Diatomaceous Zoom

[watch in higher quality here]

I posted a video before about the magnification range of a scanning electron microscope... This is the update with a slightly more interesting sample! Last time I was using 10 micron beads to confirm the calibration of the scope, this time it is fossilised diatoms; tiny single celled plankton with beautiful shells.

The video starts at 25x magnification, the whole field of view is about 2mm across.



And it starts zooming in...



And in...



And in...



Until it gets to 200000x magnification, nearly 1000x greater than at the start of the video. Now the whole field of view is only about 2um across. That is 100 times narrower than a human hair.

Then it zooms back out again so you can see what you were looking at!

Software used:
ImageJ - Generating zoom series, converting individual images to a video.

Sublime - video

Sublime is a video combining music with science. Awesome.
 

[watch in higher quality here]

The story of this video is the phase of matter and how it changes. You will know the common phase changes of water; boiling, condensing, freezing and melting. These phase changes all involve a liquid step, and in this video liquids are not involved at any stage.

The phase changes here just involve solids and gases, either deposition (changing from gas directly to a solid) or sublimation (changing from a solid directly into a gas). The actual substances in the video are common, just dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) and water frost, the reason no liquids are involved comes down to the temperature and pressure. At normal atmospheric pressure dry ice does not melt, liquid carbon dioxide is not stable, so it changes directly into a gas. Dry ice is also very cold (-78°C/-108°F) meaning water vapour (a gas) in the air coming into contact with the dry ice directly deposits to form frost. In some places it also hits the cold carbon dioxide gas and solidifies from the air to form tiny snow particles.

The frost looks black and the dry ice looks white because of the way the sample was illuminated. It was lit up from the back and frost (which has lots of tiny crystals) scatters the light away from the lens, making it darker. Dry ice scattered the light less, i.e. light got transmitted straight through to the lens, so appeared lighter.

Over time the carbon dioxide gradually sublimates and the water frost gradually forms. Because the surface the frost is trying to grow on is constantly disappearing the frost constantly moves. As the carbon dioxide sublimates it also increases greatly in volume, blowing the frost about!

This video is of a microscopically small sample. The region the video shows is only about 1mm across, depending on the size of your screen you are seeing the frost and dry ice at 100× to 1000× its actual size. This high magnification lets us see individual ice crystals growing as the frost spreads. Initially the crystals in the frost are very small (5μm or so). Gradually as the dry ice sublimates the temperature increases and the water vapour in the air can take longer to deposit onto the growing ice crystals. Slower crystal growth leads to bigger crystals (up to 100μm).

Ice crystal shapes also vary depending on temperature and environment, in this video you can see both needle-shaped and flat ice crystals.

The frost grows and the dry ice sublimates quite quickly. All the clips in the video are at 4× real life, if you imagine everything happening at a quarter of the speed that is how fast the frost was growing and changing.

Software used:
ImageJ: Image editing, alignment, cropping and video making,
Audacity: Audio editing.
Windows Live Movie Maker: Final sequencing, adding captions.

Things Never Change...

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Robert A. Heinlein: Life-Line (1939)

Treatise - my first professional font!

It was about time I started to try and make some money from my plethora of hobbies... Today my first professional standard font goes on sale! You can take a look at the interactive previews at myFonts.com:

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/zephyris/treatise/

Treatise is serif (with the sticky-out-bits (: ) font with some fun quirks. It has very big round terminals on the top of letters like r, c, k and s and a big blob in the top of the o. These all work together to make it look a bit more handwritten. It also uses the single storey a and g (i.e. like you write them, not like you type them) which also helps maintain the handwriting feel. Treatise uses some fancy Opentype features which let you adjust the way letters appear depending on what neighbours them. I have used this to make the long tail on the capital R and Q nestle neatly around curved letters like u, e, a, etc. It also means that letter combinations like ff and fl where the f can crash into the top of the next letter are replaced with a nicer looking character combination.

While it has some cheeky little design features which make it very unlike most serif fonts it is still subtle enough to sit happily in a paragraph of text. Having said that it also has enough character to make a title interesting. All in all I am pretty happy with it as a design!

The software used to design and code this font was entirely free and open source:
Sketching - Gimp
Outline design - Inkscape
Glyph coding and font generation - FontForge

Image Processing: Paper Camera

The "Paper Camera" style of image, a kinda faux-sketch view of the world, is actually a very simple set of image processing steps:

1. Take an image (this is Franklin bridge in Philadelphia):

2. Find the edges in the image and make them into a dark outline:

3. "Posterize" the brightness to make it look cel-shaded:

 4. Layer the edges onto the posterised image and desaturate slightly:

You can download this filtering effect as a plugin for ImageJ from my website: here.

Software used:
ImageJ - Scripting and image processing

Stop talking about economics; placebo effects and the recession.

It is no surprise that the current economic turmoil has been so bad and lasted so long. This is the first recession of the post internet era, an age where mass media of all forms turns over with incredible speed and can spread word around the globe in seconds. Even when the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000s there was nowhere near the current level of instantly published online news, social network gossip and digital or cable TV with dozens of news channels vying for content.

One part of how economic difficulties arise is the perception of a rise in economic risk. At first this worry hits the investors, people who carefully follow the latest economic news, but in time non-experts, us consumers, become aware of it. And as we see the risk we spend less, saving our cash for harder times which seen to be approaching.

So which came first, the recession or the news story? In the past it was probably the recession which came first, at least to some extent. The modern media system means that now it is often the news story that comes first, a forecast of future economic problems "sells papers", or rather makes people read the website and watch that TV channel...

Economic forecasts are a placebo, and often not a good one. Imagine your weekly shopping, would you really notice if your £50 weekly food shop cost £0.10 more each time? It would take quite a long time... On the other hand you probably would notice if the panicky news headline said "Inflation Hits 10%!". Many people would probably not be affected by these price rises but the psychology of it, being told to worry, is a negative placebo.

Because economies are driven by speculation of risk by telling people there will be economic problems you will get economic problems; you can make an economy ill by telling it that it will get ill. This is just like the negative placebo effect in medicine, if you give someone sugar pills and tell them that they will make them feel ill many of them will somehow get ill. The solution is simple though, just stop talking about the economy, stop taking the sugar pills!

‹/rant›

Read about the "nocebo" (negative placebo) in medicine here: The Nocebo Effect an award-winning article by Penny Sarchet.
Nocebo at Wikipedia.

Macro Microchip

To see this (much) bigger click here. This is a single integrated circuit die only 3 by 2 mm in size... The thin silver wires radiating from the edges of the die connect the integrated circuit to the legs of its case. The two large greyish patches are the chip's memory, this is an EPROM chip which stores data or programs. The data can be erased by shining a bright UV light onto the microchip. The other fine detail is the control circuitry which lets the chip actually access its memory, write to the memory and function as a microcontroller.

This picture was taken with a Canon 450D using a reversed 18-55mm lens set to 18mm.

Software used:
UFRaw - For RAW to jpeg conversion with colour balancing, etc.