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Arthur C. Clarke Talks With The Onion
sootman writes "The Onion has an interview with Arthur C. Clarke in this week's issue. My favorite line: 'The asteroid [named after me] is number four thousand and something, and the International Astronomical Federation, which deals with these sorts of things and numbered it, apologized to me because number 2001 wasn't available, having been given to somebody named "A. Einstein."'" Reader ronys point out that Despite the source, the interview is not a spoof or satire."
He's one of very few to be designated a Science Fiction Grand Master, he's the author of the classic novels Childhood's End and Rendezvous With Rama, and he first created the popular axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick."
Um no, that was Asimov. Clarke coined the term "Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent"
The interviewer's blog can be found here, for what it's worth.
'The asteroid [named after me] is number four thousand and something, and the International Astronomical Federation, which deals with these sorts of things and numbered it, apologized to me because number 2001 wasn't available, having been given to somebody named "A. Einstein."'
Asteroids are, in fact, named by the International Astronomical Union, not the International Astronomical Federation (whatever that may be). I'm surprised that Clarke made this mistake; maybe he simply misspoke himself, or the Onion reporter screwed up the transcription.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968 if memory serves, isn't Clarke getting a bit old?
I think he's nearly 90 now...
he was born december 16, 1917
Actually, it's more like a comic beginning section, followed by a slightly larger Arts section with interviews, reviews of movies, books, and music, as well as picks of upcoming shows in the area (depending on where you get it). The AV section is usually bigger than the joke section, and is usually pretty excellent.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Seriously, who marked this as interesting?
Since when has stephen hawking been nuts? physically disabled yes, nuts no.
Or am I speaking out of my arse?
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
Hawking thinks that humanity needs to genetically engineer ourselves to pre-emptively keep machines from taking us over.
Here's the article
Clarke was more famously known for his book "The Time Machine" than anything else.
What, the same "The Time Machine" that was written by HG Wells?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Actually Asimov was the one who said (through one of his charecters) "Violence is the last REFUGE of the incompetent" (emphasis mine to point out the fact that you misquoted him.
It was Salvor Hardins' motto throughout the Foundation Series (by Isaac Asimov). The Foundation series was among the best Science Fiction I have ever read (although Childhoods End still retains the top spot).
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Nevermind, I am amazingly stupid, it was the FIRST result from google when searching for "largest living creature earth fungus oregon"
http://www.extremescience.com/biggestlivingthing.h tm
http://www.chez.com/lesovnis/htm/marsveg01.htm
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
[*]There's a reason that Clarke lives in Sri Lanka or whatever the fuck it's called this week. Easy access to young boys and lax law enforcement and extradition.
Google for the humongous fungus
Here's one story. It is big, and it doesn't move.
Fellowship 9/11
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires / Nuclear Winter thing was Carl Sagan. Pretty much the entire nuclear winter thing has been discredited as pop / junk science at this point.
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I did a double take on this one too, but he seems to have his facts straight.
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Hope they help.
I think he's talking about these images.
I highly recommend his book "Greetings, Carbon Based Bipeds", which is a collection of his various writings. Very entertaining reading, especially when you consider the timeframe when some of them were written. (1934-1998) You can pick it up for next to nothing .
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No single person wrote the Bible, unless you take a strict view that God is the author because he 'inspired' the writings... in which case you have a God who, despite omniscience and omnipotence, can't write a book without filling it with contradictions.
The Bible and its siblings are collections of stories, the older parts of which probably existed as oral tradition for quite some time before being recorded in written form.
This may well have already been mentioned but... The Onion A.V. Club (the serious side of the operation) published a collection of interviews similar to the Arthur Clarke one. Book is called THE TENACITY OF A COCKROACH and includes conversations with other pop culture movers & shakers like Harlan Ellison, Chuck Jones, and George Romero. Jr.
Arthur C Clarke.
25, Barnes Place,
Colombo 7,
Sri Lanka.
That should be sufficient to get the item eventually received by him; I'd guess that "Colombo 7" is actually a postal/zip code.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The book was not made into a movie, as such. Clarke wrote the book while writing the screenplay, which was based on both Clarke's and Kubrick's ideas.
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Link
The idea was correct, just not the analysis.
These are probably the images he's referring to.
I discovered this short story by Clarke through a previous /. posting concerning chess. I really enjoyed it so here it is again.
Btw, I remember in that posting someone saying there are more possible games of chess than atom's in the universe. How is that possible? And how do you calculate # of games, with pieces moving back and forth ad infinitum?
