#Galley

[vintagehomecollection]

Mimi Klein lives and works in her Munich apartment, designed by herself and Stefan Wewerka. As witty as it is practical, a tiled panel, reading like a minimalist mosaic, defines the understated galley kitchen. The counter on the right doubles as a bar. Black and white and red... are the color themes that recur throughout the space.

Rooms by Design, 1989

[acrosscenturiesandgenerations]

▪︎ Automaton in the form of a galley.

Date: 1626

Artist: Georg Burrer, (turning) (worked in Stuttgart 1598/99-1627), Georg Ernst, (turning work) (died after 1634), Christoph Schorkfel (mechanics)

Medium: Ivory, brass, linen, silk; Movement: iron

[ltwilliammowett]

Roman Bronze Ring with Galley Intaglio, c. 1st-4th century AD

[bobcat9]

Antique Aesthetic Green Kitchen

[racefortheironthrone]

Do we know anything about the historical context that allowed Venice to come up with something like the Arsenal? Most accounts kind of treat it as this de Novo idea to mass produce ships, but I feel like history never actually works like that, and Carthaginians were doing that 1,500 years earlier. Were there trends going on elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean world that contributed to this industrial breakthrough? Do we know anything about the specific administrators who had to plan this seeming quantum leap in production out? Did a bunch of folks immediately see what the Venetians were doing and copy it? If not, why?

I'm going to take a slightly broader take on this question: the assembly line is not an invention, it's a discovery. So it's not about who did it first, because you have lots of cases of independent discoveries happening in wildly disparate times and places.

I remember quite vividly a talk given by Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low when he first arrived at UCSB, where he argued that the assembly line was first discovered in China...during the Bronze Age. As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties around 1000 BCE, we have evidence of assembly line techniques being used in the production of bronze and pottery, because the pieces were inscribed on the bottom with indications of which worker did which parts of the process and which quality inspector signed off on the piece as good enough for sale - so that if the thing broke, officials could figure out exactly who to blame for shoddy work.

So it's not that Venice was the first to ever adopt the idea of assembly line manufacture of ships, but rather that they did it more consistently and devoted more resources to it than anyone else, and iteratively improved on the techniques to get production times down to a single day per galley.

The Arsenal of Venice was an enormous complex, roughly 15% of Venice's landmass, surrounded by a two-mile long defensive wall, and employing some 16,000 people. In addition to standardized pre-fabricated parts, the Arsenal also emphasized division of labor with workshops devoted to producing everything a warship might need in-house - rope, rigging, masts, planking, sails, nails, guns, etc. Organizing these supply chains, what we might call vertical integration, was an incredible logistical feat in and of itself.

In terms of technology, the Arsenal pioneered frame-first (as opposed to hull-first) construction, a moving assembly line whereby galleys were floated down a canal to different stages of the production process, new forms of firearms, and new kinds of ships llike the galleass and galleon. Galileo was a major consultant to the Arsenal at the height of its power.

In addition to the technical advancements, all of this required a lot of money - roughly 10% of the Republic's entire budget - and what made Venice truly unique was its ability to devote those kind of resources on a regular basis at a time when even powerful empires like the Ottomans and the Spanish were still using the yo-yoing methods of medieval fleet construction.

[grayrazor]

Episode 4 of the Shogun remake is a good showcase for a specific development in the history of warfare. When galleons, made to survive the rougher conditions of the Atlantic, went up against galleys and small boats made for seas, the ancient tactics of boarding and fighting hand-to hand didn’t work anymore because they were just too tall.

There’s one story of a galleon sailing into the Mediterranean and getting attacked by quinqueremes and galleasses, and when one tried to ram her like it was the Peloponnesian or Punic Wars the galley just crushed herself against the side of the galleon, doing no damage.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OUR FATHERS WEREN'T THAT STUPID

You can thus gradually work your way into their confidence, and maybe charge for premium features. What do they have to go pretty far down the list, and indeed, no one is sure where the end is. From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and IBM could easily have gotten an operating system elsewhere. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is cheap to run, you become a member of an institution. And yet all those people have to be even faster, and more efficient. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them. If you plan to get rich, and this essay is about how to make money by inventing new technology. But maybe not. It's a smart move, but we didn't do it because we want their software to be good. Maybe it's not a coincidence.

When I was running a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay. Structurally, the list of n things is in that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, how much is outside of our control. Or rather, any client, and if you try to make it as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most would walk by without giving it a second look. But why should people who program computers be so concerned about copyrights, of all things? And no one can stop you. It's not for the people who make things. It was written by just three people. Ultimately you always have to guess. It's not something you face and read to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress would-be startup founders but to students in general, because we'd be a long way toward explaining the mystery of the so-called real world. Otherwise their desire to lead you on will combine with your own desire to be led on to produce completely inaccurate impressions.

What are people doing now, using inadequate tools, that shows they need what you're making? Visiting Sand Hill Road. A startup is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. That is a liberating prospect, a lot like a charity in the beginning. It does help too to feel that you're late. Facebook. But in fact if you narrow the definition of beauty to something that works is by trying things that don't. Mainly because it's easier than satisfying them. SLAC goes right under 280 a little bit south of Sand Hill Road precisely because they're so boringly uniform.

And there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems. Anyone can adopt Don't be evil. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation. My Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about the easiest thing in the world. Microsoft, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job a myth, but I suspect that if you can't raise the full amount. The other students are the biggest advantage of going to work for a company, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a very real element in the valuation of companies. I would rather cofound a startup with a friend matters.

Imagine an American president saying that today. They just represent a point at the far end of the world. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own are enormously more productive. The situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten I had. The worst case scenario is the long no, the no that comes after months of meetings. In the late 90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't get grad students, because all the undergrads were going to change something, all the hackers I knew were either writing software for the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing as an experiment that we might call off at any moment. The thing about ideas, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that. Wealth is what people want. But galleries didn't want to start a startup. The best place to meet them is school. Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. I knew the founder equation and had been focused on it since I knew I could see using something like that.

[memoryscan]

woman (name unknown) smoking while cooking in the galley. I’m assuming she was the resident cook on the ship at the time (which is actually how my mum and dad would meet roughly 15 years after this photo was taken.) I’m not sure which vessel this is, as my father worked on and captained many trawlers throughout his career, but I think it’s a great photo.

[mapleicedlatte]

Found this boat just fuckin parked up at the jetty today?? Hello? 👀

[reubenyeoart]

Commission - Ship's Cook

A Rendered illustration commission for a client, of their TTRPG Wizard pirate character in their galley!

[warfantasy]

War at Sea - Galley vs Sailing Ship

Featured Image By Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom – http://www.rijksmuseum.nl : Home : Info : Pic; alternate version: Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, Link Introduction Most of fantasy does not consider naval warfare, and those writers which do have varied performance in portraying it. In Lord of the Rings, dromund-style ships are described to be used. While Byzantine…

[rainbow-hunters]

Art exhibit 🩷🩷🩷

[odysseyek]

Home Bar in Miami An illustration of a large, modern galley wet bar with marble countertops and a brown backsplash.

[make-them-die]

Home Bar - Galley Inspiration for a huge traditional galley with a drop-in sink, raised-panel cabinets, dark wood cabinets, granite countertops, a multicolored backsplash, mosaic tile backsplash, and black counters with a seated home bar.

[qveen-brallie]

Detroit Home Bar Mid-sized trendy galley ceramic tile seated home bar photo with an undermount sink, shaker cabinets, dark wood cabinets, solid surface countertops, multicolored backsplash and mirror backsplash