(no subject)

[gfish]

I was in Clarkston this weekend, doing this thing, when I noticed something really cool about the huuj, ginormous bluffs that tower over the city.



Sierpinski triangles! Roughly. It doesn't come through on the image as well as I'd like. (It's a link to a much larger version, but even that one doesn't really capture it. And half of you won't be able to connect to cyphertext.net anyway.) But yay, found math!

Edit:
I was bored, so I highlighted the ridge lines. (No, I don't claim I was particularly impartial in the process. The point here is to share an experience, not to prove a theory.)

Comments

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

Actually it puts me in mind of the triangles generated by certain 1-dimensional cellular automata, as in examples on this page. (http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/ca_gallery.html)

Note that some rules generate straight-up Sierpinski triangles, while others introduce more apparent chaos, much like these hills.

Neat!

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. Sloppy terminology.

Somewhere I have a shell like this one (http://users.frii.com/davejen/shell.jpg), but with a denser pattern more like this (http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rules/1dto_marvel.gif). Pretty neat to see nature's laziness at work.