A terrible beauty is born

Striking modern art.

Love those blues.


Like a heavenly flower.


Museum quality.

If you happen to be an oncologist, you know what I'm going to say next. Yes, these gorgeous items are cancer cells. From top to bottom, breast cancer; unspecified; unspecified; brain cancer.

I've read that even amid the horrors of war, soldiers have sometimes found beauty to admire: tracer bullets and phosphorus like fireworks, smoke billowing from an explosion. It would seem that nature likes to tease us by making some of its worst phenomena pleasing to the eye. There might be a philosophical lesson in this, but if so, don't ask me what.

Here is a satellite photo of Hurricane Dean:

UPDATE 9/2: Speaking of visual beauty in weapons of war, I ran across the following description in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. It's a nighttime air raid in World War II London (Bowen had lived there throughout the war):

Harrison, back again, stood in the middle of a street, otherwise empty, illuminated by a chandelier flare. During the pulse of silence between the overhead throbbing and the bark of the guns, the flare made the street like a mirrored drawing-room. Above where Harrison stood peering at something jotted on an envelope, white-green incandescence flowed from the lovely shapely symbol, which slowly descended as it died -- the sky to the east reflected flamingo-pink nobody could have taken to be the dawn, the west was jagged with flames.