e-Clippings 4.11.01

"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them."
- Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
**Right on my man Isaac!

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UPDATE: The observant (and even the not so observant)among you will
quicly notice that something is different about this week's issue of
e-clippings - its missing. The short story is that my laptop is fried
and I have lost much email and time in the battle to restore my data
and this issue was a casualty. The longer story is that I think WIN2K
and the drivers for a USB Zip drive have some kind of Jets vs the
Sharks thing happening. I know of two instances now, in which WIN2K
reacted with a USB Zip to fry a hard drive..anybody else ever hear
anything along this line? Anyway, we should be up and running for
next week but there are a couple of items I wanted to point out to
you.

First, a new feature here at the e-Clippings' home site,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eClippings, and found under
the "Bookmarks" button is "Mark's Reading List." I decided that in my
ongoing quest to use this site as a way not just to provide you with
the latest news but also to help me organize some of my random
thoughts, I would begin posting those books which I have read, want
to read, or which I think are fun and/or critical to read. Yes, the
links go to Amazon.com but I really thought that would be more
helpful than just a dead list. As always, I am interested in your
thoughts and would love to collect and post the books you feel are
important, funny or on your "in my free time" list.

The second thing is that I actually have a Cool Site and this one
will take you MUCH longer than a week to get through.


Cool Site:
KurzweilAI.net
http://www.kurzweilai.net

Ray's short bio, in his own words: "Ray Kurzweil is a writer,
inventor and entrepreneur responsible for such advances in pattern
recognition and artificial intelligence as optical character
recognition, automatic or continuous speech recognition, and digitial
synthesizers. He also has sponsored innovative projects in the cyber
arts, and in health and medicine." Maybe you saw the books, _Age of
Intelligent Machines_ or Age of Spiritual Machines_? Anyway - just
know - big time, well-regarded, Big Picture, optimistic thinker.

His site is like a course in Technology Futures but for
upperclassmen. I think you need to start with the section on
his "historical exponential" view. In a nutshell his thesis is that
people fail to recognize what it means to say that not only is the
world changing rapidly but that pace of change is also accelerating.
Kurzweil's argument is that our current predictions about the future
are all far short of what will really happen because we have failed
to internalize the idea that with more change
(better,faster,cheaper), the possibilities of even greater change
(more better, more faster, more cheaper) will happen in even less
time due to the first round of improvements. OK, read his stuff, he
explains it much better.

Well, that's about all for me now, hopefully we will be back and
functional by next week - thanks for your patience.

V/R
Mark Oehlert
Editor, Owner, Reporter, e-Clippings

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This email is provided for information purposes only. Mention or
discussion of a product, company or person does not represent any
official endorsement or criticism of the same. All authors and
organizations retain complete copyright.
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