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.
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