Dali House

I play the fool with Photoshop all the time, but I couldn’t get close to what the microphotographers do every day in the science labs. Courtesy of the Boston Globe’s Big Picture page, the above image shows the suction cups of Loligo pealei squid.

I am not making this up, and I’m pretty sure the Boston Globe isn’t, either.

This photo by Jessica Schiffman and Caroline Schauer of Drexel University, it says, won Honorable Mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Awards. I really must find the picture that won!

The half-metre-long squid’s eight arms and two tentacles all have many, many suction cups that are lined with “fangs” made of chitin. The suckers are around 400 microns in diameter, about four times the width of a human hair.

For our next tiny, little adventure, below, we attempt to get past the fact that this isn’t a shot of sea urchins and shells. It’s the pollen from a sunflower, morning glory, hollyhock, lily, primrose and caster bean, the biggest here measuring less than 100 microns in width. To the nosy parkers at Dartmouth College’s Electron Microscope Facility: good work, fellas!

They say that when you master Photoshop, you go out and buy yourself a special microscope that your camera latches onto so it can take pictures like this.

This is soap, specifically “micro-flow pattern in thinning soap film”, an image that has won Dr Tsutomu Seimiya of Tokyo Metropolitan University an honorable mention in this year’s Nikon Small World competition.

If Theodore Géricault had tried to transpose his “Raft of the Medusa” onto a Greek portico (no, I don’t know why, I’m just thinking out loud), it might have looked like this.

The column in this image, though, is a snow crystal, and the swarming mass of “humanity” trying to get on (or off) is frozen droplets, rime in other words, no bigger than 50 microns tall — half the width of a human hair.

The snapshot was taken by the US Department of Agriculture’s Research Service and arrives here courtesy of the Boston Globe’s Big Picture page.

The photo below raises a question from the deep: What’s the point of saving the oceans if they’re full of stuff like this?

A Stuhr of IFM-Geomar captured this image of sea-going microalgae. To their immense credit, they’re wolfing down carbon dioxide, so thanks for that!

Quite apart from Islam’s strictures, any depiction of the Supreme Being is going to be fraught with difficulty. Giacomo (to others, Jacopo) Ceruti’s “God the Father” strikes me as a reasonably tolerant Viking who’s going to let the Holy Spirit serve as intermediary until you can gather your wits sufficiently to deal directly with the Big Boss.

Actually inheriting the image from an earlier artwork by the Venetian Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the Milanese Ceruti (1698-1767) painted God Senior on glass, which was apparently unusual for him, but quite common among other northern Italians at the time.

I don’t know why they used glass, but I presume there was some added sheen to it. I learn from Andriy Khomyk’s website PaintingOnGlass.com that the pane offered a protective varnish, but more importantly, that “no other medium allows for the creation of such deep and energetic colour!”

Khomyk says the painting was always done on the reverse side of the glass, but he may be referring to a specific approach used primarily for religious icons. Khomyk creates these paintings all the time, but it sounds arduous, since you’re working backwards and, in adding layers, have to be sure that what’s done first is accurate, since that ends up as the surface of the painting.

At any rate, Ceruti was definitely doing some social climbing when he portrayed the Creator. His usual subject matter was street urchins in rags, for which he earned the nickname Pitocchetto, meaning “little beggar”. Mind you, he also painted priests and nuns, and the other bearded work above is “Portrait of a Smoking Man in Oriental Habit”.

And while we’re on the subject of prayer, behold: The Malaysian orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, a beauty anyone can believe in.

A recent Monday at work got off to a terrific start when I scaled the stairs to the roof so I could have a smoke while proofreading pages and the creature above was there to say hello. He was crawling across the wooden slats of the upper deck. I used one of my pages to scoop him onto the wooden slats of a picnic table instead so I could have a better look.

It’s a good thing I used a page instead of my fingers. As I discovered later while finding out what the hell it was, this caterpillar squirts toxins when molested.

I didn’t molest him for long. In fact I placed him gently on a shrub. When I returned to the roof with another batch of pages about an hour later, of course, he was back on the slats making a wormline for … somewhere. A subsequent visit found him gone altogether, either tucked away turning into a pupa or snatched up by a bird.

This is the caterpillar of the Oleander Sphinx moth — Daphnis nerii — a hawk-moth found from southern Europe to the subtropics of Africa and Asia.

I didn’t have a camera, so I’ve purloined these photos from the ThaiPulse Blog and ThaiBugs.com. See the rest.