This paper examines a phenomenon that can cause abrasions in a surface to reproduce holographic images of the object that abraded it:
http://amasci.com/amateur/hand1.html

What's really neat is the method they demonstrate, which you can use to carve holographic images into a plastic sheet using nothing more than a compass and a bit of patience!

Yesterday I felt pretty vindicated - I got a call from a collection agency, and made THEM hang up on ME in ten seconds flat!

I was able to pull this off because I know my rights, and I know their "wrongs".  This particular collection agency, along with a string of others over the last couple of years, are practitioners of "junk debt collection" - these bottom feeders buy up old debts that can no longer legally be collected, at pennies on the dollar, then set out to harass payment from you.  They will call you day after day threatening legal action, threatening your credit, etc, when in fact they have no legal recourse whatsoever because these are debts that are beyond the statutes of limitations both for civil suit and credit reporting.  They will also try to impress upon you that you must make a payment immediately to avoid these dire consequences, and therein lies the trap... they'll take anything, anything at all, as a show of "good faith" to keep them from dropping the hammer on you.... but as soon as you agree to make one thin dime of payment, WHAM!, the debt (including whatever massive interest and penalties they may be claiming for a decade old debt) now becomes a legal obligation that they CAN sue you for!

In my case, we are talking about a department store credit card that I defaulted on back in 1989 with a few hundred dollars outstanding.  A couple of years later I made an effort to make payments to a collection agency for the debt, but things were tight and I stopped paying them before it was completely payed off.  According to the statute of limitations in the state of California, you cannot be held liable after seven years from the date of last payment or agreement.  I didn't hear about it again till about six months before the statute ran out, but I just avoided them and they went away.

Until one morning in 2006, when I was woken by a phone call from a very aggressive fellow, who claimed that he had a judicial summons ready to send out to *** Xxxxxxxx St in Spokane Washington, if I was not prepared to send an immediate payment towards my outstanding debt.  I was rather incredulous, and I explained to him that it was beyond statute, at which point he claimed that I had made payments to his office back in 2002.  I hung up on him without bothering to explain that I had not lived in Spokane for over 20 years! (ya, sure you dealt with me in 2002 - maybe he should have looked up the area code we was calling before making that bluff).  For the next two weeks he kept leaving messages on my answering machine, several per day, to the effect of "This message is for Robert Dunlop, regarding a impending legal action, please have him or his attorney contact me immediately".  The first calls were all fire and brimstone, but by the end it was more like "hi... this is so-and-so... calling for robert dunlop....".  He knew he had lost the bluff.

I thought that was it, until a month later I got a letter from another collection agency, which by the way had inflated the debt to over $9,000, and subsequent calls.  I politely told them where to go, and advised them not to call again unless they wished to face harassment charges, and they didn't call back.  Then the next month, yet another, and another, and that's how it's been since then.  It seems they must trade these debts between each other like trading cards, and as this list shows there are a lot of them out there today: http://www.credit-repair.atomicshops.com/junkdebtbuyers.html.  Give me a few more years, and maybe I'll have told them all off