Author C. Clark has passed. He was probably . . . no, he was the most influential man during my adolescence and early adulthood. He’s the main reason I began college as an astronomy major at the University of Arizona - later to get sidetracked into mathematics, history, philosophy, etc.

I read nearly all of his books, both science fiction and science. Along with the 2001 and 2010 Odysseys I love his books Songs of Distant Earth, Childhoods End, and Fountains of Paradise. And it boggles my mind that A Fall of Moondust hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

One of my favorite quotes comes in the acknowledgment of one of his books, “In accordance to the Clark/Asimov treaty the second best science writer dedicates this book to the second best science fiction writer.”

I read his bio a few years ago and it really stuck me that he wrote the screenplay for 2001 from Sri Lanka. He would fax the changes to Stanly Kubrik, they would talk on the phone and then he would go back to editing again. And this is in the late 60s that he was doing this. Sending a fax on a daily basis from Sri Lanka, in the 60s. That’s bleeding edge!

In watching 2010 the sceen that really sticks out for me is where Floyd is talking to Bowman as Bowman transforms through various ages. The old man version of Bowman says, “You see, it’s all very clear to me now. The whole thing. It’s wonderful.”

I hope AC is with the Star Child, and it’s wonderful.

A bit about the code
There’s not much to see in the code of my tribute. It’s a poor rendition of the most popular screen saver of all time. ( I wonder what AC Clark’s screen saver was. ) It’s just something I knocked together while watching 2010 again tonight. ( The movie still holds up very well.) I used the TweenLite tweening engine for the first time. I played around with a fullScreen version but I can’t get the Kimili plugin to accept the allowfullscreen attrubute. ( Yes, I have the most recent version of Kimili. )

Oh, don’t hang out on this page too long. There is a memory leak in the FullStars.swf. When a tween completes it calls to a callback function and that callback simply creates another star in a random position and then tweens it to the center. I looked through the TweenLite code and it seems to try and clean up a reference when a tween completes. But something isn’t going right. It’s probably something I overlooked. Anyway, if you’re computer is slowing down you might want to browse on from this page. :-)