Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 13

  “God is arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction.” —Richard Dawkins

If you’ve ever faced a final exam on subject matter you just haven’t been able to get your head around, you might like to know about a gene called HMGA2, recently identified by a team of 207 researchers at UCLA. The good part is that HMGA2 has reliably been shown to increase human IQ, leading [...]

Now that it seems the Higgs boson has probably been discovered, other researchers than Peter Higgs would seem entitled to justice. There were, in all, five other researchers who had the idea, and members of the physicists’ community are asking that the thing be properly named the Brout-Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble particle.

Most of the early writers of science fiction seemed to be either amateurs who began writing sf when they knew of no market for it, or professional writers on mostly quite other themes, who jumped over to science fiction for its freedom of plotting. Then it became more and more true that the larval stage [...]

  “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and the unarmed.” —Gen. Douglas MacArthur

It’s an old story — a legend since it opened its doors in 1917, principal employer for its home town, suddenly drifting into sinking sales and facing bankruptcy — until export markets opened up, and now the Izhevsk Machine Works is shipping its famously deadly old Kalashnikov rifles as fast as they can turn them [...]

Dear pals and other people, is that not one hellishly handsome birthday cake? It was delivered at Windycon, a gift from Malcolm Phifer, and the only thing that isn’t exactly right about it is that I won’t actually turn 93 until the 26th of this month. But better early than never is what I always [...]

Stick Up a Bank Today! And then after you’ve been arrested and you’re on trial act as nasty and unrepentant as you can, because the verdict you want is life without parole. For an example of the benefits you might receive from such a sentence, consider the case of Illinois’s senior convict, the late William [...]

Anybody here remember the Stuxnet computer malware? That was the one that pretty nearly put Iran out of the nuclear warfare business for a time when one of its mean little computer worms bollixed Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants. Well, Stuxnet is old stuff now. There are much more powerful programs that could paralyze any large-scale [...]

A few days ago I sent the blog staff a short message to print. It said that to vote for Republicans at this time is to vote for more and worse natural disasters. The message was short and, I fear, a bit cryptic, because areas all around us were losing power and time to vote [...]