Giant Freakin Robot

What’s the difference between a lawyer and a toilet? A toilet is only full of shit sometimes. I don’t mean to make fun of lawyers with that joke, as I would sincerely like to replace “lawyer” with the name “Guy Cramer,” the guy who is quoted as saying he invented the Harry Potter invisibility cloak, but I can’t actually tell if the guy is full of shit or not. Every ounce of my being thinks it to be so, but… wait, this isn’t a courtroom. Yeah, I’m pretty sure this guy is full of shit. This is one of those times I would absolutely love to be proven wrong, but I just wrote a story last month about the extreme complication involved in bending light, and thus creating “invisibility,” around very small objects. Cramer says he’s hiding humans.

Slap yourself in the face if you didn’t think this had something to do with the military, and then pat yourself on the back for not thinking it had anything to do with Canadian military. Guy Cramer is the CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp., is something of a legend when it comes to camouflage design around the world. He says he has now gone the extra step up and created a fabric that will render soldiers completely invisible by bending light waves around them. Apparently he already has a proof of concept that members of the U.S. and Canadian military have seen and verified to be real, at least to Cramer himself. But nobody else can see the product in action, due to “security” issues.

As a married man and father, I’ve seen my clubbing days, with the occasional exception, fall way into the past, and my bar days seem to be just as dwindling. This means that, percentage-wise, my potential to be a date rapist is close to nil, which is good, since it’s one of the most disgustingly reprehensible distinctions that a man could possibly be saddled with. The easiest way to avoid those most detestable of fiends is just to assume that all men are created equally evil and to never accept a drink from one, as well keeping your self-purchased cocktail ducttaped to your hand at all times. But booze is pricey and his eyes had just the right twinkle to them, am I right, ladies? Luckily, most men like myself still hold onto the morals that keep us from becoming monsters.

But just in case all trust has died, Mike Abramson’s start-up company Drink Savvy is aiming to be the mainstream prevention against date rape in its development of “smart” products that can detect and warn of the presence of common date rape drugs such as the odorless, tasteless, and colorless GHB, rohypnol, and ketamine. Along with technical assistance from Dr. John MacDonald, Professor of Chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, as well as Contract Researching Organizations, Abramson is using an Indiegogo campaign to raise $50.000 for production and shipping costs.

The products themselves are an assortment of cups, glasses, stirrers and straws made from plastic materials that are actually capable of detecting the drugs once they’ve contacted the material. The clear plastic turns red and alerts to the fact that the guy you’ve been flirting with should be drug out into the street and pistol-whipped.

What is the Matrix? This was the famous question at the beginning of The Matrix Trilogy. Throughout its three films that question would get redefined again and again. How far off were the Wachowskis – in terms of the idea of existence is merely a computer program – when they made The Matrix in 1999? According to a University of Washington physicist, not very far off at all.

Physicist Martin Savage believes that The Matrix may be closer to scientific fact than fiction. Savage has theorized the existence of computer simulation so powerful and advanced that it is literally running a simulation of our Universe at this moment, just like in The Matrix Trilogy. Savage explains…

…if humans did develop enough time to perform numerical simulations of ourselves and we didn’t nuke ourselves before getting there then it’s more than likely we are a numerical simulation ourselves.

At 30 years old, I’m lucky enough to have lived through nearly the entire lifespan of video games thus far. From the Atari’s stick-figured heroes to Nintendo finally grasping high definition, and all that Sega, Microsoft, Sony, and others have given us in between. Sure, I’ve scored touchdowns, raced through cities, and solved more than my fair share of location-based mysteries, but I’m certain the majority of my video game career has been spent killing things far, far more often than actually saving things. Unlike some generally calm people, like Ted Bundy and Jim Jones, I’m not responsible for anyone’s death.

And not only that, I reveled in my AI opponents’ destruction. I loved beating the bikers of Road Rash with cattle prods. I loved the technical mastery of delivering a combo-heavy ass whooping in Tekken. And I especially loved the over-the-top gratuity of games like Madworld and House of the Dead: Overkill. Give us a keg, and my friends and I will put to waste thousands, if not gabillions, of citizens unlucky enough to be digitally rendered in the Grand Theft Auto universe. There are no consequences to these actions. There are no moral quandaries that exit the game console and enter my real life. And rarely does a video game even stay in my mind when I’m not playing it, except for the brain-melting patterns of Tetris and Bejeweled.