dbaboci

Maybe should have clarified in text: the "very interesting..." bit doesn't come from the author. It's just something that sounded off to me.

Even adding the Moon or the Great Pyramid would still leave a large gap in between. Which is totally normal, does not suggest anything weird. It just feels like a vacuum (that might be filled with huge spaceships in sci-fi futures:)

I think the research in the field is fairly limited - which might make the book sound limited, but I didn't really see any picking of cherries, rather than very few cherries to pick from :).

Also West makes it pretty clear what he thinks of a bare exponential & corollary phase transition. The scaling power-law relationship however does not imply any sort of bare exponential growth.

Hehehe true. The graph is from the book, it might be mislabeled. I think it represents the change from average walking speed (which is 1.3 - 1.8 meters / second)

From my perspective the point of the book is to shed light on some of these macro trends that are not typically intuitive. So we expect walking speed to be random, but it is driven by the population of a city. So a lot of decisions in business or urban planning for example could learn a lot by knowing these macro trends (West has been one of the first to explore how these trends relate to scaling)