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There was a recent discussion on OT about fractal animation that I found interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t get along too well with the writers of that blog, so I will put my thoughts here.

I found it intriguing that they would conclude that an animated fractal is less interesting than a still fractal. You would think that it would be the other way around. Movement is always more interesting than non-movement. When something moves in a scene, it catches our attention, so why would a moving image be less interesting than a still one?

I think that it has a lot to do with the fractal that is being animated. Animation is nothing more than a series of rendered still images. Coming up with a fractal movie that has any substantial content requires a tremendous amount of rendering. Most of us don’t have the patients to wait around for days or even weeks for our computers to spit out an animation, so we start with simple and boring fractals that will render faster. A boring fractal is a boring fractal, moving or not. But that’s not the real problem.

When it comes to animation, we have high expectations. The movie Avatar is animated digital art. I saw the 3D IMAX version of it twice. The second time was just as visually stunning to me as the first. How can an animated fractal compete with that? When I walked out of that movie, I found myself wondering how any fractal art could compete with that, but that’s another topic.

I have just enjoyed 2 full weeks with my family.

Except for a little shopping and e-mail checking, I avoided the computer with no regrets. In November I even disconnected the Ultrafractal mailing list.

I hope that everyone reaches whatever goals that they set for themselves this year.

By mid September the Rufous hummingbirds were gone. I didn’t want to bother with the feeders anymore so I took them down. They were down for about three weeks and I noticed several Anna’s hanging around the yard as if the feeders were still there. I couldn’t handle the guilt, so I put a couple of feeders back in the yard.

Last year’s hummer

The feeders have been taken over by a shy male. Last winter’s male allowed me to get within about 6 feet of it before it buzzed off. This one won’t even allow me into the back yard before it disappears.

Pretty much everything in the U.S. is frozen right now, including my feeders. The birds are obviously desperate for fuel and the male Anna’s is being very territorial. It’s fun to watch that sort of action in the summer, but in this weather there is nothing cute about it. That male is trying to be the only survivor around my feeders. It’s cold survival of the fittest in action.

I have noticed a few birds buzzing around the area where I used to have a feeder in the front. I guess that I’ll have to put one there too. These birds are good at laying down guilt trips. The bird in the back can’t see the feeder in the front, so maybe at least one more bird will be better off.

I’ll see if I can get some pictures of this year’s hummers…

Everyone around here has been thinking about the 4 police officers that were shot on Sunday morning and hoping that they would catch the guy that did it. He was more than caught last night. He was shot by a police officer. It’s not my intention to re-report what you can read for yourself.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010393433_webarrest01m.html

Sometimes I wonder if miracles still exist. I couldn’t help but be impressed with the circumstances that allowed the suspect to get what he deserved. A stolen car was found by a police officer. It ended up that it was stolen by the guy that shot the cops, and he was still around when the police officer found the car. What is interesting to me is how quickly the car was found. I have had a car stolen from me, twice. Both times it was from my driveway. Both times I didn’t know that it was gone until I attempted to go to work in the morning. Both times it took over a week to recover the car.

According to the Seattle Times article, Harvey Lagon heard his car start and watched it being stolen. He called the police but didn’t chase the car. I would have chased the car and called the police while I was chasing it. There are two potential miracles there. One that he heard the car being stolen and the other that he didn’t chase it.

The car was found, just a couple of hours later, with the hood up and the engine running. Harvey said that the car was “not a very reliable car”. If the hood was up, it was obviously broken down and the cop killer was either trying to fix it or looking for another car to take.

From my experience, this string of events is pretty amazing. What are the chances that a car would be immediately reported as stolen and that it would break down in a place that the police would be able to find it? I didn’t report my car as stolen until hours after it was and it took several days to find it.

I am not trying to distract from the tragic deaths of 4 police officers. I feel grief for them and their families. The real miracle would be for that to have never happened, but it did. I just can’t help but wonder if collective thoughts, prayers, energy or whatever that you want to call it, might have had an impact on the events that allowed the cop killer to be taken out.

I was tempted to do a 5 o’clock in the morning thing, just to see what it was like. I get up that early anyway for work so it’s not that big of a deal, but I didn’t make it until 8:30.

I went to Walmart. They advertised a $200 laptop that I wanted to check out. Of coarse it was gone.

