Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts:

Today's image is strange indeed.  It holds no fine detail, consisting totally of a smooth blending of colors, as smooth, that is, as can be achieved with the 256 colors of the GIF format.  And unlike recent images, today's appears much the same at all resolutions including the lowly 640x480.

I named the image "Composition-101".  Composition is one of the basic things that makes a picture a work of art, and one of the first things taught in art courses is that the 1/3-1/3 points of a frame are powerful places to place the center of interest of a picture.  I have placed the obvious center of interest of today's image 1/3 of the distance down from the top and 1/3 of the way across from the left -- just where the art instructor would approve.

With next to no detail to latch onto, I could not give a rating to today's image, which creates more of an intuitive feeling than a visual impression.

The color palette was largely borrowed from one of Albrecht's images, with only a slight tweaking of a few registers to add as much smoothness as possible.  I suspect that the variation between color monitors will probably undo much of the tweaking however.

The calculation time of under 3-1/2 minutes is borderline slow.  This slight inconvenience may be avoided by viewing the already-calculated image at a resolution of 640x480 on the official but unfinished FOTD web site at:

      http://www.crosscanpuzzles.com/Archives.html

The image may be seen in high definition on Hal's web site at>

http://www.emarketingiseasy.com/TESTS/FOTD/jim_muths_fotd.html

But with today's image, little improvement will be noticeable.

Paul's web site is still up at:

      http://www.Nahee.com/FOTD/

though it is about 5 months behind.

I read recently on the list that the four greatest achievements of man are: the invention of Calculus, the theory of relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, and the discovery of fractals.  Each of these things has vastly changed the way we look at the reality of the world we live in, and in some cases has questioned the actual truth of the concept of reality itself.  In upcoming FOTD's I will discuss some of my ideas about these topics.  But don't expect my (crackpot?) ideas to agree with the conventional rational scientific doctrine.

Lots of sun, a brisk wind and a chilly temperature of 59F 15C made Thursday an acceptable day here at Fractal Central.  The fractal cats spent the day watching for the aggressive tomcat that sprayed their front door on Wednesday.  Luckily for the aggressive cat, he never showed up.

The day of the humans was busy but reasonably under control.  The next FOTD will be posted in 24 hours.  Until then, take care, and be at peace with things as they are.

Jim Muth
jamth@mindspring.com


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