20 Quotes by Michael Benson

Stan has decided to kill off all the crew of Discovery and leave Bowman only. Drastic, but it seems right. After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor.

In a 1972 story titled “The Big Space Fuck,” Kurt Vonnegut names his spaceship with “eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose” the Arthur C. Clarke, “in honor of a famous space pioneer.” Its mission is to impregnate the Andromeda Galaxy.

As for HAL singing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” this, too, was Clarke’s contribution, including the song’s gradual devolution to near incomprehensibility at the end. The idea originated in a visit he’d made in 1962 to Bell Laboratories, where he’d heard John Kelly’s voice-synthesizer experiments with an IBM 7094 mainframe, which had coaxed the machine to sing Harry Dacre’s 1892 marriage proposal—the first song ever sung by a computer.

Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

If you can describe it, I can film it.” Though I managed to disprove this dictum, I must also admit that Stanley later filmed things I couldn’t possibly describe.

Ask not for whom the monolith tolls.

What we discovered was that by creating additional content for this show, we could creative a marketing tool that would have fans more invested in the program, and if it was cool they'd share with their friends.

Following independence, it immediately charted its own course, not falling for certain big-name Western economists who came into to the rest of Eastern Europe and gave advice that was not necessarily the best for a specific economy.

You really can make wiffle ball your own game. Every field is different.