March 23, 2008

Seed Magazine

via Seed Magazine@all manner of distractions

The April 2008 Seed Magazine is out. Hooray! Im excited both for the content, and the 4 full spreads that I did at their request. This issue profiles ‘7 revolutionary minds’, but the Seed Salon is dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot. Seed Magazine asked me to provide some fractal images, specifically whole Buddhabrots. The Buddhabrot is an alternate way to render the more traditional Mandelbrot set. I first heard about Buddhabrots after seeing some versions that Jared Tarbell had produced using Processing.

The Buddhabrot is not that different from the Mandelbrot set, however doing any zooms of the Buddhabrot can be quite time consuming. After doing a bit of poking about, I found steckles.com where Alexander Boswell details how to implement a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to dramatically speed up the render process when zooming in on a specific section of the Buddhabrot. In the end, this addition was not needed as whole Buddhabrots worked well in the Seed layout, but it was certainly an interesting mental exercise.

And say what you will about fractals, they still continue to impress me. Something so incredibly complex coming from such a small amount of code… what’s not to like?

Oh, and there is a nice image from Mr. Natzke and a great article about the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMA.

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