Invisibility--breathtaking!

[Strephonade]

Invisibility (http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/08/19/invisible.cloak/index.html)

What an amazing world we live in. It's ballet in the metro station. Imagine the possibilities!


(*snif...* I love you, man!)

[Division56]

If you read it closely, the jacket isn't doing it itself. The image is being projected onto it.

[Melody]

lol I thought of that when I was like 7. :P

God damn, I am a genius of unsurpased skill.

That, or these idiots are really stupid. Clap clap. It takes science 15 years to catch up to my ideas.

:rofl:

This reminds me of a D12 song. "Git Up."

"You'all are still sittin?
What the fuck, are you deaf?
You motherfuckers don't listen?
I said..."

[Melody]

I'm sure that you are one among a really big quantity of people that have thought of the idea.
But, are you?

[Melody]

I think I came up with it while watching a Batman episode. I think some guy was invisible or something or had some ivisibility suit and it was hurting his health or something.

Anyway, my intuition tells me that people would come up with it only in a position where they think specificaly of an invisibility "suit." Something invisibility-inducing that covers would require optical "routing." Actually, my idea was something without a camera. It would be essentially a suit with a mesh with a particular intertwining structure of optical fibers that would route light entering from one side directly to the other. The catch is that it would have to be a pretty tight suit, because if it is not, the image it projects will be disjoint, like a pencil looks when halfway underwater.

Being the insane genius I am, I have a feeling nanobot systems could be used to keep the image consistent, even if the suit flops all over place (like a jacket.) It would essentially be a parallal processing system.

Actually, that sounds kinda hard.

[Melody]

I think I came up with it while watching a Batman episode. I think some guy was invisible or something or had some ivisibility suit and it was hurting his health or something.I was going for something like this, but I didn't want to make a deal of the issue. That is, the idea stems from response to external input. Since the input can't be chosen, and varies from case to case, to get the idea need not be so special in itself (the subject being only one part of the factors.)
Yep yep, that's what I meant with


Anyway, my intuition tells me that people would come up with it only in a position where they think specificaly of an invisibility "suit."
i.e. I am just forking around. For example, my intuition tells me thousands of people observed relativity before Einstein described it mathematically.


Oh. Yes, I have to agree on the implication. What about the problem when viewing the same point in the mesh from two different angles?
I'm way ahead of you (cuz I'm so awesome,) but I haven't thought of anything other than to make the output (and input) directional, like traffic lights that have a covering around them so that their status can only be seen within a particular range of angles.

[flan2dave]

I noticed the researchers behind whimsical technological innovations always have to justify their work by giving examples of how it would help the medical profession, or the military, or some other culturally-acknowledged-as-important field. It's annoying because 1. The researcher probably doesn't really care about those other fields, and 2. It gives credit to the mentality that creative thinking should be squelched unless it's somehow "useful" to society.

I can imagine art programs gaining extra funding by telling others having art in a patient's room helps the patient recover faster. :rolleyes:

I'm surprised invisibility experiements are being conducted with clothes. It would be more expedient to lay the groundwork of the technology by experimenting with rigid objects, then transferring the work to more complicated situations later. Maybe that's exactly what this scientist did though, this jacket just being a quick application of the work he(she?) has done so far for the purpose of showing off.

[Claverhouse]

My goodness: anyone remember the thread I posted in the old forum on the weirdest site on the internet created by Lieutenant-Col Alan Yu ? He went far beyond this trifle: CIA assassins shrunk to smaller than bees, invisible, and capable of flight even into a victim's very bowels... Now that is old-school paranoia !



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[Strephonade]

I noticed the researchers behind whimsical technological innovations always have to justify their work by giving examples of how it would help the medical profession, or the military, or some other culturally-acknowledged-as-important field. It's annoying because 1. The researcher probably doesn't really care about those other fields, and 2. It gives credit to the mentality that creative thinking should be squelched unless it's somehow "useful" to society.

The researcher likely doesn't, and I think that's insightful of you to say. It can take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to get these ideas off the ground, so it's worthwhile to spend some time marketing to the public. One doesn't necessarily have to do it personally, but it's a nice touch. I can think of a number of areas of research that have languished for decades for want of an immediately applicable purpose, or inadequate funding, leading to a lack of proper research equipment, etc.


