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In my prior post on Michael Crichton, I wrote about how Mr. Crichton had taken the time to evaluate the computer models that have led so many people to have such strong concerns about a global warming crisis. Mr. Crichton found them lacking, particularly with respect to predicting doomsday scenarios. I stated that I haven’t looked at the models, but I admired him for taking the time to look at the evidence and coming to his own opinion.

My friend Michael Hartl, a Caltech PhD, is also a skeptic. He agrees global warming is factually true, but doesn’t find it convincing that it must be due to human activity or that the warming will likely lead to some type of doomsday. Here’s his post on the subject: http://eikonoklastes.org/articles/2007/09/05/global-warming

You can also add the famed physicist Freeman Dyson (wikipedia) to the list of global warming doomsday skeptics. He elaborates on his opinions about such warming to a great degree in an article in Edge issue 219 (http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf).

His basic points are:

• Science sometimes can’t yet provide an answer; but the public will choose one anyway. Even when science lacks understanding, the public prefers to listen to confident answers and predictions by the consensus opinion of the most vocal scientists of the day. That is why heretics who question scientific dogmas have been and will continue to be useful in science, particularly on things that aren’t well understood.
• Climate isn’t properly described by computer models; it’s described by data. Global climate is a very complicated thing, and the causes of warming or cooling are not well understood. Climate computer models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests, which appear to have a significant impact on climate. They therefore do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. Diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on such computer models.
• Warming is local. It’s true parts of the Earth are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading.
• Technology to fix things improves over time. If biotechnology takes over the planet in the next fifty years, as computer technology has taken it over in the last fifty years, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. … the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management.
• Sea level is rising, but not necessarily because of humanity’s actions. We have accurate measurements of sea level going back two hundred years. We observe a steady rise from 1800 to the present, with an acceleration during the last fifty years. It is widely believed that the recent acceleration is due to human activities, since it coincides in time with the rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But the rise from 1800 to 1900 was probably not due to human activities. The scale of industrial activities in the nineteenth century was not large enough to have had measurable global effects. So a large part of the observed rise in sea level must have other causes. One possible cause is a slow readjustment of the shape of the earth to the disappearance of the northern ice-sheets at the end of the ice age twelve thousand years ago. Another possible cause is the large-scale melting of glaciers, which also began long before human influences on climate became significant.
• The threat of an Ice Age is still very real, and it’s not clear how warming effects this threat. For the last 800,000 years every 100,000 there is an ice age lasting 90,000 years and a warm interglacial period lasting 10,000 years. We are at present in a warm period that began 12,000 years ago. We do not know if human activities in general, and burning of fossil fuels in particular, make the onset of the next ice-age more likely or less likely.
• A warmer world has existed before, and could have benefits. Roughly 6,000 years ago, there were deciduous forests in Northern Europe where the trees are now conifers, proving that the climate in the far north was milder than it is today. There were also trees standing in mountain valleys in Switzerland that are now filled with famous glaciers. 6,000 years ago seems to have been the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era that began 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended. If the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of 6,000 years ago when the Sahara was wet? Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of 6,000 years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today?
• Two different types of values. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms.

Definitely more food for thought.

“E pur si muove.”

[translation: "It still moves."]

Galileo Galilei (muttering under his breath at Inquisition, after he had publicly recanted his position on Earth’s movement)

You can find my other favorite quotes here: http://mathoda.com/quotes

As iPhone excitement reaches a fever pitch, let’s take a moment to ponder what Steve Jobs called Apple’s “hobby”, Apple TV (product page). Jobs explained to Walt Mossberg that Apple TV is not another set top box or a set top box replacement, but is “sort of a new DVD player for the Internet age.” Jobs also said Apple TV is a product that will evolve over time.

Many people in the developed world have a DVD player. It’s not as big a market as cell phones, but it is a huge market. It’s historically been a pretty bad business, unless you’re the low cost manufacturer, because the format in which DVD discs are encoded is a standard that any manufacturer can create a device for.

Toshiba and Sony each saw a solution to the commoditization of DVD players: create and control a new standard for a new type of DVD disc that carries a lot more data, enough to carry movies in high definition. Toshiba, with its HD DVD standard, and Sony, with its Blueray standard, are fighting a pitched battle over who gets to control that high definition DVD disc future. A good amount of their fight has been over convincing the movie studios to back their respective standards. Yet the confusion over which type of player to buy has kept many people from buying either type of player. And when hackers cracked the digital rights protection on high definition DVDs, Fox stopped distributing high definition movie discs.

Meanwhile, Apple and startups like Vudu (see my prior post on Vudu) are seeking to use Internet connected boxes that would replace the DVD player entirely. Is an Internet connected box a better approach than a high definition DVD player? For any type of content, to me it seems the Internet is a better medium than a physical disc in 4 ways and a worse environment in 3 ways.