The Walmart crowd was intense, even at 8:30, some 4 hours after the doors were busted. I am not a shopper. I am definitely a hunter, not a gatherer. I have a target prey and I go in with the goal of killing it and dragging it home. There’s no way to find prey when everybody around you has blood in their eyes. When I saw those people pushing around their shopping carts like they were armoured personnel carriers, I had to leave.

I decided to lay low for a few hours and then try Fry’s. I love going to Fry’s. It’s the happiest place on earth.  They have everything that I, umm, or my family, could ever want (they even have a stunt kite). I approached Fry’s from the back, you know, where the loading dock is. There were cars parked back there – not a good sign. When I made it into the front lot I saw cars streaming up and down the rows. That was enough. I drove away.

I am a shopping coward, I know that. There’s no way set up a hunting strategy on Black Friday. You just have to jump in there and fight, and I couldn’t do it.

I went back to Fry’s this morning, hoping that yesterday’s shoppers were home licking their wounds. It worked. I killed what I was looking for and drug it home. I can’t say what it is because it’s a gift for my wife, but it’s cool. It has to be cool if I bought it Fry’s, right? She’ll like it, right? It was expensive but still a good deal, so I am sure that she’ll like it… I guess that I’ll find out on Christmas morning.

I also bought something for my daughter, online. Amazon can read my mind. I don’t know how they do that. It’s weird. All it took was a couple of clicks. There were no scary ladies with blood in their eyes, no shopping carts or parking lots, and it came with free shipping and no sales tax. There is something to that.

An Apophysis flame image imported into Untrafractal

Last night I had a look at the new Kansas DVD, “There’s no place like home” and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

They had an orchestra backing them up and they selected songs that played well with the orchestra, like “Nobody’s Home” from the album “Point of No Return”. It’s obvious that Livgren and Walsh wrote those songs with an orchestra in mind.

It was great to see Kerry Livgren playing with them on a few songs. It seems like he wrote many of my favorite Kansas songs, including the ones that had religious overtones, like “Carry On”.

Steve Morse played with them too on a few songs. I have never been much into Morse (Dixie Dreggs, Deep Purple), but after seeing him play on the DVD I can appreciate his recognized talent as a guitar player.

I met Steve Walsh, Billy Greer and Steve Morse years ago in Park City when my wife won a “party with Kansas” contest that was promoting “In the spirit of things”. That’s when I learned that even rock stars are normal people. I was particularly impressed with Billy Greer. He seemed like a good guy to me.

Kansas has a unique style. This new DVD emphasizes that nicely.

A werewolf filmed on location in La Push. Seriously, I saw it for myself…

Play Video

In the past I have had the thought that fractal art will someday be seen the same way that traditional art is, with fractal prints hanging in galleries and hundreds of people standing in front of them in awe. If that day came, I would know that fractal art had found its place within traditional art. 

After reading a couple of responses to my entry about the fractal art contest, it hit me that this thought would never be realized. The responses were in my Deviantart journal. They disagreed with my statement that more fractal art should be printed. One person, zweeZwyy, said that fractal art is the “art of light” and it should be displayed using the same media that it was created with. That thought doesn’t fit with the vision that I had about how fractal art should fit in with traditional art.

“The art of light” triggered the memory in me that photography is also called the art of light. Photography has a lot in common with digital art. In fact, nowadays photography is digital art.

I have talked before about the fine arts show at the Puyallap Fair. That fair is a big deal. The International Photo Solon is in the same room as the fine arts show. For years, the photography show included a theater for slides. This year that theater didn’t have a slide projector, it had a digital projector. The fair no longer uses slides in its photography competition, it uses digital images.

The fair still had a huge number of prints on display as well as the images displayed by the digital projector. I think that it is safe to say that all photography is digital at this point, but there is still plenty of room for prints. On the other hand, since I have gone digital, I have not printed a single photo.

banana-tree  said in my journal entry that the monetary value of digital art is minimized by its reproducibility. Unfortunately, that makes too much sense. There is only one Venus de Milo, but we could easily create thousands of copies of a digital image. In fact, this is exactly what we do when we put a digital image on the Internet. The law of supply and demand says that digital images are cheap, however limits can be placed on prints. If prints are limited, the value should go up.

If digital art is going to have any value, it must be printed, so I hold to my belief that there is not enough printed fractal art in the world. However, like photography, fractal art should be displayed in its natural digital medium. It’s just not worth anything in that medium, except for maybe the value of the emotional reaction that it triggers.