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Champion Graveyard Sound

Macro photography and fractals have a lot in common.  I don’t know what that is, but I just sense that they have a “family resemblance”.  Imagine you’re trying to put together a jig-saw puzzle but someone has accidentally thrown in another puzzle with it.  While looking for the pieces that match up with the ones you’ve already put together you’re also picking out the ones that belong to that other puzzle that don’t belong in the same box.  But you also keep coming across pieces that, while they don’t fit in immediately with the small part you’re already assembled, you sense they’re part of the larger complete picture and you want to hold on to them and not put them aside with the pieces of the other puzzle because they look, in some vague and hard to describe way, similar.

Haven’t we all zoomed into something like this in a fractal program?  This fly’s head reminds me of many of the formulas in Sterlingware.  Flies are purely a nuisance when seen at a regular scale but they are both magnificent and terrifying when seen up close.

I got these two fly photos off the Wikipedia.  This second one here is really a work of art.  I like color and I think color almost has a subliminal thought-inducing language and quality all its own.  What an incredible machine the common housefly is; no spaceship or aircraft a human could design will ever look as superb as this housefly.

10 Million Year-Old Fractal Found in Antarctic Ice! According to a recent article in the Scientific American, some ancient species of molds when allowed to grow slowly and undisturbed for millions of years, grow and develop in patterns that are identical to those formed by iterating fractal formulas with a computer.

I just made that up, but that’s what I thought when I saw this image by Jesse in the Fractalforums.com gallery.  Great images just make me want to say great things.  The facts come later.

The mandelbrot inside the mandelbox!  But it seems only natural to find a mandelbrot man inside a mandelbox 3D fractal formula.  He lives there.  Just like a pearl inside an oyster and it’s shell.

I’ve looked at this image quite a bit and I can’t decide if it looks more like the mandelbrot is being absorbed by the mandelbox, as I think the title by lenord is suggesting, or if the mandelbox is actually growing out from –and growing off of–  the mandelbrot just like a plant grows out of a seed.  Lenord’s got some other ones like this and they have the same interesting combination of old and new fractal designs.  Apparently it’s all from the same formula and not from layering or some sly photoshop trick.

New people are always popping up over at Fractalforums.  Fractalforums seems to be where all the action is lately.  I don’t know who any of these people are (and they don’t know me) but I don’t really need to know them when I can just look at their work and judge it for itself.  Tatty has really come up with something new here.  So much detail and such variety of it.  But it doesn’t look like a mandelbox or mandelbulb to me and yet it has that 3D look to it.  Could there really be some new thing called a “Kractal”?

Another by Tatty.  Already she’s developing some noticeable style just in these two images.  There’s a wide variety of shapes and yet they complement each other instead of clashing or looking pushed together.  Subtle and with good coloring too.

Box 1? If this is just the first she’s off to a great start.  Tatty has a good eye for the sort of pleasing organic shapes that fractals excel at.

I followed a link from Mandelwerk’s Deviant Art page to these incredible mandelbox images by Janetino.  Janetino has such unique color palettes.  I’ve never seen any mandelbox images with this sort of coloring that looked so good.  Nice use of the foggy perspective effect here too.

This one is really something.  So ornate and such unique color.  The blue haze suggests sky and sunlight streaming into this ornate temple or ritzy spaceship.  I’ve got to look around Deviant Art more.  It’ll be worth it if I find another artist with such unique and well done work as Janetino.  She’s up there with the other top “Mandelboxers” in my opinion.

Here’s an interesting photo for two reasons:  First, because it has such a dreamy, visionary, summer night, sky full of imagination and wonder look to it.  Second because it’s actually a photograph of the Hiroshima atomic bomb explosion taken, not from the air, but from the ground several miles away by a civilian who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  It dulls the golden glow of the photo’s dreaminess to know we’re also observing an event that killed over 100,000 people in less time than it takes to answer a ringing telephone.  I wonder how many other attractive things in our world would look less appealing if we knew what we were really looking at?

Texture was found on the Fractalforums.com gallery like many of the images here.  The gallery contains (I believe) any images uploaded to the forum for any purpose, either artistic or as examples and illustrations in technical discussions.  I can’t always tell what context the image appears in with respect to the forum postings, I just browse the image gallery in behind the scenes mode and comment on whatever catches my eye.  I like this one for it’s simple, classical fractal style.  Sometimes less is more and this is a good example.  This image has a real sense of style and stands out because of it.

