The two-wheeled unicorn
It is a known fact of life that anyone bitten by the motorcycling bug will eventually waste an inordinate amount of time searching for the bike. That one machine that satisfies every desire and fulfils every practical …
Great expectations
Sadly based on a true story
First contact
Suppose SETI finally pays off. After decades of radio silence, a signal arrives. It is structured, adaptive, responsive. We send questions; it answers. We ask about its environment; it describes one. We ask whether it …
Looking elsewhere
By the time Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris opens, humanity has been studying the planet for more than a century. The thing that makes it interesting, and eventually notorious, is the ocean that covers almost its …
Lineage
When our ancestors moved beads up and down grooves in a surface, and later rods in a frame, little did they know that they were witnessing the earliest form of artificial intelligence. Hear me out, for these were the …
Effective immediately
There is an unwritten rule in professional football about what happens to players who have aged out of their prime. When the legs slow and the reflexes dull, the club finds them a new role: assistant coach, scout, or if …
Choose your weapon
In olden times, when discussions escalated beyond the exchange of heated words, they would sometimes resort to a method that would settle the matter for good. The challenger would propose a duel, and the challenged party …