In the book the monolith was on Iaeptus(sp?), moon of saturn in the movie it was on the moon of jupiter.
Sierra released a Myst-like adventure game based on the Rama series in 1997. I think I might still have my copy in a box somewhere...it was pretty good and pleasingly mindbending, IIRC. Included an interview with Clarke and Gentry Lee to boot. Having only read _Garden of Rama_ and _Rama Revealed_ I can't say how well it adapted _Rendezvous_ or _Rama II_, but Sierra's version was certainly recognizable to me.
Well, I'm here in Oregon and I'd like to reassure everyone that there's no giant fungus gobbling up cities left and right. It's a bit of a stretch to call it a single giant organism. Think of it as a single mutated fungus that was particularly successful and kept reproducing as a giant mat of intertwined fungal fibers. It does a poor job at creating spores and spreading with the wind, but seems to do quite well at slowly expanding under the soil.
Just for the sake of nit-picking accuracy:
Both the book and the movie were based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," originally published in 1950, wherein a monolith is discovered on the Moon.
The front cover of the novel "2001: a space odyssey" states that it was "based on the screenplay of the MGM film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke."
Article+pics
more pics.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center deals with naming asteroids, not the International Astronomical Federation. As far as I'm aware, there's no such thing as the IAF.
Fungi, live plants, have "indeterminant growth"- this means they do not have a maximum size or age that they reach and maintain; instead, they grow until they run out of resources or can't maintain their bulk anymore. Even then, they may just lop off body parts and start over from that point OR fragment into multiple bodies, each capable of growing independently of the others. The giant fungus in Oregon (and the one in Michigan's UP, and the others we haven't found yet or have forgotten about) is UNDERGROUND (except for the occasional fruiting body), and isn't eating "the state of Oregon"- it's gathering resources from dead/decaying matter. Decomposition makes the world go round.
I'm not just being paranoid- I've seen the data.
So the Atheist Fascists never did anything bad without Religon?
If you are referring to Adolf Hitler, he was a Christian and spoke quite a bit about Christianity in Mein Kampf.
Yes, that's what he meant. You, I, and Sir Clarke are all talking about the same "Dark Dune Spot" phenomena.
Well it depends on how you define 'crusade' ofcourse. I'd be hard pressed to call the Norman conquest of England a crusade, even though they must have surely prayed a lot.
Fact is, in medieval times every leader and his uncle were aching to get their hands on more land. That some of the ensuing batles pitted christian against muslem hardly qualifies those battles as crusades.
The 'christian' crusades however, were pretty different in that they were VERY definitely about religion.
I don't blame modern christians for crimes of the past, but I don't look kindly on even a hint of excuses. The crusades were evil, period! Saying 'others did it too' doesn't change that.
What a rotten party, have we run out of beer or something?
No, Hitler was not a Christian. Quick google for Hitler Christian turned up a plethora of links telling otherwise. Mods, please verify facts before modding things like this up. I forfeit my ability to mod this story so that I could post a proper rebuttal to this. Corrections should be made.
It get's even funnier if you actually read it. It is so damn full of contradictions, silly advice and some stories that are so damn disturbing that I cannot see a good moral either way.
Believe in whichever deity you want with my blessing, but anybody who takes the bible as their lead deserves to be laughed at.
Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes (Genesis 19:8) Yeah, you go Lot!
A more disgusting tale that is a bit long to quote here is Judges 19. Bottom line of the story is: A guy stays the night as a guest of another guy bringing his concubine instead. Now during the night some bullies from the city come to shake out the mistery guest, but the host will have none of that so he offers them his daughter and the guest's concubine. Anyway, the bullies didn't come for his daughter, but they take the concubine for good measure and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning. Well the poor lass dies but being a decent guy her master takes her home on a donkey. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.
Yeah, I guess that's the decent thing to do under the circumstances. I wouldn't really know since I'm an atheist.
Anyway, offered any bulls lately? Remember to burn it's innards. They're such a sweet savour unto the LORD (Leviticus 1:9 and pretty much the rest of the book)
What a rotten party, have we run out of beer or something?
The Crusades used religion as an excuse for looting, pillaging, and land grabs. A major goal was the seizing of lands by younger and non-inheriting members of the nobility. As much effort went into fighting and looting christian states as muslim. Constantinople, the Christian citys of costal Anatolia suffered from the invasion of the European barbarians. When Jerusalem fell, resident Christians, Jews, and Muslims were slaughtered indiscriminately. Without religion, another excuse would have been found for the invasion of a preceivced weaker area.