I've always been of the opinion that just because you can do something, it's probably not a good idea to do it. Granted, not much will probably come of this, but I'm hard pressed to understand why Amazon would willingly piss off customers by deleting eBooks off of their Kindle's after they've purchased them.

Of course, even beyond the business issues, I just don't get authors like Rowling, and now Orwell, that have such a fear of electronic versions of their books. Sometimes I wonder if they'd be happier if I had to sign an agreement to only read their books in quiet solitude, sitting in a nice comfy chair, drinking some Cognac.

Okay, I've seen a lot of odd feats in baseball, but I've never seen number four on this list, a player stealing first (and that's not even the feat).

Some sanity in the mess that is the TSA: The courts have decided that the TSA can't act as their own little police agency, looking for any criminal activity at all.

Too late to save me from getting third degree from having some blood on my hand (on my last flight I managed to cut myself somehow in line and ended up with a bloody hand without realizing it till it was time to hand my passport to the TSA agent), but still it's nice to hear more and more stories of people not being so afraid to question the authority of this agency.

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One more fractal. I forgot all about iterated function systems. I present to the world the Scott and Michelle fractal, as created by an IFS.

Maybe this will be the last fractal post, maybe it won't.

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And here's an animation showing how the Anti-Buddhabrot is drawn.

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The Mandelbrot and related fractals share a feature: To calculate the color of any point in the fractal you need only calculate that single point. The Buddhabrot, however, inverts that principle. You can read more about how it's calculated here if you care to, but put shortly, for each point in the Buddhabrot you calculate, you will change the color for many other points in the fractal. This makes it hard to do the zoom-in animations for a Buddhabrot, though drawing the fractal itself is an interesting animation.

The video for this post is just that, drawing the Buddhabrot, showing the entire set as it's being drawn, and how drawing a small region of the fractal affects the rest of the fractal. One technical note: This is a mildly zoomed in view of the Buddhabrot, meaning to calculate what you see I have to calculate points outside of the view. That's why the white box representing the currently calculating area goes out of frame between each column.

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As promised, here are some fractal animations. These are two simple zoom-ins of a Newton fractal and a Mandelbrot set. Enjoy.

Impressively enough, I realized I've never written a fractal program in C#. I decided to correct this oversight, and you can view a gallery of fractals I've drawn here. I still have a couple of renders going, including an animation; I'll post more details when those are done.

Just put up some of the pictures I took while I was in Beijing a while ago, you can check them out here.

This is a new one for me. Here's an artist that "draws" on paper with nothing but folds. It's very impressive.

I think next year I'll have to see if I can find a "Draw With Fold Of The Day" calendar instead of my Origami Calendar.

What is the Dissenting Pebble?