Your suggestion that the Mandelbrot equation is the most accurate name for God—very very good!

It inspired me; brought to my mind the idea that one day, one day, if in posession of a super amazing powerful quantum computer, I might just be able to zoom into the Mandelbrot Set and find an image of myself in there, somewhere…

So please find the 40 straight laced Mandelbrot images exploring exploration within the limits of fixed precision mathamatics:
Broadband users should follow the link to Mandelbrot Exploration where the images are presented in the high quality PNG image file format at a 900 x 650 pixel size.

Dial-Up users should follow the link to Mandelbrot Exploration where the images are scaled down to 788 x 568 pixels and are presented in the lesser quality but far smaller JPEG image file format.

ok ok i’m done with the self promotion now…

THOSE ARE DOPE.  Thank you for that expansion, I’ll link back to that now.

Set 12 was especially evokative of something biological or cellular:

http://www.jwm-art.net/o7.php?p=mset-12&s=1

I have been using flam3 under linux, this is command line based. Its the underlying engine behind ElectricSheep.
The GUI’s for both windows and Linux im finding are very buggy and unstable. There could be some improvement here.
For windows i found ChaosPro to work very well, I have not tried running it with wine under linux yet, If i manage too i will post a howto.

Links:

http://flam3.com/
http://electricsheep.wikispaces.com/Using+the+Command-Line+Utilities
http://www.chaospro.de/

Right now i am trying to build an engine that would calculate these in parallel.  At some point i would like to create some very large animation series. I am working on a script / gui that will tie in several command line tools and allow for easy animation.
Ideally one would be very content with a small cluster specifically setup to render and create fractals and use the desktop as a mere satellite station. These Chaos engines would only have the necessary software to calculate and render flames.
Anyone want to help port Electric sheep and Flam3 to the Playstation3 ? 

Currently on the back burner is a Custom Linux distribution that would allow for the building of quick clusters, any random Box could be used as
long as it has cpu ram and a network card that has PXE.

a GUI is also in the works that will run on the main workstation which would control the cluster, Any ideas? This will hopefully be cross platform.
Window, OS X, Linux *BSD using python and some toolkit such as wxpython.

If anyone knows of any software that will accomplish these things please let me know!
I will post links to my site when the project is up.

Cheers!

Louis Kauffman has a book/CD-ROM callled ‘Hypercomplex Iterations’ which is available online:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/hypercomplex/

seems to be aimed at practical envisioning of high-dimensional fractals, check out the pictures and movies if nothing else.

More Fractal Universe data coming in:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14200-galaxy-map-hints-at-fractal-universe.html

s the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe.

A lot is at stake, and the matter distribution has become a source of impassioned debate between those who say the distribution is smooth and homogeneous and those who say it is hierarchically structured and clumpy, like a fractal.

Nearly all physicists agree that on relatively small scales the distribution is fractal-like: hundreds of billions of stars group together to form galaxies, galaxies clump together to form clusters, and clusters amass into superclusters.

The point of contention, however, is what happens at even larger scales. According to most physicists, this Russian doll-style clustering comes to an end and the universe, on large scales, becomes homogeneous.

Homogenous like the ocean.