Story of the day: "The Hole in the Garden" by Gene Doucette. A bedtime story about a black hole that develops in a man's flower garden.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-hole-in-the-garden/
Catching up on some fiction reading on the train and just finished a really good story: "The Music of the Siphorophenes" by C.L. Polk.
I learned a new word from it as well! Ansible: a faster-than-light communication device
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-music-of-the-siphorophenes/
This morning's reading: "The Greatest Home Run in Baseball History" by P H Lee. Asking the important questions, like, what if people used time travel to cheat at baseball?
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-greatest-home-run-in-baseball-history/
Just read and enjoyed this new short story, "Better Living Through Algorithms" by Naomi Kritzer. (There's an audio version too!)
Really enjoyed this story, "Zeta-Epsilon" by Isabel J. Kim. It's about a ship AI + human cyborg, and I particularly liked how the backstory of the AI's development draws from the sorts of issues that tend to occur with current, real-life forms of machine learning:
"The function was: get from here to there. How to get from here to there? Blow up the ship here and its component molecules will end up there. The function was: get from here to there, but do not destroy the ship. How can the ship pass through a minefield when the fuel will run out if the ship goes around? It’s possible: burst fuel in a single acceleration and let the ship drift for two decades. The function was: get from here to there, do not destroy the ship, and bring the crew back alive. How to bring the crew across solar systems and back with net-zero loss of life? Replace any dead crew with new crewmembers taken from the enemy during skirmishes."