House of Simeon

A fascinating photo-essay about building a house in Malawi. The post illustrates some of the economic challenges facing developing countries while conveying the richness of this ancient tradition.

The author is a friend of mine from college.

Tech Bubble & Goldbach’s Conjecture

A number theorist said something about math that’s stuck with me, something like “I wouldn’t know what a proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture would look like . . . I just don’t have any framework for approaching a problem like that.”

That pretty well summarizes my feelings on Facebook’s purported $10B valuation. To be sure, it seems insane to value a site with 70M users at $10B (although, to be fair, a lot of this figure must be based on anticipated growth), but I just don’t have the framework for deciding what the market cap should be. Facebook (and similar technologies, like MySpace, YouTube, and Digg) are uncharted territory. How do you model Facebook’s potential? How do you estimate the likelihood of students continuing to use the technology when nothing like it has ever existed before?

And the analysts who come up with these figures . . . do they have any idea themselves?