Slashdot Mirror
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.
2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968 if memory serves, isn't Clarke getting a bit old?
Next they'll be conducting an interview with Philip K. Dick by Ouija Board. Not that this wouldn't be any weirder than The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Radio Free Ablemuth...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Onion does have real interviews and a pretty good AV section.
The print edition is like a reverse newspaper, with the comic section everywhere and a small non-comic center pull-out.
When somebody's dead wrong, it's generally not a good idea to mod them up "Informative"... More like "Misinformative".
Moderators, please do not wildly mod up stuff only because the first moderator made a mistake...
he first created the popular axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick."
Which of course leads to the corollary: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I'm not incompetent, but I always throw my violence in the garbage too!
Oh, you mean refuGe!... Nevermind...
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
Too bad for us.
Hawking thinks that humanity needs to genetically engineer ourselves to pre-emptively keep machines from taking us over.
Here's the article
Clark is fascinating despite his age - we should treasure the elderly, there is much knowledge there to be gained, but all too often we simply shuffle them to the side like a pair of worn shoes. Enjoy his insights while you still can. He has some fascinating opinions on Martian life, for example.
Stop corporate
The man is over 85 years old. Give him a break. I'm surprised he is still alive, let alone coherent.
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.
The first quote deals exclusively with Mars and whatever pictures Clarke has seen that appear to be vegetation. The second quote is more general about intelligent life in the universe and how we've seen signs of vegetative life on Mars.
Where does one get the idea that he's talking about pictures of vegetation from some place other than Mars?
Let's just mix and match:
How about:
"Any sufficently advanced violence is indistinguishable from magick."
or
"any sufficiently advanced technology is the last refuge of the incompetent"
Or my personal favorite:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetent is indistinguishable from magick violence."
Nice try at trolling, btw.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
What, the same "The Time Machine" that was written by HG Wells?
Wells and Clarke are the same person. Clarke went back in time to write under a pseudonym.
ACC: Well, I think they've already found life. There's some pictures from the laboratories which seem to me to be unmistakably vegetation--leaves and stems and things. I don't see what else it could possibly be.
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'd think anything decayed would be long-since so weather-worn and scattered that it couldn't possibly resemble plant-life at the macroscopic scale. Of course, IANABotonist or Geologist, so what the hell do I know?
But hey, he is Arthur C Clarke, so maybe he's privvy to stuff that we aren't. Then again, he's Arthur C Clark - the guy who predicted the Kuwaiti oil fires would cause a nuclear winter-like effect and essentially cancel summer in the region. Thankfully that came nowhere near being true - though it certainly casts some doubts on his pontification.
The second response though is geared solely toward intelligent life - so I don't know that he necessarily contradicted himself or anything.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I pity the fool who doesn't name an asteroid after one of The Onion's previous interviewees, Mr 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.
you've written two autobiographies
maybe NASA vexed him in some way, and it's his way of getting his revenge, by getting the tin-foily sci-fi crowd to endlessly send FOIA requests for the Mars vegetation photos...
"We know you have those veggie Mars photos! Dont lie to us! Arthur C. Clark *saw* them!"
Was I the only one who noticed this little quote?
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.
Does anyone know WTF he is talking about here? Before I came back to China last year I didn't seem to remember my fellow Oregonians running away in fear from the killer fungus...
Do not anger the worm.
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.
Black magic? Its behaviour is certainly often incomprehensible.
His word choice leads one to envision doom and death, and I was sufficiently motiviated to search for more info on this beastie.
http://www.harpers.org/Oregon.html
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/story1b080700.html
Google search gets you more.
on another topic: Anyone amazed at how many quotes this guy has stored up in his head?
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
ACC: [Laughs.] Well, I was rather a cynic once. But now I've combined all my beliefs into this phrase I've been circulating: "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." It's adapted from a phrase by the British writer and scientist Richard Dawkins, who said that religion was a mind virus, an idea that infected the mind. He said that not all mind-viruses are malignant; some may even be beneficial. But many are harmful--racist theories, for instance.
