kitty-carroll.org

Resolved: “A woman made invisible is not likely to ask if this dress makes her look fat.” True, false, or somewhere in between? (Derived from this.)

We’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3.0, and who knows what you might see?

Update, 29 July: Make that 3.0.1.

Sharks not scary enough for you? How about invisible sharks?

[Julien] Claes and his colleagues chose to focus on one particular luminous shark, nicknamed “the phantom hunter of the fjords”: the velvet belly lantern shark.

This shark’s shimmer originates from light emitting organs called photophores from underneath its body, “effectively creating a glow from that region.”

Which, if you happen to be prey or predator, misdirects you as to the shark’s actual location.

Is this technology extensible to humanoids? Probably not, since we don’t dwell in deep water. Still, it’s fascinating to contemplate.

Dr Hermes feels that the 1940 version of The Invisible Woman falls short of its potential, but he does seem amused by Kitty’s I’ll-save-the-day attitude towards the end:

The best part of the movie is Kitty as a super-heroine. Twenty years before Sue Storm went up into that cosmic ray bath, Kitty Carroll is being held at gunpoint by crooks who have kidnapped her and Professor Gibbs. Swigging down a convenient flask of pure grain alcohol, she quickly throws her clothes in all directions. To give her credit, Kitty does manages to clobber all the goons successfully without getting caught. As her new boyfriend approaches, she decides to let him “save” her. So Kitty sprays the ground in front of his car with machine-gun bullets (!?). Say, maybe the invisibility is starting to make her homicidal, at that. She then cries pitifully for help and allows him to make a daring leap into an amazingly shallow fish pond. (This is quite a stunt, by the way, looking as if it belongs in a Republic serial.)

This was, I suspect, as far as they dared go with letting a mere female take the initiative: the otherwise-clueless boyfriend could not be shown up because — well, this sort of thing is just not done.

Still, you have to wonder what this film might have been like had it been made outside the strictures of the Production Code, which became de facto law for Hollywood productions in 1934.

Arguably the funniest stuff written on the subject of invisibility comes from the TV Tropes people; it’s simultaneously perfectly deadpan in the purest academic sense, and yet it’s jam-packed with snark. This sentence, which references two other tropes, is classic:

Permanent, involuntary invisibility is usually treated as either Cursed With Awesome or Blessed With Suck depending on the story.

There’s also an extremely-detailed list of characters, permanent or temporary, voluntary, male or female or perhaps something else entirely, which you should probably keep for reference.

Hold still, now, this will take a while:

When J. K. Rowling described Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak as “fluid and silvery”, she probably wasn’t thinking specifically about silver-plated nanoparticles suspended in water. But a team of theorists believe that using such a set-up would make the first soft, tunable metamaterial — the “active ingredient” in an invisibility device.

The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and colleagues, contains magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping.

The chains and columns would lie along the direction of [a] magnetic field. If they were oriented vertically in a pool of water, light striking the surface would refract negatively — bent in way that no natural material can manage.

The trick, so far, has been widening the spectrum within which the metamaterials can function: while they’ve successfully blocked infrared in similar experiments, they’re a long way from blocking the complete range of visible wavelengths.

(Source here. Via Fark.)

The Russian agency in charge of advertising has ruled that invisible persons cannot appear, so to speak, in beer commercials.

This ruling plugs a loophole in existing law, which forbids the display of humans and animals, live or animated, in such advertising; even having the characters offstage is forbidden.

Well, yeah, kinda sorta. Mirrors all around, and I suppose if you’re standing at just the right angle, people will freak.

In Cláudio Torres’ A Mulher Invisível, a chap who has lost his wife to an affair swears off women entirely and withdraws from the world he knows, until the girl of his dreams knocks on his door one night to borrow a cup of sugar, and suddenly everything is right with the world again.

Or so it seems. The chap’s best friend can’t seem to find any indication that the young lady in question exists at all, which complicates matters for his eavesdropping neighbor, who actually might be interested.

This isn’t a special-effects fest, but it’s good fun, and it’s Brazilian, which means lots of eye candy.

Science News (21 November 2009) has a roundup of much of the work being done in the field of cloaking devices and such, and one of the more interesting projects goes something like this:

This year in [Physical Review Letters], a team led by Che Ting Chan, a Berkeley-trained physicist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, describes an approach called “remote cloaking.” It not only (in theory) renders an object invisible, but also does so with a device sitting next to rather than surrounding the thing to be hidden. Invisibility, says one of the team’s papers, is merely the process of altering the light so an object “looks like air.” Even better, the group claims, it may be possible to make one thing look like another — for example “change an apple optically to [a] banana.” The researchers call this offshoot “illusion optics.”

Not even Star Trek’s Romulans got that far.

With the demise of GeoCities, Paul Cwick has been forced to relocate the Invisible Woman Story Archive, which now has its own domain: tiwsa.com. It looks pretty much the same, except for the absence of all the GeoGewGaws that were overlaid in a desperate attempt by Yahoo! to earn back some of the $3.57 billion they spent to acquire GeoCities in the first place.

I know for a fact that several readers have been doing their own photo manipulations for several years now. I’ve done a few myself, for that matter. If you’re curious as to How It’s Done, here’s a tutorial that presumes you’re using the ubiquitous Adobe Photoshop package. It’s time-consuming, you may be sure, but the results can be quite remarkable.

see more Funny Graphs

The Economist finds it inexplicable that the United States would name a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier after peacenik George McGovern:

An enemy looking upon an American ship of war should not be reminded of the droning speeches of American politicians. American warships should be named after universally recognisable, all-American cultural figures who embody limitless powers of destruction, put to the service of peace, justice, and the good of all mankind.

Among such figures: Batman, the Invisible Woman, and, um, Michael Jackson.

Part of the upside of naming a warship after the Invisible Woman, I suspect, is that people will wonder if it’s corroboration for all that Philadelphia Experiment stuff.

(Seen, as it were, at Mahou Meido Meganekko.)

This is just too much: Hello Kitty (!) as the Fantastic 4′s Invisible Woman.

This was done by Joseph, who has rendered Sanrio’s semi-lovable cat as, among other things, a panoply of Star Wars figures.

(Seen at Finestkind Clinic and fish market, which has a shot of Joseph’s Darth Kitty.)