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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."
The interviewer's blog can be found here, for what it's worth.
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
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
Asimov coined the term "Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent". They appeared in the Foundation trilogy and were IIRC spoken by the character Hari Seldon.
Not Hari Seldon. Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
http://www.chez.com/lesovnis/htm/marsveg01.htm
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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.
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.
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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.