Michael Berkowitz and the X-ray skull

Almost a decade ago now, back in a time where vanity pages on geocities where hip and Facebook or flickr weren't even a neuron firing in their designer's minds, I put up a bunch of "silly" pictures on my homepage as a mockery of this trend to put useless personal stuff on homepages (some trend, uh ?). These pics are digitized X rays. The irony is that, what was meant as a joke ridiculing the uselessness of most homepages turned out to be actually useful to some. Over the years, I received quite a few usage request on these X rays, mostly on the skull one. Most were for educational uses, a couple where even for art. And judging by my site logs, many are referencing the images from their own pages.

And just today, I received an email from Michael Berkowitz, a retired teacher who had asked me for permission to use the skull image in his science transparencies back in May 2006. Today he's asking me the same thing but for CD ROMs. For one thing, I really appreciate that he would make the effort to reach me again about it, even more given the use he makes of it. But also I'm very glad that this joke ended up being one of those cool things about the Net, that you have no idea how useful whatever you make available will really be.