“The More I Find Out, The Less I Know”

Finance and Economics Peter Leppik Finance and Economics Peter Leppik

Money Changes Everything (A Parable of Google)

Before Google, if you wanted to find something on the Internet you most likely looked on Yahoo. If not Yahoo, then you probably went to one of the AltaVista-like search engines, but by the time Google hit the scene all the search engines were so cluttered with advertising as to be nearly useless.

What made Yahoo useful was not that it was complete (it wasn't), but that for many topics searching the Yahoo directory was likely to give you highly relevant web pages. Part of this relevance was due to the fact that Yahoo was compiled by people, not machines, and people are very good at judging whether other people will find a web site relevant. Then, as now, advertiser-supported web sites could earn more money if they had more visitors, so a listing in Yahoo was valuable.

Unfortunately, using people to compile a web directory doesn't scale well. You can only add to the directory as fast as your staff can review and classify web sites, and obscure searches are likely to come up empty-handed.

Then Google came along and changed everything.

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Ways To Say It Peter Leppik Ways To Say It Peter Leppik

Evil Alter Ego

I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with She Who Puts Up With Me a few nights ago. It was one of the third season episodes where we get to see shy, bookish Willow as an evil dominatrix vampire in an alternate reality.

It was obvious that the actress was enjoying herself a great deal playing the dark twin to her usual character.

"Wouldn't you like to have an evil alter ego?" I asked She Who Puts Up With Me, who is one of the least-evil people I have ever met.

"Of course," she answered, then quickly added, "but just an alter ego."

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Flying Peter Leppik Flying Peter Leppik

Sold.

We've sold N620CP, and tomorrow the new owner will arrive in Minneapolis to take it to its new home in California. We've had this plane longer than our kids, and it feels a little like a member of the family.

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Science Peter Leppik Science Peter Leppik

Strung Along

Modern physics has some big problems: there are two different theories of How Things Work, but they don't fit together. Einstein's General Relativity has passed every experimental test we can throw at it, and explains how the universe works on the scale of solar systems, galaxies, and bigger. At the other end of the spectrum, various quantum theories combine into the Standard Model, which has passed every experimental test we can throw at it, and explains how the universe works on the scale of molecules, atoms, and smaller.

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Flying Peter Leppik Flying Peter Leppik

Sentimental Journey

We have a buyer for N620CP. It took only a few days after listing in Trade-a-Plane to get a serious offer (with deposit) for our beloved Archer, and if all goes well, she may be winging her way to California by the end of the week. The plane will be in for the buyer's inspection most of this week, so I took her up for what may be my last flight last night.

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Business Peter Leppik Business Peter Leppik

1. Aim Gun at Foot. 2. Pull Trigger

The release of some old TV shows on DVD has been held up by problems getting licenses for all the music. A number of TV shows used pop songs as background (or even foreground) music, and now the rightsholders of those tunes want additional royalties for DVD release.

None of this should be surprising. When the shows were originally created there was no market for consumer sales of TV shows (except maybe for made-for-TV movies or things like National Geographic specials). As a result, nobody thought about this licensing issue until suddenly DVDs created the market.

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Technology Peter Leppik Technology Peter Leppik

DMCA anticircumvention question

I am not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV. But I have a legal question if there's a DMCA expert floating around out there.

Suppose that I own a huge collection of DVDs (as many of us do), and I want to back them up onto a big hard drive. This is purely because (a) sometimes it is more convenient to watch a DVD on my laptop and the hard drive takes less power than the DVD player; and (b) I have small children and I want to have a backup in case they scratch the original.

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Business Peter Leppik Business Peter Leppik

Economics of Book Publishing

I'm at the SpeechTEK West conference/trade show in San Francisco this week, and I was chatting with a consultant I know about our respective books (his forthcoming, mine published). An industry analyst of our mutual acquaintance interjected the too-obvious-to-ask question:

"What are the economics of writing a book? How do you make any money off it?"

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