Dave Kearns

Surprised by how you react to something. I’ve never been a big Larry Lessig fan (e.g., see Death of the Internet ). We rarely agree about things, particularly in the area of intellectual property. So when all the buzz on the web, the blogosphere, the tweetzone and even the Facebook hustings were filled with encomiums to Professor Lessig’s address to the Italian parliament, I was pre-disposed to: 1) not listen to the recording, and 2) construct arguments to what I supposed would be his theme.

At a certain point, though, it became necessary to listen simply so that I could (I thought) refute whatever sound-byte arguments would be coming my way. So, this morning, I listened.

All I can say is – listen to this recording. While I don’t agree with everything Larry says – I’m not sure anyone could – this is am important address. It sets a marker along the road to the internet age. It points the path and shows what needs to be done and – perhaps more importantly – what shouldn’t be done.

Listen, learn and understand.

With all the talk about Leno’s new “old” gig at NBC (move Leno to 11:30-12:05) and the possibilities for Conan (move to 12:05 – 1:05), Fox (with their offer to Conan) could really steal late night.

Fox stations tend to do local news from 10 – 11. So put Conan on from 11 – 12. Steal the viewers from NBC & CBS stations’ local news, then hold them during Leno and first half hour of Letterman.

If Conan goes along with NBC, he risks losing even more of his audience. Switching to Fox couldn’t possible be worse, especially with an 11 PM start time.

or, as some like to call it, the advertising business.

Land Rover is running a series of TV ads for the mid-priced LR3 model. One of them starts by showing a washed out road, with voice-over saying something like “The odds of mother nature having a bad day, 9 to 1.” What this says, statistically, is that 9 days out of 10 will be bad days for mother nature, only 1 will be a good day. They then show the LR3 driving up the hill around the washout while the voiceover intones “LR3, created for the 1.”

What this literally says is that the LR3 is only good on mother nature’s good days (the 1) and rubbish on the bad days!

Either Land Rover are idiots (quite possible) or it really is a “not for off road” car and they hope their customers won’t notice. Either way, they do seem to think their potential customers are morons.

Just another P.T.Barnum moment.

…everyone else is getting younger. I didn’t appreciate reading in this morning’s newspaper that an “elderly” man’s body had been discovered south of San Jose. He was 61! Today is my 62nd birthday – how depressed did that make me feel?

I note that now the on-line version of the headline has been changed to “Deputies call death of San Jose man in Morgan Hill suspicious” certainly a better (from my perspective, if not the victim’s), more neutral news headline. I wonder if it was the editor, or the reporter who considered 61 to be “elderly”?

This is on the heals of another news story from a few weeks ago where two firefighters were killed trying to rescue a couple from a burning house. The 67-year-old man and his 61-year-old wife were described as “an elderly couple” both in the paper and on the TV news for a couple of days before a correction was made.

I can handle “senior citizen” and wince (but suffer through) at “golden ager” but if we call sixty-year-olds “elderly,” wha’s left to characterize the 85 year old?

Global Warming itself is not a myth: the earth is getting warmer, our climate is changing. Some of the pressures bringing about that change are human-created carbon emissions. But, contrary to what Pacific Gas & Electric would have you believe, we cannot stop global warming! Still, the energy company insists on putting a tag line on it’s TV ads for energy conservation claiming (or, in some cases, alluding to) the consumer’s ability to do just that.

Reducing carbon emissions is a good thing to do. So is conserving energy. But even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, all over the world, climate change would still come.

History shows that those organisms which can survive global climate change are those which are the most adaptable. But to be considered “adaptable,” we’re going to have to either plan for mass migrations as the climate changes, or work to keep our microclimates livable through the use of energy-efficient, low-carbon-emitting changes to our way of life – adding heat or cooling, irrigation, flood-control, and other non-natural impediments to nature. Science fiction talks about humans going to other planets and “terraforming” them – “…deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans” – but we’re going to have to perfect ways of terraforming the changed Earth first!

UPDATE: I’ve just come across an excellent essay by physicist Freeman Dyson (the inventor of the Dyson Sphere) on this issue. Be sure to read thru to the end where he also tells how he almost set back the course of biology a generation!

Pete Wilson died Friday night. Not the former governor, but the KGO-TV newscaster (and KGO radio talk-show host). It was quite shocking, really, as Wilson died on the operating table at Stanford Hospital while undergoing hip-replacement surgery. He would have appreciated the irony, though, of dying where there was state-of-the-art life-saving equipment available, and knowledgeable people to use it. That’s the sort of newscaster he was – there was no agenda of the left or the right, no “pretty-boy” hair and smile, no “side”. Pete Wilson was as close as we get these days to an “everyman” in journalism. You know that, unlike the brainless airheads who seem to be the majority of newscasters, Pete questioned the stories presented to him. But he wasn’t sanctimonious about it, the way Walter Cronkite grew to be. Cronkite epitomized the adjective “avuncular”. Wilson, on the other hand, always had a twinkle in his eye that said “I’m the uncle who’ll sneak you in to the places your mother doesn’t want you to go.”

Pete Wilson was my age (we were both born in ’45) which, I guess, brings his death even closer to home. But the major sadness is that I never did get to sit down with him, have a beer and talk over the momentous events of the day – whether that was a war tens of thousands of miles away, or a baseball game in the city.