TheBanyanTree: Camera Obscura Grid

[Dale M. Parish]

I don't now remember what I went into the store room at the shop looking for, but had forgotten for an instant that the burglars who visited us had chopped the wires to the lights in that store room out, and I so stopped in the doorway to let my eyes get accustomed to the dark.  I looked up towards the shelves waiting until I could make out what was there for a minute, then looked down.  The floor was creeping out from under me.

This storeroom is under part of the roof that blew off in Hurricane Rita, and again in Hurricane Ike when the shyster roofers we'd hired after Rita hadn't nailed the perlings down.  We'd pulled all the lead-headed nails out and reused the corregated metal roofing, but the old holes in the metal didn't match were we renailed the new perlings.  This left us with rows of holes on the peaks of the corregatings in regular spacing.  The sun shone through each of these holes in camera obscura fashion, making a grid of little suns on the concrete floor.  But it was a bright day, and the strong south wind was blowing clouds northward from the nearby Gulf.  As my eyes adjusted, I realized that repeated on the floor in grid-like fashion were images of those clouds formed in the camera obscura fashion through each of those nail holes in the roof.  It was like a repeating rug pattern, but in motion as the identical grids of clouds slid in unison across the floor to the south. 

Neat!  What a wonderful floor covering it would make.  It set my mind in gear, trying to decide how to make a carpet from fiber optics mounted on the equivalent of a flat panel monitor.  Having in-motion wall paper is common enough on computer screens-- why not have a floor covering that mimicks the sky outside.  Or ceiling tiles.  Should be easy enough to mount a pin-hole in the roof over a CCD and generate the pattern.  

Only for kings and governments now, but someday, moving floor patterns may be common.  Hope so.

Hugs,
Dale
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632