I always love it when an image I made, or a photograph I took, pops up in an unexpected context. I have recently been drafted for a campus committee, the Campus Council for Information Technology, and the guest speaker in today’s meeting, Patrice Koehl, did a presentation on Big Data, Data Analytics, the need for data centers, the lack of collaboration between computer scientists and other scientists, etc. Among his slides was this one (apologies for the lousy quality; I took the picture with my laptop’s built-in camera):

Figure 1: Snapshot from today’s CCFIT meeting, showing Patrice Koehl, one of his slides, and one of my pictures on one of his slides (indicated by red frame).

That image highlighted by the red frame looked oddly familiar. Here is the full-resolution one from my web site for comparison:

Figure 2: Photograph of IDAV’s tiled 3D display wall, showing the default background image: a ray-traced C-60 Buckminsterfullerene inexplicably floating above a chessboard.

This is a ray-traced image of a C-60 Buckminsterfullerene (you might at this point get the impression that I like Buckyballs, and you wouldn’t be wrong) that I created a long time ago. In this particular photograph, it shows up as the default background image for our tiled 3D display wall (scroll down on the linked page).

While we’re on the topic: all the way back in 2004, another one of my ray-traced Buckyball pictures was used in the TV show ReGenesis (episode 01/09, “The Secret War”). That was neat, because ReGenesis was a very cool show — and they asked for permission. 🙂 Let me see if I can find a screen capture. But here is the source image they used:

Figure 3: Another Buckyball image of mine that was used elsewhere, in this case as a prop in the science-fiction show ReGenesis (episode 01/09, “The Secret War”).