At the beginning of Keillor’s hilarious new novel, Evelyn sets in motion a circus of zany events when she dies in her sleep — despite the fact that she’s an inveterate insomniac. In a no-nonsense note to her daughter Barbara, Evelyn stipulates that she wishes to be cremated, with her ashes sealed up in a bowling ball and “dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point.” What’s more, in the same letter Evelyn unapologetically reveals that for years she’s been conducting a passionate love affair with a retired TV weatherman.
Daily Archives: October 4, 2007
Google & Privacy
It’s been fun and edifying watching Google’s PR engine at work. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has been evangelizing the need for “international privacy standards.”
Google’s most powerful PR tool to-date is the comforting and accessible video series featuring Maile Ohye, a personable young woman who is a senior support engineer, giving a chalk talk about what information Google captures when you search, how it uses that information and how you can control it. The two videos in the series to-date are designed to be very comforting.
The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
Sputnik 50: A talk with the BBC’s Reg Turnhill
Reg Turnill was working for the BBC in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the World’s first orbiting artifical satellite.
Turnill went on to cover the space race and travelled to the Soviet Union for the press conference following cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and eventually was based in the US to cover NASA’s Moon programme.
He got to know the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun, who had developed the Nazi V-2 weapon, and also came to know many of the US astronauts.
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