Just like Texture this image features imagery that isn’t new and cutting-edge like the mandelbox or mandelbulb and yet has real style and focuses on the more classical fractal type of imagery.  I think this has an extra layer, a grid pattern over it and although that might seem rather simple the effect it has on the image is strong.  It looks like it could have been taken off a vintage pulp sci-fi cover and maybe the author thought the same thing when he named it.

This image really has to be seen in full-size which you can do by clicking on it.  The mandelbox, like most fractals, is capable of producing a lot of imagery but it takes a good eye and some careful experimentation to produce something of interest amidst the deluge of images that pour out of the formula  This one has a surreal look to it.  Maybe it’s the ornate architectural appearance that makes the square “front desk” of the mandelbox lobby look real and therefore strangely out of place.  The fact that it’s sunk below the horizon and hidden from sight enhances the eerie feel.

I hear this Borg thing mentioned here and there but I don’t know what it’s about or what it’s from.  I find it odd that a Cyclops would be making 3D art, but maybe that’s just a screen name for L. Shone?  There’s an MC Escher look to this and I like the careful, repetitive metallic detail in it.  The hole in the center is a nice touch and shows us that the inside is remarkably no different than the outside.  It’s got an old, engraved illustration appearance that I like.

Another one that I’d call “classical”.  I guess I’m referring to fractal imagery that is single layer and was much more common back before multi-layered programs like Ultra Fractal came out.  But… this one was apparently made with UF!  I’ve always liked the shiny tubes and other orbit trap kinds of imagery that have an almost collage look to them.   The abrupt transitions resemble cut paper but sometimes the tube forests stretch all the way to the horizon although they do look like the scissors lopped off their upper branches, swift and invisible.  There can be a lot to see in these apparently simple images.  Good art is like that.

I check in on the Fractalforum.com gallery everyday.  When I saw the first of these Orion images I frowned a little because it reminded me of when I first started out making fractal images in Sterlingware almost a decade ago.  Later on, after seeing this one and especially the jagged, machine made elements surrounding it, I began to see the subtle but attractive style that these Orion images have.  This is pure digital vision; it’s all machine made and it shines with a technological glow like only some bold new discovery in a laboratory can.  The machine drew this and no human hand can imitate that cold, fractonic style.

One last one.  This is a real photograph of Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons.  I think it’s made up of several shots taken by more than one pass of the space probe although it lacks the jumbled, collage look of a composite photo.  I’ve been using this image as my desktop wallpaper for almost a week, centered with a black background.  I keep thinking it’s the opening shot from some vintage, 1950s sci-fi film that’s about to begin:  Sinister Planet.

Anyhow, those are the pieces of the puzzle.  Maybe some of them don’t belong to the same big picture.  Or maybe this puzzle is a lot bigger than the 10,000 piece label on the box says.  We should have started building this on the floor instead of the table.

Be Very Very Quiet

My blogging slows down in the summer when other projects get moved to the front burner. But I’m still lurking around.

The 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest exhibition begins in a little over a week in Hyderabad, India, at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians, although (so far) publicity for the event has been zilch.  On the main BMFAC site, there has been no information whatsoever about the exhibition at the ICM — or, for that matter, the two earlier shows in Spain.  The main ICM page also says nothing about the exhibition — even if one searches the site for terms like "fractal" and "Mandelbrot."

I hope the main BMFAC site will eventually put up some documentation about the 2009 show.  After all, why go to the trouble to stage an international fractal art exhibit, and then act like the whole thing is some kind of classified secret?

Unless, for some reason, something about the show does need to be kept under wraps.  

~/~

And this came across the transom of the Ultra Fractal Mailing List recently:

From: Frederik Slijkerman <info@ultrafractal.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 7:14 PM
Subject: [ultrafractal] IMPORTANT: Ultra Fractal mailing list has been moved
To: “ultrafractal@lists.fractalus.com” <ultrafractal@lists.fractalus.com>

Hi everyone,

The Ultra Fractal mailing list has been moved to the main ultrafractal.com server, so it also has a new address:

ultrafractal@list.ultrafractal.com

[...]

As you may know, until now this mailing list was running at fractalus.com, administered by Damien Jones. Damien has very generously offered server resources and his free time for more than ten years now, and I believe it is time for me to take over this task. Thank you, Damien, for everything you’ve done during all these years.