I can imagine art programs gaining extra funding by telling others having art in a patient's room helps the patient recover faster. :rolleyes:

It depends on the patient. I know that if I had to spend a lot of time recuperating somewhere, I'd feel a bit better about it in a light, airy, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing environment, as opposed to a dungeon-like hole.


I'm surprised invisibility experiements are being conducted with clothes. It would be more expedient to lay the groundwork of the technology by experimenting with rigid objects, then transferring the work to more complicated situations later. Maybe that's exactly what this scientist did though, this jacket just being a quick application of the work he(she?) has done so far for the purpose of showing off.

I think it's brilliant.

[flan2dave]

It depends on the patient. I know that if I had to spend a lot of time recuperating somewhere, I'd feel a bit better about it in a light, airy, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing environment, as opposed to a dungeon-like hole.

Yes, yes, I agree and believe patients would recover faster, I didn't mean to suggest this is not true, what I mean is it's kinda silly how roundabout you have to be, drawing connections to the "important" fields, to convince others the value of your work. Patient recovery speed due to art is just an arbitrary consequence of the deeper value of art. With art, usually people understand this better, but with science and technology, its deeper value, its art, is not appreciated for its own sake.

[Strephonade]

You know, I admire your idealistic spirit. And I say that with maybe half a backward glance for myself, as well, as I have argued enjoyably the value of art and 'pure' science, or the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for the joy of knowing, the art of the seeking, the beauty of discovery. I am equally as thrilled by technology--there's something about a finely tuned machine or system, elegantly designed, that makes my heart sing. That's not to say this is the route I'm taking in life--I have other goals, which are also very satisfying, but I can definitely appreciate it. I offer this (http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp) site as a personal source of inspiration/happiness--you're likely somewhat familiar with it, especially if you read Wired magazine occasionally.

[flan2dave]

I didn't know about it actually, thanks! :)

I feel the same way about technology.

[nobarcode]

My goodness: anyone remember the thread I posted in the old forum on the weirdest site on the internet created by Lieutenant-Col Alan Yu ? He went far beyond this trifle: CIA assassins shrunk to smaller than bees, invisible, and capable of flight even into a victim's very bowels... Now that is old-school paranoia !



Claverhouse :ph34r:
Yes, I do. Just for the record. :ph34r:

[Groty]

I noticed the researchers behind whimsical technological innovations always have to justify their work by giving examples of how it would help the medical profession, or the military, or some other culturally-acknowledged-as-important field. It's annoying because 1. The researcher probably doesn't really care about those other fields, and 2. It gives credit to the mentality that creative thinking should be squelched unless it's somehow "useful" to society.

I can imagine art programs gaining extra funding by telling others having art in a patient's room helps the patient recover faster. :rolleyes:

I'm surprised invisibility experiements are being conducted with clothes. It would be more expedient to lay the groundwork of the technology by experimenting with rigid objects, then transferring the work to more complicated situations later. Maybe that's exactly what this scientist did though, this jacket just being a quick application of the work he(she?) has done so far for the purpose of showing off.

I blogged something kinda like that...
http://www.groty.com/blog/index.cfm?data=20040107#F34D35AB-A94E-B63E-AEEBCD50CC0E953D

[Hazy]

Anybody beginning to feel slightly redundant with all this new technology that's rapidly being flushed out? Even aspiring to become an inventor/engineer is fraught with risk, as I'd imagine many ideas have already been obscurely undertaken/are currently being developed, so by the time you got underway, it'd be finished. Even if you overcame that and somehow managed something quasi-original, there's still a chance of another scientific breakthrough with implications greater than quantum mechanics accelerating everything further.

This isn't helped by the internet breaking down all barriers between cultures/ideas. There's no feasible way to aspire to knowledge in itself/work towards an 'end point' in knowledge as I'd imagine would be possible for people of our temperament before, so the 'human encyclopedia' route is also well out of the question (computers are better to look at anyway).

