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 the geodesic equation and Einstein’s
field equation
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 
.
While the geodesic equation is usually written as 
.
Another idea was to
tattoo the RSA cryptographic algorithm,
which used to be legally classified as a munition.
That photograph is of some old-skool crypto-anarchist named
James Melvin, who’s cuter than a
spaceship full of robotic kittens, and who has it tattooed in four
lines of Perl:
#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
Except I’d tattoo it on my bicep, so that I could flex and say,
“Check out my guns!” Also, I’d probably get it tattooed in Python,
because Perl usually makes my brain feel like it’s doing loopdy-loops
in my skull. Also, if it was in Python, I could flex and say:
“Hey baby, is there a vet in this town?” No. Why? “Because this Python is sick!”
Not to mention that it’s only two lines in Python:
#!/usr/local/bin/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)))
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?
