Monday, May 7, 2001

 

1:40 p.m. In my never-ending quest to bring you many fine things great and small, tonight I bring you something very very very small. Lots more pictures of mites posing nicely on tiny etched computer bits can be found here.

Although it looks like the stuff of nightmares, this critter is actually the approximate size of a dust mote that you may or may not glimpse out of the corner of your eye. He would be, come to think of it, a good denizen of a nightmare since he and many of his cousins are living quite happily in your pillow as you dream.

In fact, if you really think about it -- and I don't recommend this train of thought, but once it has started chugging out of the station, there's no real stopping it -- well, you're sleeping on a whole sack full of millions of these crunchy critters. They're everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.

There's no need to ever feel alone.

And he's a really amazing bug, visible only through the electron microscope. I can't help but feel awe for the even smaller parts of his body that we can't see, even with the aided eye -- the filaments, the follicles, the segments ... the little brain in there somewhere ... the nerve bundles that allow the muscles to work ... and all of this so far below our threshold of awareness that he becomes the literal ghost in our machines.

On a grander scale, I'm starting in on a new pile of paper stamping. Every five years or so, like clockwork, I gather all the scrap paper I've collected and then I stamp the used side with a special floral stamp that looks like a watermark.

Then I make separate piles of colored paper, drilled white paper, and regular paper. And then I ...

... it gets even crazier. Best not to describe what you can't see.

Really -- we all have to have hobbies.