Tom Simmons

@oldbooksguy @threadreaderapp unroll

John Fowles explains in "The Aristos" (1964) how high IQ can subvert your will to act: "High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis." Rule 1: Do not lose the will

@JohnathanBi @threadreaderapp unroll

I honestly think the most productive 11 h that @SupplantCompany ever gets out of me are on LDN to SFO 🛫 All I need is a chair, a laptop and red wine. And also good WiFi 3 cheers for @britishairways on that front! 👏 (3 boos for @VirginAtlantic)

@sethbannon Do we need to make deeptech more cool or SaaS less cool?

The story of silicon valley has two sides. One, unbounded potential to create a radically better world. And two, a tragic misallocation of talent and capital that's slowing us from getting there. We have everything it takes to solve every major problem and to drop the marginal cost of production of every needed good and service to near zero. But it won't happen if founders start unimportant companies. Or if VCs throw billions away into companies addressing wants instead of needs.

Honoured to be a speaker at the @NutritionOrgUK "Nutrition Science and Innovation - Powerful partnerships for the future webinar" on June 4th alongside: Anthony Warner at @newfoodteam, Jeff Brunstrom at @BristolUni, Philip Calder at @unisouthampton and Josh Sauer at Zya

Random thoughts I had this week while traveling 🇵🇹 Hope you enjoyed 👋

11) Lisbon has a long way to go to be Europe's Silicon Valley though. SV's lifeblood, venture capital 💰, is more than ~30x greater there than in Lisbon. Even in Europe, Lisbon is ~10x below the amount of venture invested in London 🇬🇧, Europe's primary VC destination today.

10) Though the skylines of each are today of course dominated by modern skyscrapers. 🇵🇹 Left: Vasco da Gama Tower 🇺🇸 Right: The Transamerica Pyramid

9) This shows up in the regional architecture, which is distinctly hispanic. 🇺🇸 Top: Stanford University 🇵🇹 Bottom: Lisbon Old town

8) Both have a strong Catholic heritage, but have since liberalised. 🇵🇹 Left: Lisbon Cathedral 🇺🇸 Right: Misión San Francisco de Asís

Lisbon🇵🇹 aspires to be Europe's🇪🇺 Silicon Valley. Right now, it certainly has some way to go. But I travelled to Lisbon recently and was surprised at the number of similarities. Here's a list of my observations. 👇🧵 tech.eu/2023/08/27/how…

7) But even the bridges that span the middles of the bays look spookily similar: 🇵🇹Left: The Vasco da Gama Bridge connects Lisbon with Montijo 🇺🇸Right: The San Mateo Bridge connects San Mateo with Hayward

6) Lisbon famously has a carbon copy of the Golden Gate Bridge across the mouth of its bay - the '25th April Bridge' 🇵🇹Left: The 25 de Abril Bridge 🇺🇸Right: The Golden Gate Bridge

5) Both Lisbon and San Francisco sit at the mouths of large bays facing large oceans. 🇺🇸 The San Francisco Bay on the Pacific 🇵🇹 The mouth of the Tagus river on the Atlantic This has driven the economic history of each.

4) Both also lie at one end on densely populated coastal stretches with another major global city at the other end (Porto 🇵🇹 and LA 🇺🇸 respectively).

3) The continents they are part of are dominated by large single market economies: 🇪🇺 and 🇺🇸 This means both cities/regions can easily trade with 100s millions of people and 10s trillions GDP.

2) They have very similar Mediterranean climates 🌞characterised by mild-to-cool winters with occasional rainfall and warm-to-hot and dry summers. So, from that perspective, they're amongst the nicest places in the world to live.

1) Both Lisbon and San Fran are major cities on the Western coasts of large advanced industrialised continents: Europe and North America. This means both are in the vicinity of large numbers of highly developed trading partners.

@paulg I never understand why British people go on summer vacations

In January you wonder why anyone would want to live in England and in May you wonder why anyone would want to live anywhere else.

@eric_is_weird Would make an interesting study as there is a direct control population. I think student-run law journals are basically a uniquely North American phenomenon.

Has anyone written about how law journals being staffed by law students influences legal research? I don't mean to imply they're doing a bad job. Law research has a better relationship with industry/practitioners than most fields. I consider it an applied research success