Relighting the Glowing Splint
The housekeeping continues. Hope James won’t mind me dragging these out of the bottom drawer, given that their intended home is now defunct. FutureScientific was going to be the next Onion, except more sciencey and futuristic. (You can still enjoy the words, if not his attractive design, at archive.org.)
Here are the stories I never wrote:
- Noble gasses actually quite common
- Deoxyribonucleic voted Britain’s favourite polysyllable
- General Motors drops unpopular ‘GM Foods’ line
- Common Thrush of family Turdidae insists on complete rebranding
- Computer scientists perfect AI, can’t find it a date
- Assembly line robot runs amok in bolting/respraying terror
- Giant artificial brain bored, dials out for pizza
And the one I did:
Mathematician divides himself by zero
PRINCETON: Mathematicians at the Institute of Advanced Study were in shock yesterday after a colleague disappeared during an unauthorized algebraic experiment. Martin Bovy, 37, defied a management directive against using human subjects by carrying out a complex theorem on himself. “It was all going fine,” said one observer, “until he divided himself by the main variable. When it got smaller and smaller, he kept getting bigger... and then it reached zero.”
“He just disappeared,” added another. “Undefined, man, undefined... Thank God he wasn’t working on i.”
In an unrelated development, Gyorgy Poznic of Warsaw has created a clone army of evil number-crunchers after multiplying himself by negative a million.