OK, so I spent a good part of Saturday and Sunday trying to set up a fancy web store on WordPress. I decided to call it quits and just start over. I don’t need a store at this point. I don’t even need a blog at this point. But here we are.
By way of introduction, I have been borderline obsessed with the Mandelbrot Set since 1985, when I read this article in Scientific American
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/inline/blog/File/Dewdney_Mandelbrot.pdf
Believe you me, things were a little bit different back then. Without going into too much detail, if you repeatedly perform an action on numbers on the complex plane, some of these sequences converge, some do not. The ones that converge are The Mandelbrot Set. The ones that don’t converge are beautiful. Colors can be assigned to points on the plane based on how quickly they diverge.
Back in the good old Eighties, lets just say that PC’s weren’t very fast. To generate a moderately detailed, medium sized picture might take several hours. And the only option for me back then was using public PCs (Zenith Z-100s) and a BASIC interpreter. The plan was usually to start running just before closing time, turn off the monitor, and hope no one powered down.
Note that in these early days, most PC’s didn’t have hard drives. As I recall, just one Zenith at the CSC Computer Center had a 20 MB Winchester hard drive. Twenty whole megabytes.
So nowadays my language of choice is Java. My big plan (everybody needs one) is to make beautiful images from the Mandelbrot Set (or the area very close to it) and sell things with the images: coffee mugs, prints, tee shirts, really anything.
This is my logo:
One day I was just meandering around, searching for cool stuff, and this poor lost dog showed up, hidden in here by God Himself. I adopted him and named him Gulliver.
Thank you for reading my fist blog post at paxplastica.com.
Pax