Stanger than fiction

NOTE: Things have been kind of busy, so I haven't written anything lately. Sorry. Anyway, on with the show...

We live in a strange world, and it keeps getting stranger. A number of news articles brought that home for me last week by escaping from science fiction tales into real life. For instance:

• Scientists Create Cloak of Partial Invisibility - The headline pretty much says it all. I was disappointed to learn, however, that "cloak of partial invisibility" meant cloaked from microwave-frequency light, which people can't see anyway. So it's only invisible if your eyes aren't working? But they partially made up for it by making their not-that-invisible cloak out of something called "Metamaterials", which sounds like the greatest fake-science term since Reed Richards invented "unstable molecules."
• According to the Discovery Channel, a giant meteorite was found beneath a Kansas wheatfield. The article is very brief, and therefore does not mention the meteorite's passengers or its effects on the local population of melodramatic and unnaturally attractive teenagers.
• In a world where impossibly bad writing is everywhere on TV, who could have imagined that Iggy Pop's roadie was a comedic genius?
  
• A British scientist by the thoroughly British name of Dr. Oliver Curry recently announced that the "Human species may 'split in two'." The wealthier humans might gradually evolve into tall, beautiful, and childlike creatures, while the underclass would become a squat, hairy, "goblin-like" species. Thank God for Dr. Curry and his revolutionary new ideas; anything else would sound like century-old science fiction.
  

After all that, the most amazing new development has to be instant imaginary furniture. Hard to believe, but a Swedish furniture company has invented a way to capture a 3-D model of someone's drawing in the air, and then automatically turn out a plastic model of it.

click here or on the photo for a video demonstration.