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May 26, 2006

How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?

AOL News – Invisibility Cloak May Be Possible

UPDATE: Finnegan draws the obvious conclusion.

Posted by Jim Henley @ 8:27 am, Filed under: Main

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9 Responses to “How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?”

  1. Comment by Jeremy Osner —
    May 26, 2006 @ 8:52 am

    There was also a news story recently about MIT research is developing a car-airplane hybrid.

  2. Comment by Gary Farber —
    May 26, 2006 @ 9:50 am

    ”There was also a news story recently about MIT research is developing a car-airplane hybrid.”

    There is always a story on a car-airplane hybrid in development.

    Always.

  3. Comment by Avram —
    May 26, 2006 @ 9:59 am

    And they never pan out. We know that cars and airplanes don’t interbreed in the wild, what makes anyone think they’ll do so in captivity?

  4. Comment by Matt Stevens —
    May 26, 2006 @ 10:08 am

    Crude but fully functional car-airplane hybrids have been around since the 1950s. (Sorry, no link; working from memory of an old Smithsonian article.) They’ve never been commercially viable, though.

  5. Comment by Thomas Nephew —
    May 26, 2006 @ 2:00 pm

    From the news item: ”Is it science fiction? Well, it’s theory and that already is not science fiction. ”

    Discuss.

  6. Comment by Hesiod —
    May 26, 2006 @ 9:36 pm

    Dang, Jim.

    I thought that headline was going to presage a biting Orwellian metaphor.

    But you meant it literally!

  7. Trackback by Modulator —
    May 27, 2006 @ 1:31 am

    Act Now!

    Hmmm, Finn has got it wrong… we’d better get the world straightened out (rather, governments out of the world) before they get their hands on this stuff:”Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as someone wears a cloak made of this m…

  8. Comment by anon —
    May 28, 2006 @ 11:57 pm

    First, I have to say that the MIT flying car is kind of fugly in car mode; at least the mileage is supposed to be good.

    Second, I was wondering when the metamaterials folks would get around to invisibility. What’s particularly interesting is that the invisibility has a bandwidth — you have to design your materials to be invisible to the visible, or the infrared, and so on. But if the enemy can’t see you at any of these wavelengths, then you can’t see the enemy either, because those wavelengths will never reach you inside your metamaterials suit. So more conventional stealth techniques aren’t going to go away.

    On the other hand, audio surveillance may have just gotten a whole lot more interesting…

    Anon

  9. Comment by Gran —
    May 31, 2006 @ 3:02 pm

    MIT is also working on some very interesting ”Lord Of The Rings” technology.

    Google Methril … or something close.

    The glasses look interesting.

    10. (Comments automatically closed after 21 days.)