Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 40

Here are the answers to yesterday's science quiz:



You know that light travels at a speed of 1 light-year per year, don't you? You also know that the universe is 13.5 billion years old? Okay, if you're so smart, how far away is the farthest object we can see in our telescopes?
45 billion light [...]

You know that light travels at a speed of 1 light-year per year, don't you? You also know that the universe is 13.5 billion years old? Okay, if you're so smart, how far away is the farthest object we can see in our telescopes?


When Gregor Mendel started experimenting with how organisms inherited characteristics [...]

Possibly in Arizona? Possibly late '60s?

For some time now, I've been putting on paper recollections that I think will sooner or later go into what will be either an expanded new edition of my autobiography, The Way the Future Was, or a new book which is a sort of sequel to that one. [...]

What the Other Guy Does
I said earlier that there are many, many ways of collaborating, and there are.

There's taking what somebody else knows all about but has no writing skills; you get him to talk about whatever it is or give you a rough draft of what he has to say and you [...]

I didn't get over to the Worldcon in Australia, so when I won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, my friend Bob Silverberg accepted it for me. Here is what he said at the ceremony:
"A couple of weeks before I left for Australia I received an e-mail from Fred Pohl asking whether I would [...]

I spend a lot of time reading what you guys have to say about items in the blog, and I have to say I'm impressed with what a smart and rewarding bunch you all are. (Of course I would probably say something of that sort whether it was true or not, but in [...]

Jack Williamson, of course, had become a civilian again along with all the rest of us. His plan was to go back to the college education he had been forced to abandon long before because he didn't have the money to continue it. Now there was this wonderful new law, called the GI [...:]

Well, no, it doesn't, or at least it doesn't begin quite right away, because in order to describe how Jack Williamson and I became really tight lifelong friends, I have to digress by telling you something about another dear friend, Dirk Wylie.
Dirk — old Brooklyn Tech chum, fellow Futurian, et many a cetera — didn't [...:]

Newton Leroy Gingrich's latest I'll-say-anything-for-a-headline proclamation is really pretty weird. What he says is that in order to understand President Obama's political activities you have to know that Obama is really acting according to Kenyan, not American, political practices.
Actually, I think that's pretty dumb. I've read a lot on the subject, and I've [...:]

 
"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
—Isaac Asimov


 
Related posts:
Bright Sayings of Geniuses, No. 1