The ways the Internet is superior are:

1. Marketing. It’s cheaper to do marketing. You can tease people with parts of content and it’s easier for people to share what they like. With community features like YouTube ratings and the Facebook social graph, you can let people know what content their communities prefer.
2. Upload, storage, distribution. It’s easier to allow people to upload. In the physical world, only a select few get DVDs made. In the Internet world, anyone can share their video. The technological costs of storing and distributing that video are rapidly decreasing as the Internet evolves.
3. Encryption. It’s technologically easier to create an encrypted environment on the Internet because you control the software on both the server, client, and data packet sides. In the physical world it’s harder to update broken encryption systems once part of the encryption scheme has been shattered.
4. Update the interface. The interface for Internet based solutions can be revised and updated, as we see in the rapid changes happening to websites. This advantage of the Internet will spread to Internet connected consumer devices.

The ways the Internet is inferior are:

1. Technologically it’s cheaper to move large amount of data by moving discs than by copying bits. High definition video takes up a lot of data space. For a long time it has been cheaper to move that data around by truck than by a network because each physical disc can store tremendous amounts of data. The advantage trucks enjoy is diminishing, however, because the Internet is evolving swiftly and peer to peer file sharing systems dramatically lower the technological costs of distribution.
2. Legally it’s cheaper to move discs then to copy bits. For professionally produced content it’s a bit more expensive to buy or rent movies than it is to share physical discs (thus the current disc through the mail business models of Netflix, Blockbuster, Gamestop, LaLa). This is because although technology makes it cheaper to copy bits electronically then to move them physically, the law of copyright requires you to obtain rights to copy bits electronically but often lets you move them around physically without seeking permission. Therefore, despite the greater technological costs of moving discs, they have less legal costs, and therefore potentially less total cost.
3. Painful to hook up. It’s a bit difficult to connect the Internet to your high definition television type displays. The interfaces on the devices currently used to make this hookup are generally pretty poor and keeping the Internet connection live adds a potential point of failure.

Yet that’s just where things are currently. In the spirit of Wayne Gretzky, let’s ask where the puck is going.

Are physical discs going to become better at marketing, upload (openness), storage, encryption, or changing their interface, than the Internet? It seems to me self evident that the answer is a resounding no.

Is it going to get technologically and legally cheaper to move discs onto the Internet relative to the legal cost of moving physical discs? The discrepancy in technological and legal cost will likely diminish, but it’s unlikely for the legal cost advantage of physical distribution to disappear unless more and more content is unencrypted.

There are multiple approaches to dealing with the legal cost of moving content around. Apple is trying its best to get around this disadvantage by creating one environment (iTunes) to serve content (music, video, games, software) to a multitude of devices (the desktop, laptop, ipod, iphone, Apple TV). Internet stores selling professional content in a digital form may be able to leverage their growing market share (see story) to diminish their legal cost disadvantage. Like Apple, Joost has created an encrypted hard to upload environment, but there are also unencrypted easy to upload environment (think YouTube), or encrypted easy to upload environments (think Brightcove), which all circumvent some of the legal cost disadvantages that the Internet has over physical distribution. The growing size of the Internet advertising market also potentially will draw more professional content onto Internet based distribution systems.

Is it going to get less painful to hookup the Internet to your high definition television type display? Undoubtedly. User interface design in consumer devices is something that Apple is very good at, but it’s not beyond the capabilities of a TiVo, Microsoft, Google, or other party to innovate in such a space. And one significant advantage of building consumer electronics devices with a built in Internet service to distribute media is that you can continuously upgrade the interface of that device. We’ve seen this in the desktop, the laptop, and hints of this with Apple TV and the iPhone. Device development goes from a relatively slow iteration hardware model to a super fast iteration web site like model.

Although leadership in the Internet age can change rapidly (see my post on Murdoch’s statement “They’re all moving to Facebook now”), it is possible to create competitive advantage in the Internet. Apple has shown they can do it by coupling beautiful hardware, elegant software interfaces, a minimalist aesthetic approach to what a customer actually finds most useful, and a growing library of professional content that it has the rights to distribute (iTunes) and amateur content (YouTube through Apple).  Internet connected consumer electronics devices is certainly a better business than being a commodity DVD player manufacturer, if you can get traction with the consumer, and can maintain a proper pace of innovation. This is a point that Toshiba and Sony, with their massive initiatives on a waning medium, would do well to heed.

Update, 1-9-08: An alternative to Apple TV or the various Windows extender devices is to attach a full computer to the television.  See http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/27/the-macmini-hdtv-revolution/

Update, 3-14-08: An even better alternative may be to get Netflix’s streaming movie service ($13.99 a month for 2 DVDs in the mail AND unlimited streaming of about a third of Netflix’s movies) onto your television. Currently this requires a Windows PC (thanks to Apple’s refusal to license digital rights management to Netflix), but in the near future this Netflix service is expected to appear on other consumer products devices.