Swingman wrote:
On 8/24/2011 9:19 PM, Bill wrote:

There are lots of ways to solve this long standing problem, as this
thread has shown. You only NEED one of them.

"Give me a fish and I eat for a day, Teach me to fish and..."

Teach me to code fractal geometry and ...



I happend to catch part of an interesting show on PBS last night which
provided a lot of evidence to support how *fractals* are related to
nature. If you think about it, the common tree has some fractal-like
aspects for instance. That may just be the tip of the iceberg (another
fractal?)

Of course coding fractals is probably remarkably-easy using recursion,
as long as you can deal with overflow of the run-time stack! : )
It would be analogous to one of the fastest sorting methods, MergeSort,
which takes about 3 lines of code (in some sense).

Maybe you saw the same show?

So the statement, "Teach me to code fractal geometry and ..." --may
merit some surprisingly-strong conclusions. Of course, you probably
already realized this.

In the meantime, I still have my fish. BTW, as was written by one of my
favorite authors of my teens and twenties, Patrick McManus, "Never sniff
a gift fish!". Here is an excerpt taken from his easy to locate website:

"When I was a boy, catching worms was more of a challenge than catching
fish. Some of our worms were bigger than most of our fish. We bragged
about big worms we had dug. We lied about bigger worms we hadn't dug. We
were worm snobs. Artificial flies were for sissies."
~ Patrick F. McManus in The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw

He's the only author who has been successful in making me laugh out
loud, over and over. In junior high school a gal sitting next to me
asked, "Is it really THAT funny", to which I proudly replied, "YES!". : )