Selected Shorts

Casual Friday?

[Photograph seen on Manshion.]

Here are some selected shorts. Apparently, I have no grand vision to impart to start the New Year.

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Orbit Trap has published several recent posts exploring the nature of fractal art, and Tim explicated an image by Guido Cavalcante and analyzed its artistic expression.  In response, several commenters wondered why we haven’t provided more examples of work we consider to be fractal art rather than fractal craft.

But a quick trip through OT’s archives will show many positive reviews.  I think it’s safe to assume that if we complimented someone’s work, then we probably felt that work was an example of fractal art we admired.  Here is a short list of fractal artists whose work we have praised in the years we’ve been blogging:

Morgen Bell, Tamrof Boynton, Guido Cavalcante, Jock Cooper, Paul DeCelle, Manas Dichow, Stephen Ferguson, Terry W. Gintz, Earl L. Hinrichs, Rich Jarzombek, Simon Kane, Maria K. Lemming, Jos Leys, Elizabeth Mansco, Kerry Mitchell, Samuel Monnier, Philip Northover, O, Stacy Reed, Jürgen Schwietering, Bryan A. Smith, Fernanda Steele, Mark Townsend, Harmen Wiersma, and Dan Wills.

As I say, this is an incomplete list, and OT’s archives contain more examples.  So, I wish our adversaries, like Ken Childress, who persists on whining that we are whiners who mostly wallow in negativity, would finish their reading before beginning their writing.

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Last year, I said my favorite fractal art image of 2008 was one of Paul DeCelle‘s UF renditions of Lars-Gunnar Nordström.

I think my favorite image of 2009 was this one:

The Google Search Engine by Garth Thornton

The Google Search Engine by Garth Thornton

Orbit Trap also named Thornton our “Man of the Year” for the moral courage he showed over his resignation as a judge from the 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest.  Unlike two other fractal software authors, Thornton understood serving as a judge would create an inherent conflict of interest.

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The Ultra Fractal Mailing List was offline for over two weeks at the end of 2009. Naturally, given his customary penchant for secrecy, there was no explanation for the outage from the list manager. No one on the list had the temerity to ask why everything went dark; instead, once service returned, users blithely exchanged New Year’s greetings as if nothing had ever happened.  I suppose one analogy would be to the power company.  When the juice cuts out, you just sit tight semi-patiently for the lights to come back on.  Either that, or UF List participants have read their Old Testament and know that questioning their provider-god tends to just annoy him and make him more prone to vengeance.

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Ice Cream from Neptune

Ice Cream from Neptune by Daniel White

The latest “it” sensation in Fractaldom seems to be the 3-D Mandelbulb.  Like the Buddhabrot craze of a few years back, the 3-D Mandelbulb doesn’t much excite me as it maybe should — probably because I’m more interested in processing fractal images than I am in rendering them.  Still, it’s clear that many of the images of the Mandelbulb’s extrusion of the classic Mandelbrot set are impressive — especially these seen at Skytopia.

For more information about the 3-D Mandelbulb, check out this discussion area of Fractal Forums.

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