virus: Fractals and drips

Wade T. Smith (morbius@channel1.com)
Wed, 9 Jun 1999 07:36:30 -0400

An interesting, though mostly pointless simultaneity here- from that fractal web site, which has yielded up lots of startup and desktop screens for this tired old Mac, and which has a startup screen that I've used for about three months which is a Pollock, with a small embellishment of a tiny but pungent plaque that says 'Screw Microsoft' on it....

Anyway, here is an amusing little correlation study....

Hands are not tools indeed....

The maths of fractals may be the only valid maths to use in memetics/behavior.


THE PAINTINGS OF JACKSON POLLACK, famous for their seemingly random distribution of drips and streaks, are fractal in nature. Physicists at the University of New South Wales (Australia) subjected Pollack's handiwork to the kind of mathematical scrutiny usually given to fractures in crystals and distributions of galaxies. They found that the paintings bore similar features at each of many size scales, the hallmark of fractalness. The object's characteristic "fractal dimensionality" is roughly related to the indentedness of the object's texture. Apparently the dimensionality of Pollack's work increased through the years. (Nature, 3 June 1999.)