haiKupiec

Dead at age 90. Personally, I feel indebted to his influence in the creation of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe.

Clarke’s Three Laws (from Profiles of the Future, 1962):

• “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
• “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Many in my line of work know the last law well.  The other two are equally worthy of memorization.
More on Clarke in the NY Times obit.

TED=Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It’s a conference held annually in Monterey, California. It’s intentionally kept small and is wildly popular–registration for the 2008 conference is already closed. But you can attend in a virtual way: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks.

Scientific American: A Digital Life [ INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ]
New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear–and even things they cannot sense–and to store all these data in a personal digital archive