Mardon wrote in
. 130:

One early October Tuesday evening in Newfoundland, Mardon put down
his paintbrush to check the r.p.e.35 newsgroup. (His wife kept
painting.) Lo and behold, the SI fractal submissions were on
display in their full glory, even before the submission deadline
arrived. Talk about efficiency. There's no flies on our Jim, as
the saying goes. I wonder if Al is impressed or just glad that the
job isn't his anymore.

I think he's trying to show me up. But hey, I'm glad he was willing
to take it over, and as can be seen from how long it took me to get to
this reply, I'm not in any better shape timewise ;-)

Thanks for taking the time to critique! Maybe one day I'll be so
motivated again...


"Natural Fractals" Hummm --- I own a text on Chaos Theory. I've
installed Quat and Fractint and have used them on my PC to generate
my own fractal images. I've even installed an image of Henrik
Engstrom's quaternion Mandelbrot set circa 1992 as my PC wallpaper.
All that said, I still have no idea which of the SI submissions is
really a natural fractal and which isn't. Unlike image plots of
fractal equations, I'm inclined to think that natural fractals
exist only in the mind of the beholder. So does beauty, and here's
my opinion of both:

snip

Al Denelsbeck
http://www.pbase.com/shootin/image/68336564
How'd you do that? The lily pad looks like it's under the surface
of the water but the droplets wouldn't float on water would they?
It seems logical that the droplets must be sitting on the leaf but
it doesn't look that way to my eye. Intriguing! The veins are no
doubt fractal in nature, so do deduction there. To paraphrase our
friend Bret, too bad "Elitechrome 100 Hates Lily Pads".
"Elitechrome 100 LOVES those bubbles though." Too much washed out
green for my taste.

The pads are indeed above the water, but these were fresh ones and
fairly translucent, so I think that and the short depth of field is what
provided the illusion. I don't quite see it myself, but I was there.

I think what I liked about this was the anachronistic aspect of it
- the pad, though veined, is still round, and the water drop can't get a
whole lot more unfractal. Break it up and you see it really is made of
smaller bits the same shape though ;-)


Mardon
http://www.pbase.com/shootin/image/68338439
I thought about cooking a DVD in our microwave and repeating the
fractal image from Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Microwaved-DVD.jpg). In the
end, I'm not sure if it was my reluctance to 'steal' the idea from
Wiki or the fear of having my wife catch me putting a metal DVD in
the microwave that ultimately dissuaded me.

A few years back friends and I put a standard CD in the microwave.
About three seconds and there was a minimal flash of light from the
plastic, and we took a look. The resultant pattern in the foil was very
branched, clearly an electrical discharge pattern, not at all like Wiki's
demo.

Player didn't like it either ;-)


- Al.

--
To reply, insert dash in address to match domain below
Online photo gallery at www.wading-in.net