Jim Muth wrote:

At 09:43 PM 2/28/05 -0500, you wrote:

...

Actually I liked the first tessellated fractal better but thats just me.

They are both pretty much the same. I simply got annoyed that I had posted the wrong parameter file.

I liked the first one better, at first, but now like them both. I at first felt a bit disappointed with the second one, because it wasn't enough of a variation on the first to be worthy. I tend to evaluate things against their background in time, so I'm sure that if Tessellation-II had been presented first, I'd think the present Tessellation-I the derivative, not worthy one. I like the scaly texture that dominates Tessellation-II, and wonder how the whole image might look done that way ... re Star Trek's "Warp" drive. It was just a TV version of FTL drive ideas that science fiction had been diddling around with for decades. The idea was that by warping space around the ship the right way, you could alter the speed of light (compared to the surrounding unwarped space) and thus exceed the speed of light. I think my favorite old FTL drive idea was E. E. Smith's "interialess drive" (used in his Lensman series, first published in 1937 in "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine). The idea was that you could temporarily abolish the inertia of matter. (The old inertia, complete with its original "intrinsic" velocity, was conveniently set aside until you turned off the interialess drive, at which point you had to correct that "intrinsic velocity" in order to land somewhere.) Thus, as you approached the speed of light and relativity said that the ship's mass increased, it didn't matter - the increased mass still had no inertia, so you needed no extra thrust to overcome the relativistic mass increase. In one of the later Lensman series stories, the Lensmen find a parallel universe in which the velocity of light is much much higher than that of Earth's universe. (Or something like that, I may be remembering it wrong.) So they go there, render an entire planet inertialess, and move it into their own universe. Then they carefully position it - and restore its inertia and multi-light velocity in such a way as to smash an enemy planet. Ah, the days of space opera! Of course, built into both ideas is the idea of an absolute frame of reference somewhere in which the intrinsic velocity somehow is remembered and translated from one point to another in space-time. But E. E. Smith's Ph D was in English, not physics, and he wrote tales that make the modern Star Wars tales badly done jokes. -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community