Or, in case I forget to turn on my messenger, try ICQ# 154611817!

• It's a weirdly beautiful picture!
• It's art drawn using a strange mathematical formula!
• It's so complicated that rocket scientists sit in awe and amazement of it's complex simplicity!
• It's all the above and a few more besides!

A fractal is a picture generated by a mathematical formula using both real and 'imaginary' numbers. The little oddities known a imaginary numbers came about when the eggheads of the world discovered that there was no square root of a negative number. To solve this problem, they invented, you guessed it, imaginary numbers. This vaguely algebraic formula allows a computer to draw a fractal.

One of the most amazing things about a fractal is that as you zoom into the fractal, it is actually being redrawn by the fractal generating software. So instead of a bigger picture, you are actually traveling into the fractal. It is a true 3d construct.

The fractal is drawn from a static plane into infinity. It can be said that if you travel far enough into a fractal, you will see parts of it that have never been seen by any other human being. A Star Trek like journey into the incredibly beautiful unknown. By altering the colors and other aspects of the fractal, you can create a totally new portrait of sublime beauty. Check out the .jpg's through the link below and leave me a message.

If this simple explanation didn't satisfy your curiosity, you can check out Cygnus-software for more details and get a fractal generator of your own. Alternately, you can visit my links page to search for a free one.
NOTE: Before you get to carried away, I suggest you invest in a some extra RAM. Adding RAM, (whether PC100, 133, DDRAM or even the dreaded RAMBUS)can make a significant difference in system performance. This is also one of the cheapest and easiest to do. The rule of thumb for Windows 95/98 is 128 megs of RAM minimum. 3D rendering is very CPU intensive due to the huge amount and sheer complexity of the computations, and since RAM is is where all the work gets done, this simple addition can speed things up a mite. The addition of a standard video accelerator card will do little to help, as the polygon count in rendering is beyond even the fastest card on the market. A close friend has an Albatron FX 5950 Ultra card featuring the unbelievable Invidia Geforce FX chip and while his Athlon XP3200+ PC with 1 GB of PC3700 DDRM runs Quake 3 Arena Halo-Combat Evolved with an all-mighty quickness, his rendering times haven't changed a bit. There are some cards on the market that are designed for this sort of thing, but they are expensive and don't work with games.

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