OT: Fractal: was Re: Champagne Elegance
- Subject: OT: Fractal: was Re: [iris-photos] Champagne Elegance
- From: G* S*
- Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 20:32:42 -0700
Aunty Pear wrote:
>
> Hello, Christopher.
>
> I am sending one fractal to have a look at.
Beautiful, A.P.
A brief explanation. "Normal" geometic objects look like what they are
at just one scale. Zoom out on a circle and it's just a dot. Zoom in
properly and it is a circle. Zoom in farther and it just looks like a
straight line.
Many real things look about the same at different zoom factors. A map of
the west coast of the USA has a certain roughness. A map of the
California coast has a similar roughness. So does one of Los Angeles
County. The puffiness of clouds is similar at different scales. In a
(dicot) tree, the branches off the trunk have similar geometries to the
smallest twigs on the branches. Etc.
In short, many natural objects we see all the time are not
well-represented by circles and squares. Objects with similar roughness
over a range of scales look more real with a much smaller number of
parameters.
The name comes from these constructs having (somehow) a fractional
number of dimensions. WAY off topic for here.
And don't get me started on the Mandelbrot set.
Gerry
--
g*@mediaone.net
Gerry Snyder, AIS Symposium Chair, Region 15 RVP
Member San Fernando Valley, Southern California Iris Societies
in warm, winterless Los Angeles--USDA 9b-ish, Sunset 18-19
my work: helping generate data for: http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/
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[PHOTO] Champagne Elagance