What's his address? I'll mail him the damn DVDs.
I did a double take on this one too, but he seems to have his facts straight.
What part of that phrase did you use in your original post? You said maybe he "misspoke" or the reporter "screwed up the transcription", but whatever, it seemed to upset you. If you're so nitpicky, expect others to nitpick you too.
My questions is, why hasn't this been bigger news? Did it come out and I just missed it?
I've met people involved with leaves and stems and things that seemed a bit odd, but knew an awful lot about hydroponics.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetent is indistinguishable from magick violence."
And there, in a nutshell, lies U.S. foreign policy.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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.
Yeah, and the interviews are usually excellent. Even if they're interviewing someone I have little interest in (like Amy Sedaris or The RZA), I'll still read it, because I know it'll be interesting. The A.V. Club's reviews are usually pretty good too, though their "Films That Time Forgot" sometimes get thematic from week to week.
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?"
The way that I seem to remember it is Clarke wrote the novel and Kubrick wrote the screenplay of a story that they collaberated on. Though there are major plot differences. In fact I remember reading once that Clarke said he wouldn't touch screenwriting with a bargepole (too technical)
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I was particularly interested in the last couple of paragraphs, regarding a possible film adaptation of Fountains of Paradise, and the fact that Clarke considers that his best/favourite novel.
Fountains was the first novel to incorporate the modern concept of a space elevator.
Anyone heard anything else about this news item?
Personally, I'm hoping for Steven Spielberg. He did a terrific job on Minority Report. Between that, AI, and Taken, he's definitely on a sci-fi roll lately.
He didn't say anything about fish, actually. Stop putting words in the man's mouth. :-)
But seriously, that statement did strike me as an odd bit of wishful thinking overpowering his otherwise healthy sense of skepticism. Jumping to grand conclusions based on sketchy facts is the kind of thing that leads to crusades, inquisitions, and other deplorable acts he attributes solely to religion.
Nevertheless, you've gotta cut some slack for people who dare to use their imagination. So what if they're wrong much of the time? They're also right, occasionally, and in ways nobody else could have envisioned.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Sounds like about the kind of thing you'd say if you had a genetic disease that forced you to live in a robot chair.
These are probably the images he's referring to.
Mars is the Dalmation Planet!
Table-ized A.I.
Hawking thinks that humanity needs to genetically engineer ourselves to pre-emptively keep machines from taking us over.
Well then, call me nuts, too, but I think this is actually a pretty inevitable conclusion once you start thinking of the big picture - say, developments over the next 1000 years or more. Hawkins may be disingenuous in going public with such long-range thoughts, but they are actually very well-founded.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
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.
Time for the Obligatory Simpsons Quote!
Abe Simpson: I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
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.
And here I thought the comic book store owner on the Simpsons was only an animated character.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
That's probobly because they mistook it for another giant slug ;) Or maybe they thought it was Tonya Harding...
Clarke goes into the idea behind his book about Fermat's Theorem, and while I like the idea, he should change the CIA to the NSA in the book. The CIA deals with crypto quite a bit, but the worlds largest employer of mathemeticians (or so I have heard them called) would be far more likely to scoop up someone who made a breakthrough in prime number theory: the NSA.
It just seems they would make much more sense for his book.
I always liked H. Beam Piper's variation -- Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent because only the incompetent wait that long to use violence.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Power and riches were the basis for the crusades, like all wars. Religion was a pretext. France made preemptive strikes against Arab encroachers who had already conquered Spain. It was as much about religion as W's war was about WMD.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Favorite quote from the interview: "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." Awesome, none of this idiotic, politically correct, don't-say-what-you're-thinking crap for Clarke. I was all set to write the Brits off as total losers - we recently had articles with them trying to get people to stop using the terms boyfriend/girlfriend and then tring to ban a video game for having animal violence (what's next, ban Looney Tunes?) - pretty much as far from this free thinking fellow as possible. Then again the interview also said he doesn't have any interest in returning to England...maybe we should all just write US, UK, and company off as old fogeys that are only getting worse and more restrictive rather than the innovative places they used to be.