Objets de Birthday.
I meant to post this sooner — my birthday was a month ago — but I just got busy. Anyway, these two wonderful objects came in the mail right on my birthday...
The first was a gift from Jim Blandy:
It's a Lichtenberg Figure, that is to say, lightning captured in a solid medium. Whoa. They use a linear accelerator to bombard a block of acrylic (Polymethyl Methacrylate, which I can only assume is as cool as it sounds) with a beam of electrons. Eventually the negative charge builds up to a high enough level that the trapped charge surges out along...