Yes, you read that right. I said Blu-ray. Ever since the defection of Warner Bros. from HD-DVD to Blu-ray a few days before the Consumer Electronics Show(CES), every expert who knows anything at all about this industry has predicted the demise of HD-DVD. And they're wrong.

The most important reason is that no one is an expert on the high-definition marketplace. The industry barely even exists so people making projections based on expert knowledge of laser disc or DVD figures are only slightly more accurate than Voodoo shamen sorting chicken bones. You just can't rely on recent sales in a nascent industry and extrapolate a projection from it. Projections about what people will or will not do at this stage are even less accurate than political exit polls.

My thoughts are not based on any secret knowledge of the DVD marketplace but I have a pretty good knowledge of business. Absent an overwhelming leap in technology from Blu-ray some time soon, here are my reasons HD-DVD will win:

Loneliness is commonly regarded as a social phenomenon in which individual personality differences contribute to its severity. Some people enjoy solitude, for example, because they never feel lonely, while people with high degrees of loneliness have shorter life expectancies than people who never feel lonely.

There may be more to it than that. Recent research shows that the gene expression in the immune cells of people with chronically high levels of loneliness is different than people who do not feel lonely. Even more telling, some genes were underexpressed in the same subjects, including those in antibody production.