Why thank you Amit for giving everyone one! I would most definitely live up my superheroic ambition if I got an invisibility cloak. But reasons why it won’t work.

Firstly, I would try and make sure it is put someplace where I know it will always be. Imagine the do-gooding Invisible Man scrambling for his cloak in his cupboard because he can’t see it (but obviously) even as goons beat up an innocent outside his door.

I wouldn’t say kids actually aspire to ‘be’ them. There are no kids as stupid as that. At five, one may be taken by the muscles and the gadgets and the colours that define superheroism, but man is born sane and faith in the super only comes after the ‘real world’ beats you to squishy pulp.

There is something in a super that kids really appreciate. I think I speak for all kids when I say that Superman wouldn’t be half as super if there was no Clark Kent. Superman is a lot of things (truth, justice, freedom, blah blah blah…) but what is Clark Kent? Just a clever disguise?

Heights of Velahood or creative recreation. Make your call. But I honestly came to appreciate the cool of a Vampire as opposed to the skin ripping passion of a Werewolf. Look at it my way, a Vampire loves his job. Every being it bites into is a finger-licking treat. A Werewolf on the other hand, lives in constant dread of what he is. He turns into a power far superior to any that most mortals would ever have and is too taken by it to actually feel it.

Now there’s something that makes sense. I was beginning to wonder if it was only the Japanese that even had a modicum of appreciation for a moral machine’s potential. American Sci-Fi is always so “machines are going to kill us all.”

There are hundreds of thousands of machines today that can physically outperform human beings in particular tasks. Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, the mental task, too, has become academic. Obviously this fact does not make Deep Blue better than human. However, consider a machine that is morally superior to man; that, in my opinion, could qualify as a machine that is better than human, in fact, superior to mankind.

The adrenaline associated with filmed entertainment (even books for that matter) owes much to things going wrong. In Star Wars, you aren’t a hero until your ship malfunctions at the most crucial point in the battle. Think of all the heores who were forced to lunge forward with a rod (or something) when their handguns went kluck kluck at the opportune moment. Think of all the rickety spaceships that the heroic get stuck with when it came to going up against a galactic fleet of hyperspace cruisers. Think of all the ropes that snap when they shouldn’t.

Could be mere chance but I seem to be running into plenty of Economics oriented bloggers of late. My limited time spent in Economics lectures was anything but pleasant. But in due course I managed to put that to fair use. The idea is hardly original. It is a way of proving that time travel is possible.

The way our professor told us, the law of diminishing marginal utility works like this: You pay a fruit seller five bucks for an apple the first time. Then you get partially full and are not willing to pay five for the next one you buy. You pay four.