The next time you use your cell phone....

say a little word of thanks to Arthur Clarke.

You know, the guy that wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey

He died yesterday, at age 90, and it seems writing is not the only thing he ever did.

"Clarke also was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.

In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system.

But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come.

Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched."

(ok, to those of you who sometimes are cursing at the driver talking on the cell phone, be kind, Clarke is not responsible for world stupidity!)