University fields have divided to such an extent that even the subfields have subfields. I imagine art is so widespread any art you managed to produce would be indistinguishable from all other art anyway.
Makes me think one of the only things one can really have control over is literature, but then, with centuries of books being written, is there anything left to write about which hasn't been done in great detail already?


</end hysteria over the world's knowledge being too vast to keep track of, yet too complete to add to>

[Claverhouse]

Brilliant, Crazy.


And it's also to do with the fact that the presently world-dominating Western Culture is reaching it's inevitable close ( vide Spengler ). After awhile we have nothing more to give, because we are bereft of inspiration and creativity.


A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; upstream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle, downstream, a future even so dark and timeless - such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative Power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantu's are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order. But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, lessen again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto- spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualised the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts> states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualise itself. The aim once attained - the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual - the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world.

It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air. This - the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture - is the purport of all the historic " declines, " amongst them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today - the decline of the West. Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it. " In the works of the old-German architecture," says Goethe, " one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing." Childhood speaks to us also - and in the same tones - out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears - witness the ornament of Romanesque- Gothic church porches of Saxony and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidae, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested itself in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called " Hyksos Sphinx " of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart.

At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave. The spell of a "second religiousness" comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun - those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness

The Decline of the West.



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[MacGuffin]

Brilliant, Crazy.


And it's also to do with the fact that the presently world-dominating Western Culture is reaching it's inevitable close ( vide Spengler ). After awhile we have nothing more to give, because we are bereft of inspiration and creativity.


I think that Western Culture is on the decline. In Europe at least.

Europe has low birthrates (except for Muslims), a lagging economies, stagnant social culture, paralyzed governments. Only Finland seems to not fall in line with the rest.

The post-Western cultures are exploding however. Just take a look at Asia and China. The more they use democracy and capitalism, the more their economies take off. Will they eventually be dragged down by the same malaise that Europe suffers? That remains to be seen.

[Edit: Another] question is whether North America falls under the classical Western Culture of Europe, or is more like the post-Western cultures of East Asia.

[Claverhouse]

North America is an off-shoot of Western Culture & is declining culturally and spiritually at an even faster rate. Low birthrates are only a small symptom, since through the faustian grasp of technology and inevitable progress to greater scientific knowledge this is the consequence of women achieving control over their bodies ( or giving it to drug-companies, which is the same thing ). More to the point is the inertia and submissiveness of european governance due to democracy which surrenders easily to other powers ( capitalist corporations; the USA; muslim ( and other ) immigrations, etc. ) justifying this weakness by fear of the past ( wars, communism/nazism ) and mumbling progressive mantras.


Just take a look at Asia and China. The more they use democracy and capitalism, the more their economies take off.

And the more their workers are exploited, presently for the West, later for their own capitalist bourgoisie. Although the Tiger economies have faltered a bit since the 90s. Instead of race-wars between them and us, don't rule out any charismatic social revolutions in the Far East.


Will they eventually be dragged down by the same malaise that Europe suffers? That remains to be seen.

Inevitably. But it will be the malaise caused by their own decline in their culture too, eventually ossifying and uncreating.

Still, new cultures will arise in North America, Europe & the Far East if you wait long enough. ( From the fissipating remnants left alive ).



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[MacGuffin]

North America is an off-shoot of Western Culture & is declining culturally and spiritually at an even faster rate.

It is an off-shoot, but I'd disagree it is declining. If only for the fact there really isn't a "culture" to decline. Americans (I am lumping the U.S. and Canada into one group, no disrespect to Latin America) have always been very pragmatic, taking what they like from other cultures and inventing anything else they need.

Look at France, they rail against American "culture" and even try imposing limits on imported entertainment. The U.S. govt. has never been big on promoting American "culture" or limiting foreign culture. It all succeeds or fails on its own merits.

As for the "spiritual" aspect. I don't even know what that is.

[Melody]

lol i dun even know what 'the west' is

ima keep living and creating stuffs with or without it

[nobarcode]

..... this is the consequence of women achieving control over their bodies ( or giving it to drug-companies, which is the same thing ).
Claverhouse :ph34r:

Oh I'd like to see what result you might get from some other forum you might post that sentiment on. :D