Buddhist Sand Printer

Certain Buddhist monks (see link) painstakingly piece together wonderfully intricate paintings out of colored sand, one particle at a time. The time taken to create them, coupled with the ease with which they are subsequently destroyed, by wind and people walking on them, are presumably important in some kind of Zen way.

Kids at seaside resorts spend minutes, if not hours, creating sand pictures inside bottles, which the tourist shop then proceeds to sell to them as souvenirs of their time spent, well, making sand pictures inside bottles.

So, in the spirit of applying modern technology to every aspect of modern life, whether it be meditation or vacation, enter the sand matrix printer. Using technology I don't fully understand, but I am sure is feasible if someone will give me a grant to build one, this large format printer will take standard computer format images and render them in colored grains of sand.

Rendered pictures may then be preserved, if printed on a glue base, or left out on the street for passersby to scuff and scatter, as karmically desired.

Of course, those Buddhist monks may still find it more satisfying to put their pictures together one grain at a time, but we're not going to let spiritual concerns get in the way of progress, are we? And they can always use our sand "prints" as a pattern.

[It is entirely possible that our competitors will accuse us of cheating, by using that dot matrix to paint plain pieces of sand. But we could do that with a regular printer, so it's not worthy of discussion here.]