Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday in a hospital in Sri Lanka, his adopted home.  He was 90, which was a pretty darn good run if you ask me.  He was the last of the "Big Three" of science fiction (the other two being Asimov and Heinlein) to take a trip to the Great Galactic Recycler. 

He was one of my favorite authors in my youth.  To be fair, his plots often were a bit stale and glacial.  But his imagination and the awe I felt from reading his work more than made up for it.  The space elevator in The Fountains of Paradise.  The weird description of geological "worms" on Titan in Imperial Earth.  The biobots and the inside of Rama in Encounter with Rama.  And of course Europa in the 2001 series.  The list goes on and on. 

I also remember watching his two TV shows about the paranormal.  Unlike lesser shows that go for the sensational, I really felt that they had some semblance of scientific methodology in exploring the out of the ordinary.  I think in a small way it helped to shape my science-based world view. 

The idea of communication satellites are also attributes to Clarke, who wrote a memo in 1945 about bouncing signals off a man-made object in a geostationary orbit, which means that it would appear to be in a fixed location relative to the surface.  The geostationary orbit is often called the Clarke orbit in his honor. 

So next time you use a GPS, watch satellite TV, or uses a satellite phone, think about Arthur C. Clarke.  But I think that in the years to come his name will keep popping up as new technological and scientific discoveries are made.