I found out what the funny noise in my car is. I was getting a whirring/grinding that I had associated with the transmission. it didn’t seem to effect the drivability of the car in any way. it was just annoying.
Got applause this morning from the people in a starbucks this morning for my parking lot skills.
…and I thought having a FWD car was going to kill all my fun in the snow. It’s very white out today. It started snowing just before I left my house and there’s an inch or so of damp snow where I work.
I was pulling into the starbucks near my work. as you enter, there’s a double row of cars on the left with an island at the end. there are 2 spots closest to the island, then a bunch of handicapped parking. nobody was in the side of the double row closest to the starbucks, so I decided to take up residence in the end spot next to the island. I thought I’d have a little fun too since all the spots around were empty. too early and too snowy for most people I guess.
I turned in, lifted to get the weight forward, and flicked the handbrake to get the rear end around. the thing slid around perfectly, and I inched forward to park it. I thought to myself “damn, I hope I can drive with as much grace this sunday at the race”. So I bebop into the starbucks, and I get a round of applaus from the dozen or so people that were in there. I guess they had a good view and were impressed by my m4d sk3elz y0. I dunno.. it was cool.
-IggDawg
Google is giving props to chaos math today. they did an excellent job constructing their logo:
not only do they give the equation for the images they’re using… They even name the pic “Julia” when they could have gotten away with the more well known “Mandelbrot”. The equation they give is “Z=Z^2+C”. the subscript under the first “Z” indicates that this is an iterated equation. anyways, that eqation is what generates the Mandelbrot fractal. A Julia fractal is a similar image that is basically the inverse of the mandelbrot fractal at any given point (more specifically, for any value of C). The best way I can describe it is that you could “click” anywhere on the Mandelbrot fractal and get an image that’s quasi-similar to the original image. every point will generate a slightly different image.
One of the neat things about fractals is that they have infinite resolution. Given a computer with sufficient computing power, it could be zoomed in upon infinitely. the “chaos” comes in at the border between the frilly exterior, and the less exciting single-colored interior. the closer you zoom into the border between the two regions, the more complex the border gets. you can never actually see where the two regions meet. there’s no clear line no matter how far in you look.
The Mandelbrot set became fairly well popularized some time ago. The Julia set is much less well known. which is why it’s pretty cool of them to name the picture Julia instead of Mandelbrot. I guess someone in their ranks is a fractal junkie.
-IggDawg
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