A few follow-ups to the paleo-future post below:
The sad and creepy world of Ray Kurzweil, a technological genius who in all likelihood is going to die a very unhappy man.
A couple of obituaries, here and here, for Arthur C. Clarke.
Clarke was probably the last of the great sci-fi writers who was formed by a not-quite-post-Christian civilization which took certain bourgeois values for granted: the importance of reason, its power to tame the raw stuff of human nature, the virtues of restraint and tolerance. His writings are entertaining but very, very thin. He was contradicted by that older, wiser, and vastly more gifted writer who saw the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
Partly in memoriam, and partly just by way of a general reflection on the decline of the future, here is a journal entry from 2004, “I Miss the Future.”
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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