kitty-carroll.org

Mars Will Send No More (now that’s a name to be reckoned with) has a couple of Scarlet O’Neil four-pagers from the old Famous Funnies. There’s even the obligatory Blind Guy.

The Web site of the Guardian has added a fashion column dedicated to the “vintage years,” written by someone identified only as the Invisible Woman. Apparently no one’s noticed her in about ten years.

I think it’s a fairly safe bet that she can actually be seen, but I have to applaud her taking on the pseudonym, if only because it stirs conversation, and if there’s one thing the Guardian likes, it’s conversation: they have a whole subsection called “Comment is free,” with its own US sub-subsection.

Very nice short-short story by Maria Deira: single mom raising invisible daughter.

At some point when I wasn’t looking — turns out to be the early 1990s — Marvel Comics issued a handful of Swimsuit Issues. (As Brett White of Topless Robot points out, “The only difference between superhero spandex and a swimsuit is that the colorist gets to use a lot more flesh tone.”

Which still doesn’t explain putting an invisible swimsuit on the Invisible Woman:

Frighteningly, there’s precedent for this.

(Via Fark.)

Theodore Hook’s The invisible girl: a piece in one act dates to 1806. The young lady in question, one Harriet Falkland, has lots of lines and an enthusiastic suitor, but the play contrives to have her unseen, behind the scenes or otherwise out of the line of sight, for its entire length. (Google has it as an e-book.)

I suspect this was intended as a send-up of the popular Parisian “Invisible Woman” shows of that decade, in which audience members were invited to interact with the feminine occupant of a seemingly-empty room.

From EA’s Crysis 2 description at YouTube:

Enhanced strength and speed are necessary improvements, but it’s the Nanosuit’s invisibility that will give gamers the true advantage. Fight to save NYC and the world from an all-out alien invasion by slipping into the shadows and using stealth to surprise, confuse and eliminate your opponents.

Due out on Tuesday.

(Via ShootersOnly.)

Well, okay, not tomorrow, as in “the day after today,” but apparently they’ve made a heck of a start:

In the past, researchers have only been able to “cloak” microscopic objects using extremely complicated physics and so-called meta-materials made on a tiny scale.

But a new study at the University of Birmingham in the UK has taken a major step forward by making a paper clip invisible — an object thousands of times bigger than in previous experiments.

Invisible paper clips! How do they work?

The research works by using a naturally forming crystal called calcite which has extraordinary light-bending abilities.

By placing the crystals over an object it “bounces” light around it rendering it invisible to the naked eye.

And apparently calcite has been found in crystals up to 21 feet long, about the length of the current Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Misterdoe has consolidated his various Web activities under a single URL: Misterdoe.com. It looks quite a bit better, and should be easier to navigate.

WordPress evidently discovered something sneaky that took advantage of a hole in the last release, so here’s a new release. As always, please advise if you see anything you shouldn’t, or don’t see something you should.

There has been much talk of metamaterials and their application, but not so much about who’s going to do the actual research.

Perhaps this is a clue:

My guess is that we would see the lead in this project being taken by high school science whizzes who would never never never never never never never use a working invisibility cloak to camp inside the girls’ locker room with the highest megapixel resolution video camera they could get their hands on.

Five will get you 22.7 there turns out to be a girl on the team.

After several years on GeoCities and a year on its own domain, The Invisible Woman Story Archive will be shutting down. I’m hoping some of the stories may turn up elsewhere — Yahoo! Groups, perhaps? — but it looks like this particular repository is, um, vanishing.

Bill B. recommends My Invisible Sister by Beatrice Colin and Sara Pinto (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), the tale of a nine-year-old boy named Frank who is, as nine-year-old boys often are, tormented by an older sister. Elizabeth is thirteen, which is bad enough, but she’s also invisible, which means that, as the cover says, “trouble is so much harder to handle when you can’t see it coming.” It doesn’t help that he thinks the parental units always take her side.

Unusually for a book dealing with this subject, My Invisible Sister does not relegate the young lady to the shadows: she goes to school every day, and apart from her lack of appearance, she is regarded as a fairly normal person. It helps that the genetic anomaly that caused her condition is merely rare, not unique. It’s a charming little book with something of a twist at the end, and if you’re about Frank’s age, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot.

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.