David Jones wrote (responding to me):
Trouble is, I do NOT have a soft copy of the book itself.
Bummer. Means you need someone who has a copy of the book and could put in the contents somehow. Not having seen the book, I expect that entails graphics, too?
I have hard copies of all my books. I just don't have the final pagemaker files. So if we want to put the book on a CD, we'd have to scan the book. Probably not worth the trouble. The CD could be a bootable CD that boots to Freedos or Linux and allows running Fractint. As has been pointed out, we could stuff a whole lot of images and PARs on the CD. My timing was not too good to talk about this, since I'm about to take off on a vacation of several weeks. I'll be back in early July. This project could take a while. The good thing is that anyone with some energy and ability to work for a few months in their spare time could help. Another group project I have been thinking about for a long time is to make an animated really really deep zoom. 1. We'd have to identify the target, preferably a migit at 10^1500 magnification (or thereabouts). I say a midgit, because if you zoom into the Mandelbrot without really seeing where you're going, it's hard to avoid zooming into a truly self similar region. That happened to me on my first attempt, and my image at 10^1500 was just a carbon copy of a much shallower zoom. Paradoxically, zooming into a midgit (which appears to be a self-similar Mandelbrot set) is actually guaranteed to be novel. The down side is that you have to let images develop pretty far in each step in order to copntinue zooming into midgits. 2. Decide the zooming algorithm. I have found a simple rotation along with a linear zoom is effective. Gives the effect of spiralling out of control while falling. We'd probably have to rotate the palette as we go, or else designe a very special palette. 3. Generate the PAR files. COuld probably do this with a simple program, or maybe used the existing fractal animator program, which if memory serves supports arbitrary precision. The programn that generates the PAR files necessarilt has to support arbitrary precision. 4. Rendering the images. This would be the "group" part of the project. List members could render the images and send them to a central place. 5. Combining the GIFs into an animation. There's an animation like this on the Image Lab 2nd Edfition CD, but it only goes a bit past the limit of double precvision. I rendered the images with a hacked up version of Fractint I have that uses 80 bit long doubles instead of doubles. Tim