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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.
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".
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.
he was born december 16, 1917
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
What other SF book had such an inpact as the Bible?
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.
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!
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!"
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.
Don't you know? Elderly citizens must report to the fuel vats for decommissioning. Their energy must be returned to society.
That's the real reason he moved to Sri Lanka.
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.
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.
My questions is, why hasn't this been bigger news? Did it come out and I just missed it?
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.
"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.
Google for the humongous fungus
I don't think anyone with a fondness for the english language could fail to appreciae that sentence....
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?"
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.
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.
I've seen no credible refutation of the Nuclear Winter hypothesis, and would be interested to see any references you may have on this point. Conflating this with the Kuwaiti Oil Fires merely clouds the issue, if you'll forgive the expression. Junk science? I think that remains to be seen (hopefully not anytime soon...)
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
He was a highly-regarded planetary scientist, though it is true that he was more of a bureaucrat for the latter part of his career. Most of his work was done in large collaborations, but that can hardly be held against him.
Cheers,
Mouser
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.
That's probobly because they mistook it for another giant slug ;) Or maybe they thought it was Tonya Harding...
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