I've never seen a moose... today was no exception

so in an interesting turn of events beginning with this comic...




I once again stumbled across fractals and Mandelbrot patterns. I say once again because I first had the pleasure of encountering fractals in one of Piers Anthony's novels called presciently Fractal Mode which I don't fully remember because halfway through reading it I realized that it was the second in a series which I had never read. However somewhere in the novel they talk about fractals which came as a surprise to me because i thought that was just a cool word they were using in the title (i was probably 10 or so at the time so don't be too quick to judge ) basically they somehow end up in a "fractalian" world that i belive is only one part of a larger fractal pattern that continues forever (as fractals do) though plant leaves and everything else. and of course the heroes of this novella were sure to see part of the larger fractal and discover just how infinite both it and the small fractals were. (disclaimer: yes i know that you can't really say large or small in context with this because its all incredibly perspective based, nevertheless)
This comic led me to wiki to find out what exactly MATHNET was. Turns out there used to be a kids tv show where the policemen always had to use some kind of mathematical thing to solve the case they were working on. One of these cases involved fractals. which look like this:







In this particular case a spiral has many spirals spiralling off of it. each of these in turn have more spirals spiralling with their own spirals. artists have used fractals to make all kinds of crazy images with the aid of computers. examples can be seen just by typing fractal into google.
However fractals need not be self similar in the way this one is. the most famous of all fractals is the Mandlebrot which is not self-similar as is evident in the following images:


The Mandlebrot Set

A zoom-in of the mandlebrot

A different zoom-in of the Mandlebrot



Fractals are not just a mathematical/geometric idea.They are found in real life as demonstrated by this cauliflower:



Physicists often speak of a spherical chicken. Here we can see a fractal cow:



I forgot how i discovered this but... there is apparantly an online site attempting to list all fictional books with ties to mathematics. So just in case you're in need of summer reading material, I give you...
mathfiction!


also i recently(as in an hour and a half ago) began following this blog:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
where the writer blogs about new advances or discoveries in science. pretty interesting, a ton of updates, and would probably be my primary source of material (today's blog was actually supposed to be about the parallel universe post) if I was selfish enough to keep it to myself. a few favorite posts include:
Anti-matter
Humans ate the Neanderthals
Parallel universes real?

and props to xkcd.com for the comic at the beginning and wikipedia as always for supplying most of the pictures except for the fractal cow to which i give thanks to http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow and google for leading me to that site.

the opposite of laundry?

I am officially the proud owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. That is to say, the frustrated and confused owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. In other and slightly more interesting news: Credit cards, Student ID's and anything else with one of those black strips on the back of it work because of Magnetic Flux! Flux is the amount of something passing through an area. the Magnetic Flux is the amount of magnetic field lines passing through an area. aka Flux = B * A * cos(theta). Now most often its the CHANGE in this flux that's important. In other words how much stuff goes through the area in a particular amount of time. and this! is what makes your credit card work , (and thereby sink you into debt with the rest of America ). That black strip on the back of your credit card (or Disney Pass !) is Magnetic. Therefore when you swipe it the flux changes dramatically which induces a current! (more on this in another post) and the machine responds by giving you your candy (assuming its a vending machine). This is also why you have to do it fast, because otherwise the change in flux per time will be a lot less and the current induced won't be big enough to make the machine work.

Interestingly enough, this same basic method can be used to ensure that the light at the intersection changes when you pull up. Cars have ferrofluids in their suspension (?, I'm not completely sure where the ferrofluids are)...

so actually, after digging around on Google i couldn't find any support for this claim other than Dr. Martin's verbalization in class. what i did discover is that Ferrari uses ferrofluids in some of their cars' suspensions' and who can argue with Ferrari? (answer: a proud owner of a Lamborghini)

case in point...






But! since we're already talking about ferrofluids, lets look at something almost as sexy...



so this is a Ferrofluid. Its actually surprisingly easy to make, i had the opportunity to do so this past semester in my Nanotechnology Lab and we each manged to make it spike though we didn't have quite as cool towers as seen in this video. Its basically a liquid that when introduced to a magnetic field becomes polarised and ends up spiking. This particular one moves when the music starts and a stronger magnetic field is created. The structure that it moves on is simply an iron core and one electromagnet.

more information (and my source) at:
http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/04/19/ferrofluid-morpho-towers-two-standing-spirals/

the lambo pic was straight off of Google's image search.


il y a deux assez décent "cela est qu'elle a dit" blagues dans le premier paragraphe p.s.

You're HIDEOUS! and Sexy...

"Happiness is self-propagating. Begin it, spread it, live it."

I can't remember if this is an actual quote or something out of my own mind. The important thing to realize is that Light is also self-propagating and this is one of the reasons it can exist and travel in a vacuum. Light in general is probably one of the coolest things in nature. in A Wrinkle in Time the kids at one point end up in a world where the creatures are very kind and sensitive but have no eyes to speak of. Color can not be explained nor even really the concept of seeing. Furthermore light is both a particle and a wave which even though i understand the reasons for this dual nature still strikes me as odd. What else do we see this in? I'm thinking there must exist some other examples of things with a dual nature of some kind even if it can't be explained with either of these particular descriptions.

Cosmic brownie points as always for anyone who knows where the title of this post comes from.