#1533 – Blinded
Posted on May 3, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
Usually you only hear things you don’t want to hear at a hotel. Seeing things you don’t want to see would be much worse. Of course there would be a few people that would really enjoy it. Like the designers of the hotel.
Tags: hotel, poop, transparent
This brings up the eternal question: How exactly certain invisibility-powers work. In this case, what happens when the, uh, excrement leaves the person’s body and lands in the toilet? Does it eventually disappear when it reaches the pipes, or what?
Similarly, if an invisible person eats something, and you can see them chew their food and it go down their throat, does that mean you can see blobs of food floating in their stomach under their shirt? And does that mean you’ll be able to see as it is slowly dissolved by invisible stomach acid and pushed through invisible intestines? Perhaps I think too hard about this kind of thing.
I always thought of it like bending light around you, or maybe like a camera and display, or something. So if you were invisible, people saw around you instead of through you. So, they wouldn’t see the food in your mouth or digestive tract, but once you pooped it out, it would be visible in the toilet. Also, if said invisible person was wearing a shirt, you would see the shirt.
For vehicles like tanks and APCs, the camera/display thing is happening now. Not perfect yet IIRC, and not sure about infrared signatures, but I do recall a (SF) book by Dean Ing (1990), called ‘The Ransom of Black Stealth One’ (find it at Amazon or your local bookseller, etc.)about a ceramic aircraft that had some of those things, rather well-described and thought-out. And his cameras and display would have to be woven INTO the shirt…
The only thing that would have been worse than a transparent hotel would be a transparent apartment building, as you would have to live with seeing what your neighbors do all the time! And that they can see you as well…
In the novel We by Evgeny Zamyatin, all citizens of a totalitarian state lived in transparent apartment buildings, so that the secret service could keep an eye on everybody. I don’t remember how the bathrooms worked in that system.
Yesterday, on another website, there was an article linked about a bathroom built above a abandoned elevator shaft. The guy who installed it made the floor out of thick glass with metal reinforcements, so you can look straight down into an abyss.
That’ll scare the poop out of anybody.
Back in primary school, we sometimes got these task sheets that’d have 6 square panels on them, 2 x 3 landscape. They’d have some short description of the past of a topic in the bottom left panel with a related illustration in the top left one. In the bottom middle panel would be a text about the same topic in the present with an according picture in the panel above. (So, if the topic was e.g. transportation, you’d find something about horse-drawn carriages in the left column and something about cars, plains and trains in the middle one.) Our task was to fill in the right column of how we imagine the future, concerning the given topic, with a drawing in the blank top right panel and a short “essay” (like, 3-5 sentences, or some such) in the blank bottom right panel. (I remember that for the transportation topic, I came up with some kind of muscle powered (and thus environment friendly) bicycle-o-copters with which people would fly around. Drawing such a thing was a bit challenging for me back then. I mean, drawings of bicycles were already kinda hard to get right, even without having to fit in some horizontal propeller.)
One time, the topic on such a sheet was school. There was some description of how teaching was done in the past and is done nowadays in the bottom left and bottom middle panels, with drawings of according class room settings in the panels above. I don’t know anymore what I wrote/drew for that topic, but I still remember the key sentence my best friend back then wrote in his essay, about how he thought school might be in the future: “Das ganze Schulhaus ist aus Glas, ausser den WCs.” (Translation: ‘The whole school building is made of glass. Except for the restrooms.’)