More Fractals! MORE!

Here's another video from the Fractal Foundation, the people who bring you Fractal Friday.

The Buddha-like object at the beginning of this video is the shape I associate with the Mandelbrot set. (In fact, there is a fractal called the Buddhabrot, which is even more eerie in its resemblance of a seated Buddha.)

You can see again, at the start, the mathematical equation that gives rise to this image.



Fascinating, isn't it?

Avoidance

I have been almost completely successful in avoiding all news. I did spend about twenty-five minutes on Barack Obama's website, watching a couple of videos about what he plans to do for women when he is president. I will tell you that a couple of things stuck with me: One was the fact that he, when greeting people and shaking hands with women of all ages, he stops--actually stops--and listens to women who are older than he is. Those are probably, in American society, the least listened-to group of people, and I don't think the interest that he shows in them can be easily or successfully feigned. So I was impressed by that.

The other thing I was impressed by was his wife's assertion that if he can't be elected to the presidency by telling the truth, then they (he and his family) don't belong in the White House. I don't think he's as transparent as he wants us to believe that he is (and that lack of transparency could be the result of many things, up to and including diplomacy, so I'm not quite ready to hold that against him), but I think he, like me, tries his hardest to align himself with the truth. I know the difficulty of that path. And I am just cynical enough to believe that maybe it is true that, given the current state of our nation, there isn't room in the government for someone who tells the truth--or even recognizes the worthiness of attempting to align oneself with the truth.

I also learned that Barack Obama and I share a birthday. He is ten years older than me to the day. Like many Leos, I don't believe in astrology except when it suits me to do so. Other Leos tend to drive me crazy because they are often attention-seekers, proud, and seemingly pompous--just like me. I am so prone to disliking other Leos that whenever I dislike someone else, I try to find out their astrological sign just because I want to test my hypothesis that all the other Leos are jerks. (Usually I'm wrong. I meet jerks of all astrological persuasions.)

So that was the extent of my online political reading today. At least it wasn't news news, right?