OT readers might recall that the main Ultra Fractal site moved off Fractalus earlier this year.  No explanation (other than what appears above) was given for moving the site and list off Jones’ server.  Last summer, after Fractalus went dark for a time, Jones offered this enigmatic statement on the UF List:

My role as a web site host is no longer required, and I cannot fulfill that role adequately in any case (especially not for those sites that have moved on).

Nothing stays the same forever. Nor should it.

Nor did it, apparently, although, like so many of Jones’ activities, the reasons for this UF hosting break remain strictly hush hush.

But I do see some progress.  At least Jones didn’t resort to his previous tactic of booting folks (who merely disagree with him) off Fractalus by ginning up phony charges of protecting his server from alleged "security threats."

Frames, drains and hurricanes

Many people have a favorite sport.  Some follow soccer, others american football or hockey, basketball, baseball, cricket…  I follow hurricanes, the tropical storms or cyclones that form in the Carribean during summer and fall of every year.  There’s never a players strike and you can follow all the action over the internet.  In fact, you really don’t want to buy tickets to see any of these “games” live.  The American National Hurricane Center gives you the best seat in town, or out of town, rather.  There’s only one team but everybody loses.  And it’s impossible to cheat.  It’s a funny sport.

This year was supposed to be much more energetic, which was a great relief after the incredibly disappointing 2009 season.  I’m still waiting for a really big, Category 4 or 5, game this year.  Bonnie was so pathetic the NHC stopped talking about her before she even made landfall which, in this game, is ordinarily the main event.  She just went back to being a depression –tropical depression.

They don’t name them only after women anymore, they’ll use any name.  They ought to let the folks living in the path of the hurricane suggest the names.  But they’ve got more important things on their minds –hiding, dodging, staying alive.

Life is the sport of sports and art is its World Cup.  But that’s coming from a guy who thinks hurricane season is more fun to watch than the SuperBowl.

Back to fractal art:  here’s a piece of fractal artwork by Deviant Art member Sophiiiii that caught my eye just this week and also strongly suggested –hurricane– to me.  (That’s Sophi with five “eyes”.)

- Click on any of the images below to view them full size and on their original site -

This image (by “Five-Eyed Sophi”) has a number of interesting aspects.  Although, from the title, she probably didn’t intend it to have a marine theme much less that of a hurricane, it fits well into this and I think she saw a similar terrifying weather theme from her choice of the word, frost.  But maybe the spider web is the terrifying theme here?

I guess that’s the thing with “imaginary” art: the image is open to a number of interpretations, each one arising from the personal context the image unavoidably becomes mixed up in when it engages the viewer’s mind.

It was made in Incendia and I suspect has a few other layers incorporated into it, such as the spider web and the cloudy, watery background.

As I was saying about hurricanes, they are “wrathful” creatures that arise almost out of nothing and quickly grow (within days sometimes) into massively destructive beasts.  They are also composed, not of a neat circulation pattern which we see in the simplified diagrams used to explain them, but of broken and winding bands of thunderstorms and sometimes tornadoes spawned by those thunderstorms.  Sophiiiii’s image here, although completely artificial, is an excellent example of such an “extreme weather phenomenon”.

And it looks good too.  Incendia seems to have this nice ability to make grainy images that are more characteristic of real world imagery than the slick smooth world of computers, but I think Sophiiiii has added a lot of her own artistic talent to make this one looks a well as it does.

Sure.  This one’s not a fractal.  But when you’re floating in the ocean off the coast of Quintana Roo where Mexico meets Belize and the rest of Central America, such things are incidental.  There is the hint of shore in the dark bottom we see through the water, but where is it?  This is the morning after the hurricane.  It’s beautiful.  Out there somewhere is your house, but take heart, there’s plenty of building materials all around you.  One of them must have hit you and knocked you out.

I read an anectdote about hurricane Hattie that erased Belize City back in the 60s.  The author, a young boy at the time, told about how his family had completely lost their house (built on the beach, incidentally) but then a week later his father and uncle were out fishing and found a better one that the storm had dropped off from somewhere else.  I’ll bet there’s a lot of that shuffling of property going on in the wake of hurricanes every year.

Obviously this isn’t a fractal either, but Peter Alexander has made palm trees into such a separate and well developed genre much like the fractal spiral is in fractal art that they deserve a mention.  Click on the image to see the whole collection.  Very colorful.  I had a hard time picking the best one because they’re all very interesting.  Monoprints are prints that are made with unique characteristics and thus not reproducible merely by making another impression with the plate.  (I’ll bet they sell for more too.)  I think the coloring here is very sophisticated and carefully done.  I don’t like a lot of contemporary art (of the paintbrush sort) but these palm trees are something completely different.  Better than Warhol?

