Fractal fans: For the foreseeable future, the FOTD's will be few and far between, if there are any at all. I have not stopped finding interesting scenes in the abstract world of fractals. Indeed, my hard drive and backup disk are still filling with these mathematical wonders. The situation is that I have become equally fascinated with the abstract world of spirit, which to me is every bit as real and far more important than the world of fractals. If I were to continue to post the FOTD and its discussions, my words would appear totally inappropriate for a list devoted to fractal exploration. To me, the increasing unrest in the world is a result of the spiritual bankruptcy of our culture, which I see as using technology and the sensations created by its countless gadgets to cover the spiritual emptiness we find when we dare to look within ourselves. Conventional religion with its nonsensical doctrines has totally failed to fill this emptiness, while science does even worse, failing to admit that spirit even exists outside of an emotional stimulus created by the mortal brain, and Atheists and skeptics confirm what science only reluctantly implies. This leaves many people totally adrift, in a world they see as without meaning, a world in which they see themselves as mere temporary aberrations of nature, fighting among themselves as they vanish one-by-one into eternal oblivion like the flash of a firefly in the summer night. As I see it, this is what is now happening with our culture, and unless we can find rational and believable meaning and hope for our individual selves as well as our children, all the feel-good talk about the different cultures getting along together has not a 'ghost' of a chance of bringing the peace and harmony we can now only dream about. JIM