terre Natale. I really enjoy your projects

2. Evgeni B Starikov Says:
   April 7th, 2010 at 2:04 am

   Dear David,

   … the “scientificblogging.com” apparently experiences difficulties, so that there I could not post my response to your most recent comment. But please find below everything what I wanted to communicate you …

   Respectfully yours,

   Evgeni Starikov

   Dear David,

   many thanks for your comments and sorry for my delayed response.

   As for me, I do not see that the Verlinde’s paper makes any hop between the logical and the thermodynamical entropy, because along with Entropy itself there is always Negentropy - or Ectropy (or something alike - many authors tend to dub rather simple things in a bizarre way).

   Negentropy is known from the works of Schrödinger and Brillouin - and mathematically is different from the Entropy owing to the sign before the logarithm.

   But this sign entails a deep philosophical consequence: namely, Negentropy and Entropy are dual to each other. If the latter characterizes the degree of microscopic disorder, the former expresses the degree of the collectiveness/cooperativity in the microscopic dynamics, giving rise to various kinds of spatio-temporal self-organization at the meso/macroscopic level, pattern formation etc.

   But the entropy/negentropy duality is of different kind, as compared to the entropy/energy duality.

   In fact, there are many processes in the nature (especially in its organic, biological branches), where the so-called entropy-energy(/enthalpy) compensation can be observed.

   Apart from obvious artefacts due to the incorrectness in the statistical processing of experimental data, these are phenomena where there is practically no change in the free energy. One may show that the phenomena of such a kind can be possessed of extremely high efficiency (very near to that of the Carnot cycle).

   The above-mentioned “compensation” is nothing but a “strong correlation” from the statistical viewpoint. Conventionally, we interpret the observed correlations in terms of the direct cause-and-effect relationships. Indeed, if A is correlated with B, then either A is the cause of B, or A is the effect of B.

   However, if we apply this conventional reasoning to the entropy-enthalpy compensation, we’ll arrive at a strong contradiction with the basical thermodynamics and will oscillate between the total quining of this effect - or diving into some “extra-thermodynamical swamp”.

   Still, there is much more to the story.

   Specifically, tight correlations might be interpreted in the third way: there is some phenomenon or process, factor C which is the common cause for both A and B. But the factor C is hidden, we cannot study it directly along with the A and B, using the experimental techniques at our hands.

   This factor C is an objective reality, there is no mysticism in it. This is simply our Ignorance, due to the restricted power of our measuring devices - not less, but also not more than just that. When our experimental techniques/machinery/approaches will arrive at the proper level, we shall most probably be able to study the factor C directly, without applying to A and B.

   This approach to correlations is long and well known in psychology, social sciences etc. as the so-called “factor analysis of correlations” - but, regretfully, not in the natural sciences.

   To my view, above is the true essence of all these puzzling “entropic forces”. Of course, I am just biophysicist, and not a fine expert in the gravity. But I am sure that applying the factor analysis in the natural sciences will clarify many intricate problems.

   Respectfully yours,

   Evgeni Starikov

3. admin Says:
   April 7th, 2010 at 3:01 am

   Thanks Evgeni,

   Agreed negentropy is a more natural concept to look at (as in ‘free-energy’ makes more sense colloquially, than ‘lack of free energy’), but there is also a problem with switching between logical and thermodynamic entropy for the reasons outlined here: http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/information.is.not.uncertainty.html.

   Anyway, I didn’t want to get diverted on the discussion of logical vs heat entropy because I’m sure its just my misreading of Verlinde that thinks there is a logical flaw in his argument here.

   But I wonder if there is a deeper flaw? My understanding of Verlinde is that his paper says this:

   1. On the scale of planets etc., matter clumping into one place is a high entropy state. (i.e. as Roger Penrose points out - a high entropy state with a gravitational force looks like the opposite of high entropy with respect to gas or billiard balls or whatever)

   2. Entropy always increases.

   3. Therefore, at sufficiently large scales a clumping together of matter will emerge statistically, over time, giving the impression of an attractive force, hence gravity.

   If this is indeed the argument, then it is circular: a high entropy state only involves clumping together (rather than being randomly distributed because of the repulsive force causing particles to bounce off each other) precisely because there is an attractive force.

   i.e. isn’t Verlinde actually saying: Matter clumping together is a high entropy state because there is an attractive force. Matter tends to a high entropy state, therefore there is an attractive force?

   In which case the argument is circular, it defines an attractive force (gravity) to show that one emerges.

4. Groupon – IPO Ponzi scheme du jour Says:
   June 3rd, 2011 at 10:12 am

   [...] David Galbraith tweeted: “We now have a simultaneous tech bubble and economic collapse”. Really, in the good old days we used to know how synchronize… With the rush of the tech IPOs following Linkedin, the only question is why Ponzi schemes are still the legal modus operandi on Wall St.? Or more precisely why is the corporate structure is so fundamentally broken that when a founder and an early investor get in the same room with the underwriter of an IPO, their interests are so divergent from the interests of potential shareholders on the open market? Unless of course the “shareholders” hold the shares no longer than a millisecond. [...]

5. amonle Says:
   August 30th, 2011 at 7:25 pm

   What a treat to discover you (via the ‘Big Apple’ story)
   Coincidentally i am also ex-Bartlett, a stint at Foster and tried (but failed) with Fisher Park … and now pushing ‘new directions’

6. jimmy gardiner Says:
   October 5th, 2011 at 7:37 am

   i have a great concept. need advice. would love to hear from you.- thanks- jimmy gardiner

7. Real Estate IDX Says:
   January 31st, 2012 at 2:21 pm

   Great Information and thank you for sharing

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