I plotted a graph of Rome’s population through history [source]. Some points: the rise and fall of Ancient Rome was roughly symmetrical (compared to the rapid decline of societies such as Greenland in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’); the population 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.

I’m not sure what the population of Rome’s hinterland would have been in ancient times, but assuming that present day Rome is more sprawling, the 4 million inhabitants of greater Rome would perhaps show the post industrial city’s growth as being even more extreme than its ancient counterpart.

Not entirely facetiously, note that the extended period of decline and relative stagnation between 400 and 1500 roughly corresponds to Nicaean Councils of the 4th century and the Copernican revolution of the mid 16th, events which stake out what could reasonably be called the Christian period, (or partially, at least, the Muslim one, depending on your perspective).

Dr Fedoroff science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007 says that humans have exceeded the Earth’s “limits of sustainability.

The Current world population is 6.8bn. In Roman times, it was less than the population of the US. It is growing by 218,030 people per day.

To put this is perspective, this is the entire population of Iceland every day and a half.

Link

Given the riddle like title, Oasis’ obsession with the Beatles, the similarity of the scene depicted to the Abbey Road album cover and the the supposed symbology within Abbey Road, I am surprised that nobody has considered that “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory”, might be a riddle.

Not that I really care, but I do like riddles.

Baarle-Nassau is a piece of Belgium within the Netherlands, that contains pieces of the Netherlands within it. Pictured above is the swiss-cheese border situation between the two countries, within and around the town.

Thanks to Max Fawcett for this gem.

Georgia state: 8,560,310 in 2002.
Georgia the country: 4,646,003 in 2007.

According to Badastronomy the universe generates (or is that consumes?) half a trillion dollars of power per cubic light year per hour, not a quarter of a trillion as was thought until yesterday.

I wonder if anyone pointed out to the people who named USS Ponce, that in the UK it means ‘flamboyantly gay’.

USS PONCE (LPD15) “The Proud Lions!”

Trivia - Pandoras ‘box’ was a mistranslation.

Pandora - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The mistranslation of pithos as “box” is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod’s tale of Pandora. Hesiod uses the word “pithos” which refers to a jar used to store grain. It is possible that Erasmus confused “pithos” with “pyxis” which means box. The scholar M.L. West has written that Erasmus may have mixed up the story of Pandora with the story found elsewhere of a box which was opened by Psyche

Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails - Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup?

Twenty years ago, I was reading a Graham Greene novel on a painfully slow train ride in Italy. In the book, he pointed out that your mood as a train traveller was directly proportional to speed.

Evan posts today about how the mood a Twitter HQ is directly proportional to the speed of the site.

I’ve noticed that many people running startups seem to have moods that are directly proportional to their Alexa rank.

I’d argue that fast response time is the unwritten golden rule of successful web apps. A site that is slow is like wading through mud. Before Youtube I could watch video on the web, but before Youtube, my expectation was that it would splutter and stall.

I suspect that focusing on speed is much healthier than traffic or, dare I say it, features. If you built a product with one great feature and make it fast, your traffic will come, people will understand what its about and the extra features can be added later.

Google had less accurate search than Altavista for a long time after they became hip (you couldn’t do exact phrase matching because ’stop’ words like ‘the, of, and or’ etc. weren’t indexed), but Google was always blindingly fast and they kept focused on one things even as CMGI made Altavista pour portal crap around their nice search page.

And anyway, Graham Greene said nothing about Alexa.

According to a British Coffee Association spokesperson (with a vested interest), its 4.5 cups a day:

“a wealth of scientific evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups per day is perfectly safe for the general population and does have a beneficial effect on alertness and performance even in regular coffee drinkers”

BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee ‘no boost in the morning’