28 Comments

This isn't so much a fractal thing, but that second image had me flashing back to the style of the graphics that CBC television used to introduce its flagship newscast, "The National", back in the 1980s.

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Fractals were all the rage in the late 80s.

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Obviously CBC picked up on that...

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The 3rd image took me back to pimp-my-ride. That show was great

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Coastlines are infinite.

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Then there's the classic by the man himself:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature

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I made it through Misbehavior of Markets. I think I might wait another ten years for another Mendelbrot book!

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I forgot about that book. Haven't read it but I suspect it is good.

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It was very tough for me, but I do think I got a lot out of it. But... not trying to revisit, you know? You might really enjoy it!

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I'll add it to the ever-lengthening list of books I want to read.

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Nothing helped me more with this than audiobooks when I finally first started listening to them some 13 or 14 years ago. What a game changer!

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Sounds like me and A Brief History of Time. I used to drive an hour to an hour-and-half each way to work, so I had time. :-)

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I learned a bit about fractals before I was officially trained as a computer scientist by reading cool books. Pickover has some pseudocode in his books that is fun to implement.

1990. Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-486-41709-3

1992. Mazes for the Mind. St. Martin's Press.

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Interesting read! Another example might be mountains. Beyond the physical objects such as coastlines and mountains, might history have a fractal nature to it? Just curious.

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I think so, yeah. I think a lot of stuff follows these same principles.

It's kind of a simplified version of the butterfly effect!

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Mandelbrot set - you’ve probably seen it, but if not well worth a google! One of my favorite things. There are sites where you can play with them- Merci Benoit Mandelbrot!

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Yes, absolutely. I listened to his "Misbehavior of Markets" a few years back, too! It was really tough to get through.

The sets are super cool, though, and folks reading this should definitely check them out. I may write a solo piece on them one day.

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Oooh, I went off and wrote a whole bit on this! I ran around and took pictures of all of JFran’s succulents (super fractally) and then went on about Fibonacci numbers and recursive programming. Recursion is tech’s version of fractals where a bit of code calls itself which then calls itself … think about that for a minute! Spider-Man nesting dolls made it in too. The whole thing is very mind bendy https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/thinking-of-you-thinking-of-me-thinking

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Nice, bookmarked for later reading!

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The "fractal" modifier also tends to trigger some awesome images in Midjourney, as I covered back in July 2023: https://www.whytryai.com/i/135476797/prompt-create-with-unending-patterns

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That's right! I remember seeing those.

If fractals were super hot in the real world during the 80s, then 2023 was the 80s of gen AI.

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Speaking of, "synthwave" is another favorite Midjourney modifier of mine!

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I am disappointed to learn that Harold Faltermeyer doesn't qualify as "synthwave." Go listen to his stuff now!

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