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Jessica Hagy’s lovely requiem for Authur C Clarke He knew science fiction didn’t have to be an oxymoron.

Thanks Arthur:

• “Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside.”

• Clarke’s three laws:

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

• “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

• “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

• “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”

• Of UFOs: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.”

• “Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.”

Now there’s a zen graph I have never seen in ppt!

Comment by Jon Burg March 19, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

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it is about time someone brought Arthur C. Clarke to the business discussion. great science fiction has more to do with humanity than current documentaries. it shows that we are capable of imagination that allows us to move in leaps – radical innovation.

IP is a big topic in the world of innovation: protection vs open source. Consider this thinking -from ‘Accelerando’:
“…he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project. In IP geek circles Manfred is legendary. He’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack IP regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap but the set of all possible better mouse traps. roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee and panics.”
How’s that?

Comment by Margaret Manson March 24, 2008 @ 9:05 pm

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