My web reading varies a lot from day to day, but two items I never miss are Ray Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence News and Paul Hsieh's GeekPress. While both resources are invaluable to a Speculist, and often cover overlapping news stories, I imagine that they are produced quite differently.
I picture Kurzweil as a kind of Bond villian, commandeering some vast army of automated data-gathering agents. He's got bots, spiders, and other artificially intelligent, ravenously hungry web-crawlers working 24/7 to fill the maw of KurzweilAI.net with much-needed news of emerging technologies.
Contrast that with Pauh Hsieh — the hapless everyman (everygeek?) who has taken on the job alone. I picture him hammering away at Google into the wee hours of the morning, long after Diana has given up on him and gone to bed. He's a single-combat warrior in the fight to bring us the offbeat technology and tech-related news we so desperately need.
Kudos to both of them, of course.
One thing I find particularly interesting about GeekPress is the way Paul develops little themes within his four or five daily items. Consider this juxtapostion of headlines:
Physicists have been able to resolve events separated by as little as 10^-16 seconds, i.e. 100 attoseconds. This is on the order of the time it takes the electron in a hydrogen atom to orbit the proton.
Geek wristwatches galore...
Coincidence? I think not. The theme there is time — geeky approaches to time.
Today's entries were unique in that this was one of two identifiable themes. Look at these two stories:
Shat-Lessons: Handy on-line guide on how to speak and act like William Shatner. (Via Dave Barry.)
"Sending e-mail can be a struggle if your name has a 4-letter word"
Clearly, we are left to wonder whether William Shatner has trouble sending e-mail, or whether the mail filters miss the obscure past-tense form of the S-word.
Thought-provoking? Maybe a little.
Dangerous? Definitely.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Paul Hsieh: sleep-deprived genius.
Posted by Phil at February 26, 2004 09:38 AM | TrackBackI would like to keep up with both, but neither has an RSS feed, and that means that they are below my radar.
Posted by: Phelps at February 26, 2004 10:41 AMI have to agree. Even my piddling and manually maintained web site has a simple RSS file that I manage to keep up-to-date.
Posted by: Andrew Salamon at February 26, 2004 10:51 AM