Am Freitag, den 10. Mai 2002, um 10:48h schrieb Morgan L. Owens:
'apple males' is the incorrect translation for 'Apfel-Maennchen'. 'apple-man' is a German figurative for mandelbrot-set.
Interesting ... it doesn't really look _that_ much like a person, but it's quite frequently described as one - apple-man, it seems; or snowman (with an aerial sticking out of his head) - even though the figure has to be turned on its side from its convenetional orientation for the description to make sense! I guess it just goes to show something about human neurophysiology - symmetry suggests biology.
I think that symmetry is very important to humans ... behaviourists found out that people with perfectly symmetric faces are more often described as being beautiful and nice (just by looking at pictures showing their faces). I think symmetry is also the key to the fractal's special charm. The human brain needs up to 10 seconds (!) to classify a complex pattern. If it is finally classified there seems to be some 'reward'. I think that this is the reason why most of the PARs are saved with names that resulted from this classification ... not just 'F012039..'. If this classification failes the fractal is described as 'stupid' or 'ugly' or 'nonsense'. I think people who love fractals have less problems with nonrepresentational art while others more often describe it simply as 'nonsense'.
Speaking of names, consider those bifurcation diagrams drawn by Mitchell Feigenbaum when he was investigating the periodicities of iterated functions.
and the funny German translations and 'back-translations': Feigenbaum (Feige <-> fig, Baum <-> tree): "fig tree" I think the "tree" is also supported by the tree-like look of these diagrams. (although a real fig tree looks very different) Mandelbrot (Mandel <-> almond, Brot <-> bread): "almond bread" -- Michael *Weitzel*