It’s been possible since Version 6 of Mathematica to embed images directly into lines of code, allowing such stupid code tricks as expanding a polynomial of plots. But is this really good for anything? As with many extremely nifty technologies, this feature of Mathematica had to wait a while before the killer app for it was discovered. And that killer app is image processing. Mathematica 7 adds a
![The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing—Wolfram Blog](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/33dca3e6349efe29c7ce57cd18ddf990f7ced65a/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wolfram.com%2Fshare.png)