An article I read from the Berkeley Lab News Center, titled "Blurring the lines between magic and science," truly left me gobsmacked.

It is all about a team led by Xiang Zang at UC-Berkeley Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center who have created a "carpet cloak."

No kidding! It is a seemingly magic carpet that can be seen but it hides the bulge of the object underneath it. It sounds all very Harry Potter-ish.

I e-mailed the article to some friends. Two of the friends quickly wrote back they would be the first in line, meaning they would like to hide a bit of bulk of their own.

Zhang says, "Our optical cloak … suggests that true invisibility materials are within reach."

Shocking! At least to me it is. The ability to Photoshop pictures has already made me a cynic. What will this do? How will we ever be able to believe what we see? After all, isn't seeing believing? Well, not anymore.

Then there are the ramifications of hidden warfare and weaponry. Such deception in the hands of the wrong sorts of people could end the world as we know it.

Albert Einstein once said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

However, Zhang continues with good possibilities by saying, "… it also represents a major step towards transformation optics, opening the door to manipulating light at will for the creation of powerful new microscopes and faster computers."

The obvious upside to that is we will have even more amazing technical equipment and services. Who knows, perhaps we will have a telephone chip in a tooth so we won't need to carry around the cell phone we can no longer leave home without. But then we could be tracked. But aren't we tracked now anyway what with Google Earth and photo tickets as a couple of examples?

There are now computers with "virtual" keyboards that are light sensitive. It has no keyboard but projects the keys onto a table top and you type away. The tripod for projecting the light looks like a pen that slips in a pocket. Set up the little tripod and off you go.

In a light-hearted spoof on a now defunct Web site pwot.com, Bill Gates joked, "Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy."

Though tongue in cheek there is a truth in his statement.

My Tivo wouldn't work so I spent parts of several days trying to get it working. I ordered a wireless connection because the tech expert finally decided our phone line was "running high." (What in the WORLD does that mean?) The wireless gadget didn't work, so I called the phone company. The phone company sent me off to the router 800 number where, because the router was one someone gave me, I would need to pay a fee to the tech "gods."

Fortunately, I deduced that if my Internet worked with the router, why shouldn't the Tivo? I finally tried one last time by putting the plug into a different USB port and it worked.

Thinking about it makes me need a good piece of chocolate, but too much chocolate and I'll need an invisible cloak.

e-mail: sasy14@gmail.com