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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.)

Agathe Teyssier’s film La Femme Invisible, which opens in France this month, stars Julie Depardieu, daughter of Gérard and Elisabeth Depardieu, as a woman who, when confronted with difficult situations in life, vanishes into the background. What to do? One scary possibility is electroshock treatment:

You can see the trailer here. I have my doubts that this film will ever screen Stateside, but if it’s enough of a hit, perhaps they’ll remake it in Hollywood, though Teyssier herself has said: “The film ends where an American movie starts!”

I have no command of Portuguese, but the picture says quite enough.

Now this is ingenious. The same kind of technology that makes invisibility cloaks work, sort of, can protect buildings in earthquakes:

The new theoretical cloak comprises a number of large, concentric rings made of plastic fixed to the Earth’s surface. The stiffness and elasticity of the rings must be precisely controlled to ensure that any surface waves pass smoothly into the material, rather than reflecting or scattering at the material’s surface.

When waves travel through the cloak they are compressed into tiny fluctuations in pressure and density that travel along the fastest path available. By tuning the cloak’s properties, that path can be made to be an arc that directs surface waves away from an area inside the cloak. When the waves exit the cloak, they return to their previous, larger size.

The same way our prototype cloaking devices divert light away from the object to be cloaked. I am impressed.

Mister Doe sent this one to me, and it’s one of the better examples of “in certain circumstances”: the narrator is totally unable to see anyone with green eyes. Unfortunately, this included his mother, who died when he was ten.

It’s a little rough around the edges, but it gets the tone and the dynamics right.

You’re looking at WordPress 2.8. If it looks funny, or if you can’t see it at all, then I’ve got problems.

I popped open Sarah Neufeld’s Visibility, and of course had to check out the author; about the only thing I’m sure of is that she is not the Sarah Neufeld who plays violin for Arcade Fire.

The book itself is a charmer, an illustrated novel, not quite a graphic novel but more than just text. (The illustrations are by D. Meister.) Natalie Irving is just turning seventeen, and if she seems like an angsty teenager, well, she has some reason to be: her mother Jadyn — formerly “Janice,” but that name was insufficiently cool — can snap herself into invisibility, a gift she’s used for all manner of self-aggrandizement, and of course to keep her daughter on edge more or less 24/7. Up to now, Jadyn’s power hadn’t been part of Natalie’s own skill set.

What makes Visibility more than your run-of-the-unseen-mill invisibility yarn is that when Natalie vanishes, so does most of her vision, as the laws of physics would seem to demand, and other senses are called upon to fill in the blanks. For instance:

I decide almost immediately that I like the stairs. For one thing, even the scuffing of my ballet slippers against the stone is enough to let me see the next two or three steps. And, even if I couldn’t see, there’s a handrail to follow.

Usually this issue is given a perfunctory handwave and ignored.

The novel is $15 from Bowler Hat Comics; an e-book version is available. It’s a seriously good read, and the illustrations are apt.