Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: 

After seeing the Mandelbrot set on TV last evening, I thought I would return to it as the source of today's image.  The image I found shows a minibrot deep in Seahorse Valley, at the limit of resolution.

Thanks to the serendipitous coloring, the image rates an 8.

The name "Mandelbrot Scene" is a simple description.

The calculation time of a few seconds is true when the image is calculated using the standard double-precision math routine.  A slightly improved rendering will result if arbitrary-precision math is used, but doing so will cause the calculation time to leap to well over a half-hour.

Friday evening I caught a watered-down pop-science show on one of the discovery channels.  The advertised topic was chaos.  When the show began, I expected the discussion would soon get to fractals, but fractals were not mentioned until 45 minutes into the show, and then, after a meager 5 minutes devoted to Mister Mandelbrot and his well-known Set, the show started pushing its apparent agenda -- an attempted demonstration of how life might have come about through random evolution rather than from intelligent design.

At the disappointing end, I was left feeling that the show had been produced more as an attack on the fundamental Christian theory of intelligent Creation rather than as a demonstration of the wonders of chaos and fractals.  Too bad.  It was a great opportunity gone bad.  (I wonder if some skeptic or Atheist organization was behind it.)

Lots of clouds and a temperature of 84F 29C made the day a nondescript one here at Fractal Central today.  The fractal cats had nothing to complain about, nor did they have anything to enjoy.  The humans had an average day.  FL went to a party or something in the afternoon; I thankfully escaped.  The next FOTD will be posted in the near future.  Until whenever, take care, and watch out for both zealous skeptics and true believers.

Jim Muth
jimmuth@earthlink.net


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