Originally published at: This opal contains a breathaking miniature universe | Boing Boing
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Reminds me of the old Jack Handey Deep Thought.
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Aw - no video. Shame.
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Actually, it brings to mind Death’s wedding present to Mort from the book “Mort”, by Terry Pratchett:
From Tor.com:
“Death gives Mort their wedding present , a giant pearl made of the actualities Mort created; Death tells him that one day this pearl will be the seed of a new universe”
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With that coloring it reminds me a lot of Hubble images of nebulae, like the Eagle and Helix. But admittedly I suffer a heavy professional bias here.
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A lot of the ‘cooked’ opals look like nebular swirls.
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Now we just have to figure out on which side of the opal we are.
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Nice. Opals are really cool looking. I would love to find some in the wild.
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Go to coober pedy. It’s small enough that miners who run opal tours will take you out for a bit of “noodling” (surface searching, not underground mining). I was able to find a film cannister (yeah, remember those?) of small low to mid grade opals in about an hour.
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Some of us don’t run Javascript from Google’s servers (which is apparently the only way moving pictures on the web can be published anymore) so it’s nice to actually see something in a front page post for a change.
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A fun technique in 3D modeling is using layers of ‘noise’ to recreate the natural. Noise can be used to extrude a surface and when multiplying and adding layers of noise it is remarkable how close CGI can mimic nature!
Thanks @frauenfelder
The opal is something I’d like to tackle, have been to Cooper Pedy 's opal mines and seen the real thing in the rock below the surface. Here is a rudimentary mountain I grew using Cinema 4D’s ‘noise’ generators (45 different types of noise):
Just watch where you put your feet when walking around as there are many, many, many holes in the ground. Most of which are very deep.
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Flash was just the best, no? /s
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I’ve been to Coober Pedy… twice. I wanted to explore the idea of living in a hole in the ground. But it is SO remote, flat, desolate, and dry that I cringed each time and wondered WTF did I come here for? I can see the appeal if your mining - or in some kind of service industry - but my god, that is a harsh place. Most of South Australia is an ideal place for a desert.
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There are a ton of actual signs all over the place about this exact problem. Tons of stories about guys who got drunk at night and fell into a deep deep hole.
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A few missing persons/murders too. They have used drones as an expedient to search shafts.
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