Nathan Myhrvold custom-builds a camera to take highest-rez-ever pix of snowflakes

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/11/nathan-myhrvold-custom-builds-a-camera-to-take-highest-rez-ever-pix-of-snowflakes.html

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Unfortunately not the only things he’s famous for.

https://psmag.com/magazine/a-patent-boogieman-with-the-potential-to-obliterate-aspiring-startups

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Great, now I’m going to have to pay Myhrvold every time I look outside in winter, since he’s bound to claim snow is his IP.

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Like everything else, The Onion predicted what his business plan came down to:

Myhrvold was just as bad as Shingy at managing to do nothing at his company but be a pal of the CEO, but at least Shingy never did as much harm to the rest of the world.

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Monsters Inc__Snowman__snowcone__01

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About 1970, a magazine had an article about saving snowflakes. I want to say Natuonal Geographic, but other details seem wrong, so maybe Popular Science.

I can’t remember if it revealed tge process or told ofa kit, but I ended up ordering the kit from Edmund Scientific. Took fore er to arrive.

I don’t remember using ut, after all that.

Catch a snowflake on a glass slide, add a drop of something, and it holds the shape of the crystal forever. So you can easily view it on ykur handy microscooe. Didn’t every science minded kid have one? I wanted a stereo microscooe, like in the Carolina Scientific catalog.

I think the liquid was crazy glue, though why do I know that? It was when crazy glue was a new thing (hence ordering from Edmund Scientific), and no brand name involved.

A search says it can be done with crazy glue.

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Carbon fiber camera? Artificial sapphire? Sounds like the audiophile version of snowflake photography cause the images look just as good as any other you’d find on an image search of the subject.

Translation: Tech Bro was monstrous asshole and got rich doing it. Now he has infinite time for hobbies so now we all have to suffer him getting recognition for that too.

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when I was a kid I did it with hot wax…heat to liquid in a small dish, let a snowflake fall into it, and it’ll make a cast. The results, at least for me, were kinda “lo-res” but it worked. It’s hard to get just one, though…in my experience, the larger “flakes” are just an accumulation of smaller ones jumbled together. You will get individual crystals, though.

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