Okay, this one is a little weird, but bear with me – it’s all about squid ink. (Yes, that’s pasta dyed with squid ink above.) When I was little I spent a couple summers on a schooner in the New Haven harbor, learning about marine biology. One thing we learned was that if you have a whole squid, you can use its innards to write. Cut it open, find the cartilage “backbone”, which is shaped like a quill. Use the “pen” to puncture the ink sac, and you can write with the ink.

Here’s a middle school science project guide for writing with a squid-ink pen: Link

Interestingly, two definitions of the word Sepia are:

1) The genus Sepia of cephalopod, a grouping of cuttlefish.
2) The secretion of a cuttlefish and the melanin-heavy pigment made from it.

And in fact there have been proposals from a Japanese company to use squid ink (a byproduct of squid fishing) as an eco-ink for dying t-shirts and as printer toner.

More on inks to come…

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See Also: Ink Refills and Edible Ink,Exploding Ants,The Epson Diet,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Warren on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 3:00 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.