Patterns In The Void

Sometimes I nerd out on tattoo ideas.

I really want some sort of tattoo that’s geeky, scientific/mathematical, and also goes with my body shape. Like the equation for Gaussian Curvature, tattooed along the curve from my waist to my hip:

I also want Einstein’s geodesic and field equations tattooed onto my wrists as anti-suicide tattoos. To remind me that I still have things to fix before trying the old piano-wire-and-superglue trick. The Einstein field equation is usually expressed as:

and the geodesic-as-the-shortest-curve equation is usually written as:

Or, another idea was to tattoo the RSA cryptographic algorithm written in three lines of Perl (which used to be legally classified as a munition), on my bicep, so that I could flex and say, “Check out my guns!”

Actually, I’d probably get it tattooed in Python, because Perl usually makes my brain feel like it’s doing loopdy-loops in my skull. I mean, regular expressions tend to do that, no matter what the parent language is.

#!/usr/local/bin/python -- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-in-4-lines-Python from sys import*;from string import*;a=argv;[s,p,q]=filter(lambda x:x[:1]!= '-',a);d='-d'in a;e,n=atol(p,16),atol(q,16);l=(len(q)+1)/2;o,inb=l-d,l-1+d while s:s=stdin.read(inb);s and map(stdout.write,map(lambda i,b=pow(reduce( lambda x,y:(x<>8*i&255),range(o-1,-1,-1)))

That photograph is of a crypto-anarchist named James Melvin, who’s cuter than a spaceship full of robotic kittens.

And speaking of spaceships, what’s cooler than maps of where the Earth is? This one shows Earth’s location with respect to the observable universe in the cosmic microwave background:

Neat, but not feasibly tattooable. Also, not exactly readable to extraterrestrial intelligences either. But thankfully, NASA already made an illustration of where Earth’s Sun is, which would be readable by aliens, and they made plaques of it, which were launched with the Voyager 10 and Voyager 11 spacecraft. The graph uses the locations of 14 pulsars to show the Sun’s precise location. And someone else beat me to the tattoo, but whatever. I’m getting it anyway.

I haven’t gotten any of these yet, though, because years ago I discovered a patent for nanoparticle ferrofluid tattoo ink. Basically, it would work like this: You take ferrofluid, which is a “fluid” made of nano-sized particles of iron, which is magnetic. Ferrofluids are really neat. If you’ve never heard of them before, you should check them out. Anyway. So, then you coat the ferrofluid in three triangles of different colours, and then coat in in another layer of some transparent bioproofing agent. Because the individual particles are magnetic, you can rotate them to corresponding colours with magnets at three specific frequencies. Then you tattoo yourself with the stuff, not lines or pictures, but a whole solid area. You then use the magnets to rotate the spheres to the desired colour. It’s like being a human etch-a-sketch! So cool! If you chose one colour to be similar to your skin tone, you could even erase your tattoos, and don’t get me started on all the ways that could come in handy.

The reason that nobody’s done this yet is because current medical imaging technology is mostly based around high-powered magnets, for instance, MRI. If you had nanoparticle ferrofluid tattoos and you got an MRI, your skin would boil off. Heh. It’s only a minor complication, right?