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April 22, 2007
Those People Playing Horns
"Those people playing horns..." remarked Marianne, "well, they have people playing horns on their heads." And so they do.
We were stuck, once again, on Marianne's homework. Each week she's given a list of words to try to include in a coherent piece of writing, and she always struggles to find the natural inner story contained in what is essentially this week's spelling list. This week we clearly had ph words: elephant, sphere, dolphin, pheasant, graph, photo, phantom, microphone, phone, physical, geography, alphabet, and pamphlet. "You could write about an elephant standing on a sphere," I offered, lamely. An internet search turned up this picture, and we digressed happily for an hour or two into the Mandelbrot set, of which I will never get tired. We've been using Mandelbrot on Cocoa, finally giving the G5 processor a proper workout. Marianne is looking for a fractal screensaver for Mac OS X. I think the perfect option would be something that shows previously generated gallery pictures and cycles the colours, but I couldn't find anything quite right. If necessary I will make a set of animated .gifs, but that seems excessive somehow.
Posted by Alison Scott at April 22, 2007 08:45 PM