This one is just fantastic.  Color, shadows, lighting, contrast; it’s like a carefully painted old master’s work, laboriously rendered and painstakingly perfected.  That’s what Incendia can do when the right person is clicking it’s buttons.  I guess it’s a bit like paintbrushes: what comes from them depends on who’s holding them.  This is sort of weird, but I think the real beauty of this work is in what the image is reflecting.  It’s the light source that we don’t see.  There’s something golden, shining and radiant in this image –off screen– and it’s all suggested by what we see in the image.  The question is not, “What is this?” but rather, “Where are we?”  This is a great place.

To me this image is sea shells and other sea debris caught in a tangle of branches on the shore after that world cup of storms –a hurricane.  Neatly collected, I see.  Apparently the best time to collect sea shells is right after a storm (the key word is “after”).  That might also be the best time to check and see if your neighbors are still alive, so you’ll have to chose between the two.  Of course if your neighbors are down on the beach… with the seashells…

Sophiiiii added a link on her Deviant Art page to the image she used as the background for this image.  It’s worth looking at too.

I find it interesting how the background complements the incendia image.  It may seem trivial, but the background layer, even just a colored texture like this, just like the frame on a painting, is part of the artwork and contributes to the viewer’s general impression in ways which I suspect can be quite strong even if they may appear subtle at first glance.  Speaking of frames…

What came first?  The Picture or the Frame?

Flickr’s thesmartestfish (Sophia Brueckner) said “experimenting with some vintage round picture frames I bought on etsy. I was thinking it would be interesting to have a series of paintings in round frames. not sure if I want to keep going in this direction though.”

(Etsy.com apparently is a website that describes itself as “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies.”)

Thesmartestfish really is pretty bright.  Not only is she a Master of Fine Arts student, she also works with javascript to create generative imagery using the Processing platform; a nice combination of skills we could all use.  From this I suspect she either printed and embellished by paintbrush the images in her round collection (similar to monoprinting) or just painted them freehand using their simple but characteristic, generative look as a guide.  Either way she’s produced something quite appealing.

Here they are; nicely photographed, too.

The round paintings look hand-painted but the bottom image the author describes as “shapes generated by javascript + photoshop with a scanned watercolor background.”

It’s a strange dynamic between frame and picture but there’s more dynamism going on.   Consider the interplay between the digital imagery of the javascript-photoshop process and thesmartestfish’s own hand painting skills.  Thesmartestfish created the javascript which in turn produced the snakey tendril imagery.  But that computer generated imagery in turn went on to inspire the hand made images in the round picture frames.  From such well defined and synergistic rotation often comes a powerful hurricane.  But it has to stay well out at sea, away from land, and feed on  warm waters and also avoid the vertical shearing forces of interfering ridges and troughs which dissipate the force of that rising energy coming off the sea.  Hey, some people like to talk in football or baseball analogies.  I prefer hurricanes.

Finally, everything flows back to where it came.  Solomon remarked on this very thing almost three thousand years ago: “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.  To the place the streams come from, there they return again.  All things are wearisome, more than one can say.”

Ouch.  Here’s a fine illustration of that somewhat depressing/encouraging quotation.  It’s in the form of a video screen capture of a highly talented java applet rendering Fractal Drainage Patterns.  This is extremely fractal.  But I doubt it would have cheered up Solomon: everything is just sinking into the earth and if you watch the applet long enough at the original site, everything eventually fades into nothing.

I think they’re cool.  They’ve got a weird, sci-fi, Andromeda Strain replicating space-virus look to them.  I suppose epidemics and even wars have similarities to sports, just like hurricanes season does.  But hurricane season has a much more regular, reliable schedule than those other disasters even if all the hurricane game dates are impossible to predict ahead of time except by more than just a few days.  I should go check right now.  There’s a new update at the NHC about every four hours.  The next big one could be boiling away as we speak.

Surf’s up

I’ve been surfing.  From the noisey beaches of Deviant Art to the silent shores of guano islands.  Every one here’s a gem to me.  Each one gleamed in its own way when I saw it.

Remember this:  There are things that can be bought for a few glass beads in the South Seas that can be sold for a king’s ransom back in Amsterdam.  But remember this also:  there are things that can be bought for a king’s ransom in Amsterdam that are worth nothing more than a few glass beads in the South Seas.

