In every sense, then, there's more to a microchip than meets the eye. Michael Davidson, Florida State University's director of optical microscopy, was taking microphotographs of one when he suddenly spotted the smiling face of Waldo ["Where's Waldo?] beaming at him from the intricate circuitry.
"At first… I wondered if he was there to perform a special function on the chip," Davidson says.
But no. Any blank surface, from the wall of a cave to the side of a bus-stop, seems to cry out for decoration. Waldo was merely the first discovered work in a hidden exhibition of minuscule art that has been secretly created by chip designers since the dawn of the modern computer age.
View some of it at Molecular Expressions [http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html], Davidson's chip-art site. There's an interactive Java tutorial of how this silicon doodling - each image is less than the width of a human hair - is done.
Humming-birds, cheetahs, cartoons - even Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of entombment, standing guard over mask-alignment targets - these twentieth-century cave-drawings will doubtless intrigue and mystify archaeologists of some unimaginably distant future.
And so, in the electronic age, we circle back towards our ancestors. We are truly a microchip off the old block. I found a tiny herd of bison, and was reminded of images in the recently discovered Chauvet cave [www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr/gvpda-d.htm], a subterranean Louvre over 30,000 years old
Where the works of the past-masters were created in the flicker of firelight on rock, ours take shape in the unearthly glow of a monitor.
Vita brevis, ars longa... only the lighting is different.
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