As a kid I always thought fractals were neat, but every time I tried to learn how to do them, I got lost in the math. I guess 20 years makes all the difference: today I went and read up on the Mandelbrot set and had one of those “wait, that’s it?” moments.
It took me about 15 minutes to write the program. Here’s the output:
Click for larger version (1400×800)
The whole program was about 400 characters long. I got to thinking, “that’s *almost* small enough to fit into a single tweet…” and then I spent the next hour and a half refactoring my code for size.
Victory:
http://twitter.com/dbrady/status/12546255974
What do you mean I need a hobby? I have one. See?
@Scott: Oh, there were plenty while I was writing it. I got the minus sign wrong and it made this graph that—oh, wait. You mean actual bugs…
Hehehe, yeah. Sadly, I think insectpod.com is a chapter that has probably closed indefinitely. There’s about 20 hours of work involved in resurrecting the webserver. I *did* save the all the data from it, but the site itself is royally borked. :-(
@Wendy: Oooh, very cool. You must linky link when it’s ready for us to see!