I had a colored photograph of water for a while, that I snitched from someone’s gallery on deviantart.com, and then I switched to a big picture of Harry Potter. Now I’m looking for something new. Anyone have anything unusual?
There are some nice selections at Space.com
I’ve got a small bunch of large flourescent mushrooms growing up from a stone floor.
damn, that used to work. Oh well, it’s a very close up picture of a fly.
Eddie Izzard’s nekkid ass in multiplicity.
Neonatal rat cardiac myocytes, grown in culture on slides, and treated with 50 micromolar phenylephprine. These were fixed and labeled with a monoclonal antibody against sarcomeric alpha-tropomyosin and a polyclonal antibody against atrial natriuretic peptide. This labeling is visualized by immunofluorescent staining with Alexafluor 488-conjugated goat-anti-mouse IgG1, and Alexafluor 568-conjugated goat-anti-rabbit IgG. DAPI is used as a nucleic acid counterstain, and reveals the presence of some non-myocytes, which do not express the other two antigens. I’ve won a little publicity with the photomicrograph, as it has been used in some official presentations and documents. I’ve entered it into an “Art of Science” contest. The sarcomeric striations and perinuclear staining of ANP are pretty cool, I must say.
Windows: Part of a movie poster for the original (1932) version of “The Mummy” starring Boris Karloff
Linux: “The Grand Canal at the Salute Church” by Canaletto
I have the newest of the collages that I’ve made as my desktop wallpaper. It’s the one with the word New revolving next to it.http://www.geocities.com/mulderscreek/downloads.html
I have a very cool picture of a bear at our back door that Mr. 'addi took a couple of days ago (the first picture).
Mac G4 553: Picture of Yosemite National Park. Half Dome and El Capitan. One of my own photos. All my Yosemite wallpaper is from my own photos.
Mac G4 400: Picture of (I think) a California poppy (comes as default wallpaper with Mac OS). Or just another picture of Yosemite.
Windows XP PC in purple case: Picture of (wait for it) Yosemite National Park. Is there a trend going on here?
Windows XP PC, old Dell: Stargate SG-1 wallpaper (designed it myself). Okay, I broke the trend.
Old PC that I hardly ever use: Yosemite National Park wallpaper. (Oh, the trend wasn’t quite broken!)
An absolutely plain medium gray background.
Each of the other machines I remote control while wearing my sysadmin hat have screen backgrounds of different shades. It helps to avoid silly mistakes like rebooting the main domain controller when you meant to reboot the alternate webserver #4. Rule#1: Never do anything against the dark blue background without thinking three times before clicking once. It’s effective precisely because it’s subliminal.
Pictures of any kind are merely a distraction. Then again, I look at my work machine as just a tool, not a toy or a personal artifact.
My home machine used to have slide show screensaver with nekkid women . But then I realized that I was never there to see it since it only ran when I wasn’t using the machine. D’OH. My wife wasn’t getting much out of the pictures, either, so I turned it off.
I’ve got a picture from the Astronomy picture of the day site.
I change it every so often, just because there are some neat pictures there.
Currently my desktop is Charisma Carpenter nekkid on a white furry rug, overlooking downtown LA. I’m sure my wife is going to make me change it soon. 
Old PC:International Space Station
New PC:Alitalia 747
A dark theme from deviantart.
No icons
No toolbars
A very clean fluxbox desktop
At home: a close up of the moon at one quarter phase. At work I have two computers I am responsible for, and I often put up jpegs I’ve “taken” of several things I’ve created in Bryce.
Vlad/Igor
A photo of my kid at the beach in Florida, taken last February.
(Let me know if the link doesn’t work.)
I have a folder of 271 images which include
•scans of slides and photos I made, or that my Dad made when I was a kid
•fractals made with Floating Fractals, PowerXplorer, or Fracture
•3D worlds made in Bryce
• freehand art created in Photoshop, Painter, or SuperPaint
• astronomical photos downloaded from the Hubble site
I have my Desktop configured to load a different at random every time I reboot.
On my work computer: A black background with a pair of big, yellow, scary eyes staring out of the darkness. I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s great for scaring those annoying co-workers who try to read over my shoulder. I just click the ‘desktop’ button and watch them jump!
Home: a photo of me with O-sama. No, not that Osama, this one. He’s a musician/comedian whose schtick is making literal Japanese translations of English rock songs, without any foreign words at all. He’s an absolute scream, and a good musician as well. He was performing at a tiny little club that Cerowyn and I happened to stop by, so after his set I went up and told him how much I liked his act. He gave me an autograph and posed for a picture with me.