Journaling and Doodling with Fractals

I haven’t been in the mood to write much recently in part because of everything that has been going on. The air around here has been thick with smoke from fires in Canada and closer by. It is clearing out a bit now but everything is still a bit hazy, smelly, and golden looking.

Apparently the peat bog is burning in Greenland too. This stuff has been collecting for thousands of years and now it has dried out enough to light on fire.

Sometimes I’ve been reluctant to say anything negative or complain too much. If you can’t say anything nice why say anything right?

Jet stream patterns are continuing to get more abnormal with them crossing the equator consistently now.

Lots of saber rattling is going on with tensions mounting all over. Starvation, war, pestilence, what’s the world coming to?

Some estimates put us at half a billion people as a sustainable population with business as usual. We’re burning through our resources now at an enormous rate. Populations of many species are going extinct or in decline. Most people don’t seem to view these things as a warning sign - this is what is particularly bothering me.

We have obvious technical solutions to most of these problems, we could be carbon neutral now with existing technologies. We could be putting more funding into better solutions and using renewable resources.

Instead it seems like were stuck in endless debates over minutia and thoughts around how much of this is human caused, and whether things will be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the economy. If history repeats, we may still be arguing about these things thirty years later.

I’m afraid it may take some major ‘wake up call’ like a four or five times spike in food prices from major shortages of oil, water, and habitat, for the world to wake up to the point where some practical effort is made to do things differently.

I hope it doesn’t come down to that. The future actually looks very hopeful with electric vehicles, cleaner technologies and self driving cars close to major adoption. New technologies in farming could greatly reduce the chance of crop failure and support the biosphere. Many cool things could be done if we can learn to cooperate.

Fractals

Anyhow, I digress. I can’t solve the worlds problems, even if I was dictator. Oh, that’s an idea! Why not have a country wide random lottery and elect a new ‘Dictator for the Day’ each day as president? That way we could all spread out the strange presidential policies. It might be good though, to make it so that the ‘Commander in Chief’ couldn't launch a nuke like some battle hardened pirate from the good old days. ;)

I_R is calling me again! I’m afraid to answer; this can’t be good. I’m sure the IRS is surrounding my house right now with armed commandos. I probably just need to pay some major value in Bitcoin to make them go away. (For those of you that don’t know, hackers disguise themselves as the IRS and demand ransoms around here.) Hey, I’m just a cynical old man, why can’t these hackers just leave me alone? LOL.

I really need to stop reading the news and get a new land based phone number but like some strange addiction I can seem to break away from trying to figure out what the heck is going on around here and I enjoy my phone number - dang it. :(

Okay, enough digression, without further ado here’s my recent fractal doodling. It helps me a bit to play around with graphics programs to improve my outlook. I’ve merged some images together and modified them a bit in GIMP. The main output is from Mandelbulber. The partially viewed picture was taken by me with my Galaxy S7.

And here’s a more traditionally colored version with the randomly generated fractal colors look. Sticking to strict fractal picture traditions, no use of photography was used. Yes, you heard that right, amazingly these are just the pixels as they came out of the fractal programs... Well, sort of. Actually, not really, but never the less, no paintbrushes, photos, or actual ink was used. (Do Wacom tablets count as a paint brush?)

Anyway, please enjoy the almost traditionally generated fractal:

One of these days I’ll have to get out my old DOS based fractal software and see if I can get it to run on an emulator just for fun. Or maybe not – it is probably lost in a storage bin somewhere or given away to Goodwill by this time.

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Thanks for reading! I aways appreciate your support