Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts:

I'm back . . . again!  And this time things are caught up enough for me to feel reasonably confident there will be no further interruptions to the steady flow of FOTD fractals for at least two weeks . . . that is unless the unexpected happens.

When I opened my e-mail box yesterday for the first time in two days, I was surprised by the number of spam letters offering fake Rolex watches.  I was expecting a flood of impossibly cheap mortgage offers.  What is it with Rolex watches?  What do they do other than measure time?  Are they some kind of a status symbol?  And why would I want a Rolex.  My 29-dollar digital watch shows the time as accurately as a Rolex and wakes me up with an annoying buzz.

I might not know much about the latest trends in watches, but I'm reasonably hip about fractals.  Today's trip into iteration land takes us to the ghost of the fractal generated when 0.2 negative parts of Z^(-4.2) are combined with negative Z^(-1.6) and (1/C) is added.  This parent fractal is typical of fractals generated by negative powers of Z.  It is grossly oversized, with no organized shape at all.  The filaments extending from the buds end in filament rings, with disconnected bits of debris scattered inside these rings.  Today's scene is an evaporated one, which means it consists totally of trapped 'inside' points. It is located in one of these disconnected islands of chaos.

I named the image "Coronal Display" and rated it at a 6.  The name came to me at random.  Considering the lack of effort, the rating seems fair.

The quite brief render time of 1-1/2 minutes means that those who are disappointed with today's image will have wasted little computer time in calculating it.

On a minor philosophical note, a couple nights ago I watched a TV program on which the rational skeptics once again debunked the easy-to-debunk professional psychic fortune tellers who dared to appear, pretty much proving to the skeptics' satisfaction that foretelling the future is impossible.

The skeptics' victory was hollow, for they had little competition.  They merely demonstrated once again that professional fortune tellers are about as accurate as would be expected by chance.  They did not prove that getting hints of future events is impossible.  (Such a proof is impossible!)  Nor did they prove that it does not happen.  (It does happen!)  I know from experience that not only is it possible for information to travel backward in time, but sometimes it actually does happen, and somehow it works its way into a person's awareness.  The frustration is that I have no way of convincing skeptics of the truth of precognition.

I suspect that the answer lies in the nature of time.  The theory of relativity pretty much does away with the universal sequential time that we take for granted in our everyday lives.  Such time is an illusion.  But what is really there, which permits hints of future events to travel into the past?  I will have more to say about this topic in future philo-FOTD messages.

Wet days alternated with dry days here at the Old Fractal Central over the holiday.  The cats' moods varied as widely as the weather.  Luckily, the supply of tuna held out.  In my departent the work is almost caught up, though not yet quite there.  Another day will do the job.  The next FOTD will appear in 24 hours.  Until then, take care, and things are never so good that they cannot get better.

Jim Muth
jamth@mindspring.com
jimmuth@aol.com


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END PARAMETER FILE=========================================