Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 26

When I was writing The Last Theorem with Sir Arthur Clarke, I found it necessary in the story, for plot purposes, to have the hero, Ranjit Subramanian, spend a prolonged period in a jail, in solitary confinement.
The obvious way to get that to happen was to have Ranjit get tangled up in the [...]

 
"It is always easier to prevent a disease than to treat it."
—Anthony S. Fauci

A simple high-school electrochemistry question for you smart ones: how do you make that excellent, but tricky, fuel for your car, hydrogen?
Simple. You start with plain old water; you dip two terminals from a battery at the ends of the tank and turn on the current. Something starts bubbling at [...]

Part One:
The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring
And Most of the Rest of the Year, Too
Everybody loves flowers, right? But some people are more in love with them than others. For instance, consider the Dutch. They grow them by the metric ton every year, and they go to a lot of trouble [...]

Let's make believe you're a poor person. (I know that's a stretch, but let's go with it.) A member of your family gets a fever and other signs of something wrong, so you want to take him to a doctor. The trouble is the only insurance you have is government-sponsored Medicaid, and [...]

My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the "cooling box," to [...]

My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the "cooling box," to [...]

 
 
"We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel, but it is on the space where nothing is that the usefulness of the wheel depends."
—Lao Tzu 

After Fletcher Pratt's death, his wife, Inga, sold the house and moved away, but returned once to take this photograph. Actually it shows the back of the mansion, looking downhill from Portland Road. The other side had the main entrance and the most frequently used stretch of the great porch, with its view [...]

"20 Chernobyls happening at once."
That's how Arnold Gundersen, a licensed core operator and former nuclear industry senior vice president, described the situation at Japan's wrecked Fukushima atomic power plant — not when the Force 9 earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11 but in late June. As he described in an interview for [...]