Christmas Fish Eyes

A quick closeup of one of our Christmas ornaments. I took this while packing them away earlier this month. At normal size, it's a seafoam green sparkly christmas ball. I wanted to see what the sparkle was made of, and as you can see here, millions of tiny clear balls are adhered to the ornament. They look like bubbles or fish eyes, at this level of magnification.

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Bell Pepper Seeds

Yet another set of photos that turned out better than I thought they would. I was originally just shooting the cut open pepper. And just out of curiosity, I got my macro lens out and started shooting the seeds. They turned out to be beautiful and strange and wonderfully textured.

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Holographic Paper

The kids have some holographic craft paper. I actually think it's aluminum or mylar, not paper.

Here are some microphotos of it, whatever it's made of. Its beautiful, prismatic shine is lots of fun for the girls, and also still mesmerizing to me.

I found it interesting to see that the aluminum/mylar/paper is embedded with millions of microscopic reflective "pixels" that split light into colors from the spectrum. Totally cool. I'm also intrigued how much these photos look like photos of an LCD display.

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Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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A Green Spongy Foam Forest

While this looks like an overgrown lichen or bizarre moss, it is actually squishy green packing foam. I yanked a piece from one of the boxes while packing away Christmas ornaments.

I was most intrigued by the prismatic rainbows sparkling in the thinnest membranes of the foam. We've looked at foam before here, and it too was full of rainbows.

I like how this one looks like an alien forest, and am happy to add it to my collection of alien forests,  farms, and seed pods.

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LED Christmas Lights

Here are the best microphotos I can get right now of the light-emitting diode (LED) inside an energy-efficient LED Christmas light. You can see that the electronics inside are different than the glowing tungsten filament in a standard incandescent mini Christmas light, which we've looked at before.

LEDs work differently than incandescent lights, use far less energy, and generate far less heat. To get these photos, I actually had to shoot many frames because of the way LEDs work. They strobe very fast, blinking on and off many times a second. This aspect of their function meant that about half the photos I took of the diode came out completely black.

I also found it interesting that the blue diode appeared to have two attaching wires at the top as opposed to the single lead on the orange diode above. While I don't know why they are different in this way, I do know that there are differences in the ways different colored diodes function. Getting the right light frequency is apparently part art and part science.

Another LED tidbit is that white LED lights are actually not white. Rather, they are made from one of the other LED colors tuned to a very desaturated color within its frequency.

I'm gonna say I'm about 98% right on that bit of cocktail party knowledge. It's knowledge for a geek cocktail party, but a cocktail party nonetheless.

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