Click on any of the images to see them full-size and on their original website where you can browse more works by the artists.

Dave seems to make a very wide variety of fractal imagery and works almost entirely, I believe, in Ultra Fractal.  I’ve never seen anything quite like this.  A city of dreidels?  The surface texture suggest some old kind of nylon material.  There’s a strange vintage radio tube feeling to it.  Nice, subtle coloring that reinforces the 20s or 30s Art Deco style (before the time of brightly colored plastics).  A rather unique image with a similarly unique style.

Strange electronic vibes and I like strange electronic vibes.  Perhaps an unusual image to draw attention to, but who cares about the usual images?  I suspect this one was uploaded as part of a Fractalforums.com discussion, but that just adds to it’s exotic allure.  Maybe Bent-Winged Angel wasn’t trying to make a piece of art with this one, but she did.  It splashes like water but turns into grains of sand around the edges.  Far out.

Talfrac adds that the image was made with Fractal Imaginator.  This is a program by Terry Gintz that I’ve never tried.  I like the clean, solid, silkscreen rendering style that the image has.  Sharp, crisp colors.  Anyone familiar with fractals will recognize the common organic structure to the image despite it’s very untraditional –vector-like– blocky rendering style.  This looks more “art gallery” like than most of the smooth, millions of colors fractal images normally seen.

Full color or black and white, a good image is simply a good image.  Art’s funny that way.  Working with the most advanced and feature rich formats doesn’t guarantee anything.  Of course there’s nothing simple or retro about this image here by Samuel Monnier.  It’s another example of his sophisticated pattern piling technique that he’s been polishing over the years and developing with Ultra Fractal.  Click on the image to go to the original site where you can explore the vast algorithmic world which we are only seeing as a mere thumbnail here.  There’s  so many interesting things to see in this one.  It’s like a table of contents for a large anthology.

This is a mandelbox, I’m guessing.  Not your average type of mandelbox and not the usual style.  Strong design is what makes this one special.  Everything lined up and arranged in a careful display of shape, form and symmetry –but with the usual mandelbox variations and complexity to it.  Look closely, is it really symmetrical?  anywhere?  All an artist really does is help us to see the great scenes going on around us that us common folks don’t seem to notice.  I think that’s what Lenord’s done with this one: he’s helped us to see the simple shapes and the sophisticated patterns made in the mandelbox by cutting out all the usual distractions of surface texture and wild, vast perspective.  Yes, art is complex, but only when you analyze it.  Out in the wild it’s natural and instinctive.  But that’s why it sneaks past us so easily.

What are those men doing in a fractal?  Believe it or not, this is actually a photograph of a very elaborately designed pipe organ somewhere in Spain.  Or maybe it really is a fractal and the author cleverly edited the image?  Never let your right eye know what your left eye is looking at.

I often feel that fractal art is not really about fractals but is instead about “imaginary” imagery.  In that sense, there are many “pre-columbian” fractals out there; meaning they are graphically similar although completely unrelated in terms of the way they were made.  Fractals just make it easier to create imaginary imagery.  I guess it depends on how you chose to define the art form.  The lack of a fractal formula naturally makes it hard to call  “fractal”.  Well, in the old days fractal artists worked hard.  Try doing something like this.

This one’s for real.  I stumbled on Kaeltyk’s Deviant Art gallery somehow.  I forget how.  Maybe from a link in someone else’s favorites?  Incendia does some nice things, but I’ve never seen such a good combination of 3D and 2D elements like there is in this one by Kaeltyk.  And it’s black and white, too.  Black and white is a whole new kind of color.  The uber-color.  It’s often thought of as being being feature-poor as opposed to feature-rich.  But all the colors in the world can’t do what black and white does.  More strangeness.

This one by Kaeltyk was done in Ultra Fractal.  I just like these peaceful drifting snowflakes and the different landscapes they seem to be falling and dissolving into.  It’s hard to crop out just the right piece from among such a huge mass of repeating imagery like this, but Kaeltyk did a good job here.  Very professional looking.  It deserves a classy title and black frame.

I would have guessed Incendia for this one, but Kaeltyk’s notes for this one indicate it was made with Xenodream.  I know these sorts of spirally seashell/horns are common and perhaps even cliche now, but Kaeltyk has managed to create something interesting and appealing even in such a heavily picked over genre.  In Kaeltyk’s own words, “I like how it’s clean and almost carved.”  That’s why I like it too.  The coloring and surface texture adds a lot as well.

