Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 21

When Anne McCaffrey died, I lost — in fact, we all lost — a kind, generous and undemanding friend, and it took some of the holiday spirit out of the Christmas-New Years time. It also led me to think about the general question of death, as presented in the cases of three old friends. Annie [...]

  "There are many things we thought we knew and it's now painfully clear we just don't." —Emile A. Okal

"I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there is a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election." So said Warren Buffett in a news interview last July. A somewhat embroidered version also containing the [...]

Cyril Begins to Blossom When Cyril's bad luck dumped him into the Infantry just when Hitler caught the American Army with their pants down in the Battle of the Bulge, he became a machine-gunner. What happened with him in that worrisome period before Patton, plus thousands of fresh reserves, kicked Hitler's troops back into Germany [...]

We meant to print this last week but time got away from us, as it often does. So here it is anyway. Maybe the Week of Heavy Hangovers is an even better time for its message.

When you set out to celebrate the New Year give a thought to what your drinks cost. [...]

 
"Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves."
—Richard Feynman

On His Way to Being the Very Best Writer I Have Ever Known
I think Cyril Kornbluth knew he wanted to be a writer at about the same age as most of the rest of us, which was generally early to middle teens. What he didn't know was what kind of writer he wanted to [...]

A few months ago some fed-up Americans decided to let Wall Street know that they were a bunch of greedy, conscienceless pigs, and so they marched down that short, narrow — and crooked — street. It made the papers, and the next day there were a few more of them … and then more [...]

So far in the history of life on Earth there have been five Great Extinctions. One was caused by the giant meteor that hit what is now the coast of Mexico, two by freezing in the oceans and the lowering of the sea levels, one by huge, widespread volcanic eruptions, one (probably) by gigantic [...]