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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."

15 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Author's blog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The interviewer's blog can be found here, for what it's worth.

  2. Re:Isn't he getting old? by iamplupp · · Score: 5, Informative

    he was born december 16, 1917

  3. Re:Believe it or not by illuminatedwax · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  4. Re:small article nitpick by Unknown+Kadath · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  5. vegetaiton statement by VAXcat · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.chez.com/lesovnis/htm/marsveg01.htm

    --
    There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
  6. Re:gotta agree by CommieLib · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  7. The 2,200 Acre Thousand Year Old Oregonian Fungus by blorg · · Score: 5, Informative
    Incidentally, have you heard about the discovery of the largest living creature on Earth? Would you believe it's two or three miles across, and probably several thousand years old, and still growing? It's this fungus that's eating Oregon. It's a single creature. I'm not quite sure how that's determined.

    I did a double take on this one too, but he seems to have his facts straight.

  8. Re:gotta agree by rsidd · · Score: 5, Informative
    I almost wondered: did I miss a day of NASA releases where they casually announced that 'Oh, by the way... there's stuff growing on Mars'. I mean, I suppose it's possible that he was referring to debris that resembles decayed plant matter.

    I think he's talking about these images.

  9. A really good book of Clarke's by gosand · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Onion A.V. Club Interview Collection by FilmJr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. ACC's Mail collection address by reality-bytes · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:What is your fucking point by Scaba · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  13. A few real Arthur C. Clarke Quotations by stuffduff · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?"
  14. Clarke's short story (postcard) on chess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  15. Re:Great Quote from the Article by michaelhood · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.