This is one of those things that is either totally delusional or a sly parody and it’s hard to tell which. It’s like Sarah Palin doing Sarah Palin vs. Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin. Life imitating Art, or Art imitating Life? Beyond a certain point, the question becomes meaningless.
It’s hard to describe the fascination of the Mandelbrot Set. It’s something that is “already out there” in the sense that it is implied by some simple equations. All it takes to explore it is billions of multiplications carried out to 100 decimal places. It’s a fractal, so at any magnification, it’s somewhat similar. On the other hand, it never repeats exactly, so it’s always different. There’s always something that no one has ever seen before because no one has done the multiplications. You might say that this is a two-dimensional, graphical version of looking at a billion digits of Pi. A description is here.
xkcd is an internet comic, a strange combination of sophisticated humor and really bad art. I can imagine a Gary Larson or a Gahan Wilson doing this cartoon with decent art, or maybe a Stephen Wright turning this into standup comedy, minus the art. I can imagine a whole Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode based on the idea. And yet, here it is, a few words and some stick figures.
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
This is irresistible. It’s ironic, self-referential and Simpsony.
From my AARP newsletter, right after I complain about the Xmas Quadoku requiring too much hand-eye coordination:
8. Leave your comfort zone. Getting good at sudoku? Time to move on. Brain teasers don’t form new neural connections once you’ve mastered them. So try something that’s opposite your natural skills: If you like numbers, learn to draw. If you love language, try logic puzzles.
AARP has a point. If I can solve the sudokus in the newspaper too easily, I’m not not getting as much benefit from them. However, forming neural connections takes a lot of repetition, and repetition takes motivation. If the activity isn’t intrinsically motivating, and the sudokuholics out there know exactly what I mean, “leave your comfort zone” becomes “force yourself to do something you don’t enjoy”, and who wants to live like that? I wouldn’t recommend sudokus to someone who doesn’t like logic puzzles. Give it a try, sure, why not? But if it doesn’t grab you, try something else.
Pastor Rick Warren’s selection for the Inaugural Invocation makes him fair game for ridicule. From The Purpose-driven Life:
… Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up.
Right. There’s no such thing as physics. Evaporation and condensation are just theories. Water molecules do whatever God tells them to do. Teach the controversy!
I never paid much attention to these plants until they started flowering. I figured that the the green ones were Ti plants (Cordyline Fruticosa) like I see in the woods, and the purple ones were something similar, except purple. Now I see that there is a range of colors from all green to part green, part purple, to all purple, but they all have the same kind of flowers. I have to conclude that they are all the same species, but different varieties.
