{SI] Shoot-In - Fractal Comments

"Mardon" wrote in message
. 130...
"William Graham" wrote:

& plums, grapes, & several other berries, and my wife bought a
blue (or was it purple) cauliflower last Saturday......

Blue potatoes are common here. Many Newfoundlanders prefer them.
They are not a deep blue but still, definately blue.

Well, we have some blue potato chips here, but I always assumed they were
created with food coloring.......

Desdinova wrote:

Alan Browne:
I don't think I've seen a fern that colour or at least stay that colour
for long. It's almost like tarnished gold leaf, if there is such a
thing.

The time of day shot (late afternoon) may have contributed some red to
the yellow as well. But, that is pretty much the color of ferns and
other leaves here in the fall. Except of course the maples which are
stunning reds, oranges, yellows and purple accents.


Cheers,
Alan

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

"Mardon" wrote in message
. 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.

"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:


Bowser
http://www.pbase.com/shootin/image/68336559
Nice image! Are the barnacles the natural fractals or the rust? I
suspect the rust is really more fractal in nature than the
barnacles but who cares. No deduction because one of them must be
fractal in nature. The orange and white complements each other
well and I like the composition, with mostly white to the upper
left and mostly rust to the lower right.


Thanks for the comments! Answer: both are fractal and blend into each other.
I liked the colors, but had a difficult time getting it all into focus. The
bouy is convex, so the corners bowed away from the center, and I was failry
close so the corners are still a little OOF. I didn't want to screw up my
own mandate...

Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
"JimKramer" wrote

http://www.pbase.com/shootin/image/68336571
It is the egg case for a Green Lynx Spider Legs of which ar in the the
background.


It has much the same form as the sprout from a potato
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/.../potato21d.jpg
http://research.cip.cgiar.org/potato...jpg_medium.jpg

That looks a bit like roman cauliflower
http://www.notthisorthat.com/sblog/u...auliflower.jpg

That looks a bit like a Julia set [sort of a Mandelbrot set turned inside
out]
http://www.fractalartcontests.com/1998/images/258.gif


So what do all these have to do with the equation for the Mandelbrot
set:

2
Z = Z + Z
n+1 n n

Where Z is a complex number: x + yi, where i is the square root of -1

The Mandelbrot set is but 1 algorithm that generates fractals. In fact
Mandelbrot didn't even come up with that equation, it was a French
(IIRC) mathematician in the late 1800's or early 1900's. As it is
difficult to impossible to produce fractal imagery (despite the absolute
simplicity of the equation) in any detail without a computer, the whole
notion was lost until Benoit Mandelbrot took another stab at it.

Occasionally in aerial photography you will see river deltas or gorges
that are astonishingly similar to the Mandlebrot set. Ferns are not
Mandelbrot like, they follow another, much simpler, fractal equation
(that I don't recall offhand) but that I programmed on an HP-9845 back
in the 80's and on a PC later. (Much easier on the brillant HP-9845
which was WAY ahead of its time at the time with a FORTRAN-like BASIC...)

Cheers,
Alan


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Alan Browne wrote:

*snip*
I programmed on an HP-9845 back in the 80's and on a PC later.
(Much easier on the brillant HP-9845 which was WAY ahead of its
time at the time with a FORTRAN-like BASIC...)
Cheers,
Alan

A really neat programming language I used on my Commodore 64 was
"Logo". It excelled at plotting equations. I guess Logo is now just
one of many dead programming languages.

"Mardon" wrote in message
. 130...
Alan Browne wrote:

*snip*
I programmed on an HP-9845 back in the 80's and on a PC later.
(Much easier on the brillant HP-9845 which was WAY ahead of its
time at the time with a FORTRAN-like BASIC...)
Cheers,
Alan

A really neat programming language I used on my Commodore 64 was
"Logo". It excelled at plotting equations. I guess Logo is now just
one of many dead programming languages.

Yup. - And this is why I, (with a degree in math) did not become a
programmer. I have no problem learning a good language and using it. But
learning a new one every year for the rest of my life? - NO THANKS!!

Logo in many ways lisp without parenthesis was marketed as a kids
language and is actually a very serious language for many applications.
As far as I know LCSI who wrote many of the LOGO's used in computers
a decade ago is still creating software.

w..


Mardon wrote:

Alan Browne wrote:

*snip*
I programmed on an HP-9845 back in the 80's and on a PC later.
(Much easier on the brillant HP-9845 which was WAY ahead of its
time at the time with a FORTRAN-like BASIC...)
Cheers,
Alan

A really neat programming language I used on my Commodore 64 was
"Logo". It excelled at plotting equations. I guess Logo is now just
one of many dead programming languages.