FOTD -- September 17, 2003 (Rating 6) Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: This morning at Fractal Central features a plethora of junk e-mail and media hype. One of the junk e-mails actually had a subject line that got me to open it. The line was 'you left your umbrella'. Since I recently lost an umbrella, I thought the letter was from some good samaritan who had found it and wanted to return it. I never stopped to wonder how the sender had known not only the person who had left the 4-dollar umbrella, but his e-mail address as well. When I opened the e-mail, I saw the usual gibberish that results when an html document is opened in text mode. I have yet to fathom what a lost umbrella has to do with selling a low-interest loan. Then there is the current local weather forecast, which has a hurricane watch in effect for Thursday and calls for winds of 35-40mph. Hurricane winds start at 75mph. I could see a storm warning, but a hurricane watch . . .? I guess a hurricane situation is remotely possible. The local TV outlets have of course gone into overdrive. By Friday morning, when the storm has just passed its mini-peak, they will probably be frantically searching for a fallen tree and showing rain water flowing down the gutters. So much for the local nonsense. Today's image was created by combining decreasing portions of Z^2, Z^3, Z^4 and Z^5. The resulting Julibrot figure was then sliced at a minor critical point, which drew a tiny Mandelbrot set located well off to the west of the default screen. This M-set is rotated 180 degrees and is surrounded by tiny dots, each of which contains a universe of M-sets. These M-sets are unusual in that they have basically no patterns around them, but are surrounded instead by flat iteration bands containing sparse clouds of star-like points. I have named today's image "A Sparkling Midget" because it is surrounded by little other than widely scattered stars. The coloring was done using the usual equal-iteration bands method. The other outside coloring options give more detail to the image. In fact, some of them give too much detail, but I wanted to show the basic star-like blandness of today's scene, so I chose the standard outside=iter option. The image rates a 6, which is not bad for such a bland picture. It renders in 3 minutes, which is even better. Best of all, it downloads in one minute or so from . . . <http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/FotD/FotD.html> or from: <http://sdboyd.dyndns.org/~sdboyd/fotd/index.html> The weather remained perfect throughout the day here at Fractal Central on Tuesday. Not a single cloud was seen all day, the wind was light, and the temperature reached 77F 25C. The dynamic fractal cats made the most of the perfection by spending several hours in the yard. At the end of the day, no tuna was needed. Today is starting perfect once again, but that hurricane is still lurking in the vicinity. Stay tuned to see what develops in the next few days. Until tomorrow's FOTD, take care, and try to be at ease when nature misbehaves. Jim Muth jamth@mindspring.com jimmuth@aol.com START 20.0 PAR-FORMULA FILE================================ A_Sparkling_Midget { ; time=0:03:19.93--SF5 on a P200 reset=2002 type=formula formulafile=allinone.frm formulaname=MandelbrotMix3a function=ident passes=1 center-mag=-16.27242179554596000/-0.06293582629549\ 968/4.17399e+010/1/25/-0.000463342159198340542 params=1/2/-0.67/3/0.33/4/0.17/5/-2.73312824662175\ /0 float=y maxiter=255 inside=0 periodicity=10 colors=000clsaot`sn_viF5oH4iJ3cL2YN1SO0MS8RWFV_MZb\ Tbf`gjgknnoqus4REAVIFYML`QQcUWgY`jafmekphdijYckRYl\ LSmEMn7Go1Ap5Dj96MCCPGJPKMONOMRRMVUPYYSa`VedYki`rp\ czzemsfllfkggjagicghWhg_hf0hvJRfw0Cq6GkBKjGOiLShQW\ gVZf_U6AW4SY3hdJTzYEyXGeWIbVJ`ULYTMVSOTRPTKRTDTT6V\ T0Wa4ci7kqAroDswGzmJulMugWvcdvZmvVvvNloGbi9Tc2JYUM\ KtP7jV8``8Rf9Hl97r9JlIVfRf`_qWgWUoBSwARm9Qd8PW7ON6\ NE6N5CRDIVLOYTM`RLbPKdNJfLIhJHjHGlFFnEOcJWTNcISk8W\ fIKbS9SXDI`HKaMLaRNaWOa`_U`kN`wG`uKcsNeqQgoTimWkkZ\ mjaoacgTe`KgTBiM2kF5lJ7lN9mRBmVDnZFnbIm`Ll_OkZRjXU\ iWXhVZhUWdRUaPRZMPWKMSIKPFHMDFJBKIGPILTIPYIUbIZfIb\ cGZ`FWYDSVCPUEVTF`SGfRHkZKYfNKnQ7jUCgXHc_M`cRXfWUi\ `RldtNZsQ`rSbqUcpWeoYfL0rJ9sIItGRuF_uDhvCqwBywGvuK\ ssOpqSmoWjm_gkcdieefgfdigakh_lhY`WOPJFTOMXTT_YZcbe\ ggljlrimqinqhnphopgpogpoemidkcbhYafT_cNZaHXZBWX6WW\ 7WW7WW7WW8WW8WW8WW9WW9WW9 } frm:MandelbrotMix3a {; Jim Muth z=real(p5), c=fn1(pixel), a=real(p1), b=imag(p1), d=real(p2), f=imag(p2), g=real(p3), h=imag(p3), j=real(p4), k=imag(p4), l=imag(p5)+100: z=(a*(z^b))+(d*(z^f))+(g*(z^h))+(j*(z^k))+c, |z| <=l } END 20.0 PAR-FORMULA FILE==================================