hood stick – not what you think

i saw this in rolling stone magazine and thought it was bullshit…

…but, apparently it’s not.

so, part of the giddy thrill (har) of living and/or working around austin is it’s a techie city. there’s google fiber, there’s dell computers, there’s apple, and intel, and eBay – oh my! and there’s also plenty of google cars that drive themselves. now, the vehicles that take all those wonderful images for google maps are actually lexus suv’s with the badges removed (but you can tell). the cars that drive themselves are weird bubble looking fuckers that, from what i’ve seen, are never let out without somebody in them to at least monitor shit…i’ve never seen one unmanned tooling about, and to be honest i’ve rarely seen them away from the mueller area (a shopping center one the land where the austin airport USED to be which now also contains dell children’s hospital).

apparently the little fuckers have hit at least one pedestrian, and lest we damage people worse from bouncing them off the windshield or throwing them in the path of another car, google recently was actually issued a patent for this:

it’s a sticky substance to go on the hood (it’s been called “human fly paper” in many articles, which isn’t far off) which holds the “victim” to the hood of the car. to protect the car from copious insect build up the gel-like adhesive would be covered in a matte “egg shell” like coating that would allow for normal bug-stick-free driving but something large enough to break the coating (cow, deer, fixie-riding hipster) would stick to the coating and not injure itself any further rolling up onto the windshield, or the roof, or getting bitch slapped by the vehicle into oncoming traffic.

the REALLY interesting part of the story to me? google has ZERO plans on making this a reality. none. they just wanted to patent it…you know, just in case. and they got it. so there you go. if you have any concept of the time and money involved in getting a patent you now have a clue as to how much time and money this company has to waste. and if you don’t know, just google it! hehehe…