A Grand Universe
chaoticutopia | August 15, 2008Summer around here must be coming to a close. The temperature has dropped and the kids are going back to school. Strangely, these circumstances have gotten me thinking more about the sun, rather than less. I blame my son... he came home after one of his first days at school talking about life on other planets. (Apparently, this week, he is aspiring to be an exobiologist. Previously, he wanted to be a pirate.) He asked what planets might have life and what they looked like, so I pulled out a book titled "Empire of the Sun: Planets and Moons of the Solar System" and we began to leaf through our…
chaoticutopia | November 10, 2007Speaking of unpredictable climate changes, there was always that surprising storm on Jupiter that started brewing last year (and still blows strongly.) I figured now would be as good a time as any to repost the fractal I made in tribute. (This works out especially well, as I didn’t have anything else prepared.)
Pictures released to the media [May 5, 2006] seemed absolutely perfect for the Friday Fractal. A breathtaking example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, today’s image shows the enigmatic beauty of chaotic patterns. No scientist has yet been able to explain the famous deep…
chaoticutopia | October 24, 2007Last week, I discussed the difficulty of creating a perfect model of our environment. Once, I toyed around with the idea of a perfect simulation... wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from reality? What if we created the perfect model--and it turned out to actually be reality? As advanced as our technology is, we obviously won’t have to worry about this any time soon. But in a science fiction story, where plausibility is a little plastic, we can explore such questions. So, that’s what I did last year--I wrote a story. And here it is:
Ω
By Karmen Lee Franklin
The General swept his fingers…
chaoticutopia | April 13, 2007What happens when you cross two immensely complex patterns, and then picture them at the perfect unique angle? Consider first, the merging of a skewed Mandelbrot set with a cloud-like plasma fractal. Zoom in on one, out on the other, and blend:
Now compare this with a photograph of a distant galaxy:
NGC1356
Like my fractal, the photo was taken at a particular and unique angle, capturing an eclipse of enormous scale. In this case, the Chandra X-Ray observatory captured the eclipse of a black hole with a galactic cloud. This gave astronomers the perfect opportunity to measure the halo of…
chaoticutopia | March 30, 2007Which is a stranger place to find an interesting shape: on the north pole of Saturn or in 248 dimensions? In either case, without 21st century technology, we wouldn't be seeing anything at all.
In the first case, astronomers knew about this strange sight since the 1980s, but didn't get a clear view until Cassini hit the right angle:
A hexagonal form surrounding the north pole of Saturn.
This image reveals atmospheric activity on Saturn at a wavelength typically invisible to the human eye. Here's NASA's description:
In this image, the blue color shows high-altitude emissions from atmospheric…
chaoticutopia | January 26, 2007Trying to merge a flame fractal with a Julia set and a 3D sphere was almost enough to make my computer have a thermonuclear meltdown.... or at the very least, run out of memory. With a little coaxing, however, I was able to make it work. I'd say the results were pretty hot:
...but not quite as hot as another flaming sphere that we see every day:
Sol (image taken this morning by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory)
This seemed like a good time to make a corona-like fractal. Coronal Mass Ejections have been spurting out the side of our grand star over the last week. (Check out these cool…
chaoticutopia | October 6, 2006To compare this evening's fractal with nature, take a walk. Look beyond the scaling patterns in the autumn leaves, the branching trees, the billowing clouds, and up into the darkness of space. If the time is right, you'll see a familiar shape, similar to the following image. This, of course, isn't a photograph, but a computer-generated set of patterns based on numbers. This Julia Set has been trapped within a spherical shape and slightly randomized, then highlighted with nature's palette:
In case you can't find the Harvest Moon in the sky tonight, try this picture, taken by Bev Brink in 2003…
chaoticutopia | July 25, 2006The deeper we look, the more complex order we discover.
Biologists studying DNA have discovered another pattern of code within the genetic code. This pattern may regulate the placement of nucleosomes:
Biologists have suspected for years that some positions on the DNA, notably those where it bends most easily, might be more favorable for nucleosomes than others, but no overall pattern was apparent. Drs. Segal and Widom analyzed the sequence at some 200 sites in the yeast genome where nucleosomes are known to bind, and discovered that there is indeed a hidden pattern.
Knowing the pattern,…