Fractal fans: Greetings again from Fractal Central. It's been over a year since I did any serious fractal searching, and in that time I have grown a bit rusty in using the old standard classic DOS version of Fractint. I now need to sit down and actually take the time to remember the key strokes that were almost automatic, such as coloring, zooming and saving parameter files etc. But I'm sure that with a little practice, it will all come back to me. The DOS version of Fractint has worked well for over 25 years, so I'm not going to trash it, at least not yet. And I'm still searching for fractals on the tired 18-year-old DOS machine, which for a reason known only to itself, will not lie down and call it quits. During the past year, I have been doing much thinking about the philosophical side of fractals, asking myself questions such as 'What are fractals made of?' and 'If they are made of nothing, are they actually real?' In many ways, such questions remind me of the questions I wondered about long ago, when I searched so many books trying to find what subatomic particles actually are. The answer I eventually settled on is that the entire quantum realm with all its particles is nothing more than the abstract mathematical formulas and expressions that define it. All images picturing quantum things as tiny particles, or spread out waves, or neither, or both at the same time, are mere ideas in the human mind that were inspired by the math. They are as real as one considers them to be. And the same is true of fractals. I can now say that I have answered, at least to my satisfaction, the question of what fractals actually are. They are the math that defines them. The sounds and images we are familiar with are emergent epiphenomena of the activity of computer circuitry. I'll end this letter now, but I have only begun to reach into the depths where fractals have led me over the past year, involving science, philosophy and even religion. The actual fractals will resume before long. JIM M.