Larry Jaques wrote:
On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:59:06 -0400,
wrote:

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!". : )

You haven't read _The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove_ (or any book by
Christopher Moore) yet, have you?

Gee, "The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" sounds like it might be a bit
"racy" for this forum? I haven't read it, but reading a little about
it sort of reminds me of "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy". Does it have
pictures? I tend to lean towards non-fiction. I still have your
"Influence:.." book on my Amazon wishlist. I forced myself through
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" 28 years ago too--just to see what it
was about. I can't say I really "got it".

An old author I have to recommend is Paul N. Hasluck. We're talking
vintage 190X. I read most of his book on "woodworking" (largely rustic)
and just started his book on woodcarving this week. These are 700-800
page books (for less than $15) and the words are layed out as
thoughtfully as can be. After reading only up to the 2nd page of
woodcarving, I sighed as to what a treat it was! It's that good. It's
still good up to page 20 and I think it would be interesting even to
someone with no plans to carve any wood at all. It's already started to
help train my eye (to look critically) when I look at sculpture. I
caught myself doing it by accident. And beautiful pictures.. He was a
genius tradesman/scholar of his time and I can't see how anyone alive
now can compete with him on his turf. Enter his name at Amazon.com to
see if he's written on something of interest (glass working, metal
working, ...).




Exceedingly highly recommended.

_Coyote Blue and _Island of the Sequined Love Nun_ are both excellent,
too. Cargo Cults, anyone?

Sequined Love Nun... Woo Hoo!!! That one Must have pictures???



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_Get Your House Right_

--
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
-- Jimi Hendrix