According to notes for this image it was made by “two pictures of the sky that I merged together and then reversed”.  I guess the inverting created the yell0w-orange coloring from the natural blue sky tones in the original.  I include this because it’s another “mind-bender” that show that when we look at graphical imagery and ignore how it was made, we find “fractals” in places we wouldn’t have expected.  Although the shapes and structure of clouds really are a natural form of fractal rendering.  I guess that just reinforces my point.

“FMF + POV-Ray”  POV-Ray is a ray-tracing (ultra realistic) program, but I’m not sure what FMF stands for.  I like planetoids and this one’s got some cool coloring and texture.  Looks like ice cream that’s just about to start dripping.  Incidently this was chosen for a Fractal Window Weekly on Renderosity a year and a half ago.  I visited cgpad.com, the so-called Chinese Fractal Art Society and I think maybe Ferry Man Fractal is the mysterious “FMF”.  I’ve never heard of the program, so maybe spanzhang made it himself?

By spanzhang again.  He’s got a gallery at span.cgpad.com.  This one’s made with Apophysis.  Nice design with repeating circular elements and good colors.

Yes, people used to dream of such imaginary, fractal-like imagery way back in the 70s.  But it’s not merely once in a lifetime today; it’s everyday and all the time.  Music’s gotten a lot cheaper now too.  Hasn’t it?  And who needs to pay to get great artwork for their album covers nowadays with all this computer made stuff around?  “And you may ask yourself…” how come nobody sings about having mental breakdowns and emotional decay anymore?

Check out the nice set of instructions Shala has made to go with this example of Fractal Earrings.  “Fractals are geometric patterns that show self-similarity, they can be very complex and really beautiful.”  Doesn’t that statement by Shala answer the proverbial, “What are fractals?” question quite nicely?

You can also bead fractals. This is a pair of earrings that uses a very simple fractal pattern to create a delicate fringe or tassel that resembles some of the fractals you can see in nature like trees or the veins in your body.
The shape I used was 3 lines. Each time you add another set of 3 lines to the ends of the lines, that’s called an iteration.

For folks like myself such descriptions are more enlightening than those of the more technical type.  You’d think by now I’d know what a fractal is.  But I keep finding fractals that don’t fit the formulas.  Never let your left brain know what you’re right brain is thinking.

You’ll only end up slapping yourself in the face.

Art imitates Nintendo

I don’t play video games much; just an hour every day of Star Wars Battlefront (original one).  I have friends in Mos Eisley and although they always lose –horribly– they’re always asking me to come out and “play”.

My nephew loaned us his old GameCube and while I’ve never used it because all we have for it are Super Mario games, it’s been there on the floor in front of the TV for almost a year now.   I glance at it occasionally in between ferociously savage bouts of Battlefront ( Dark Trooper… Rhen Var Citadel…shotgun in the sky).

Since the discovery of the Mandelbox by Tom Lowe (Tglad) early in this year with it’s general cube formation and multiple grid and curved structures in it, I’ve looked at the Nintendo Gamecube differently.  They seem to be derived from the same formula.  Could it be true?

Exploring the graphical output of fractal algorithms should give you a floating feeling from time to time as you experience that “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” feeling that Dorothy did when she found herself in Oz.  The world of video games is not so different either;  they’re as real as any movie you can see on your TV screen.  What we find in fractal graphics today would have passed for pure science fiction in the past.  What else?  3D fractals are the best game in town.

Anyhow, I just keep looking at that GameCube and can’t help but notice the resemblance to the Mandelbox.

Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine

There’s actually a lot of goldmines out there in the outer reaches of our computer system.  None of us have been to all of them, but we’ve all been to some of them.  I don’t know where exactly this one is, but you can find all the scenes from it here.

This is what’s written at the entrance to the mine:

A gallery of large graphs

graph drawing of matrices in the University of Florida Collection

Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection using sfdp algorithm . The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 2328 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (a rectangular matrix is treated as a bipartite graph) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm. If the graph is disconnected, then the largest connected component is drawn. The largest graph (Schenk@nlpkkt240) has 27,993,600 vertices and 366,327,376 edges. A simple coloring scheme is used: longer edges are colored with colder colors, and short ones warmer. The graphs are in alphabetical order. Use the “Search” link to find graphs of specific characters.

from: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index1.html

Thanks to but does it float for helping me find the Goldmine.

FUC Redux