Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 42

Political columnists are saying that Americans have a new plan for dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That is, they're trying to bribe the Talib to become our allies instead of our enemies.
For those who wonder if this is a good idea I recommend a look at the cover of the Aug. 9 Time [...:]

 

 
It's called The Messenger; it stars Woody Harrelson and it's the story of a lifer Army captain and a used-up, shot-over staff sergeant who get assigned to the stressful job of bringing to GI families the news that their son, father or husband has just been killed in Afghanistan.
I never heard of anyone in the [...:]

 
Until 1994, the oldest fossil of a possible ancestor of ours was a mere three and a quarter million years old,. Then some teams of excavators in Ethiopia's Afar Depression began turning up pieces from some three dozen individuals, all from the same species of hominid, called Ardipithecus ramidus, and dated at 4,400,000 years [...:]

 
"You should never express more clearly than you can think."
—Niels Bohr, godfather of quantum theory

By the mid-1960s, Algis Budrys had become a darling of the critics. In the field of science fiction, two of the most respected at that time were Kingsley Amis and James Blish. Kingsley said that the way A J was going, he might become the most honored sf writer since H. G. Wells. [...:]

It was a nice spring day in 1950-something and I was up in my third-floor office in the house in Red Bank, New Jersey, trying to telephone my other office in New York.
I wasn't having much luck. Every time I picked up the phone my then wife, Carol, was already on it. Finally, [...:]

 

 
All the time some of us put in to learn Klingon no longer avails, because the new lingua faana is the one devised by linguistics professor Paul Frommer for James Cameron's Avatar. With an existing vocabulary of hundreds of words and using sounds that are familiar in terrestrial languages — but not all of [...:]

 

 
All the time some of us put in to learn Klingon no longer avails, because the new lingua faana is the one devised by linguistics professor Paul Frommer for James Cameron's Avatar. With an existing vocabulary of hundreds of words and using sounds that are familiar in terrestrial languages — but not all of [...:]

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn't particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn't quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do [...:]

When we started this register of the offensively clownish behavior of so many of our most powerful legislators, the only claim to fame we knew of for the Texan Republican Joe Barton was that he was generally considered the most successful member of Senate or House of Representatives at collecting money from the oil [...:]