(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

[helenangel.livejournal.com]

Very, very cool. And great shots! =)

[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!

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

There's a model of Mount St Helen's that is made up of just the ridge lines, everything else is hollow. It's very cool. I wish I had the software to convert DEMs into such models, it would make mountanous areas much more comprehensible.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Who was Sierpinski and what, exactly, defines his or her triangles?

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

In case you haven't seen this (http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/talks/jmm2004/index.html) -- I think you'd enjoy it.

I can see my house from here!

[gement.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with math, and I know you're headed for Points North right now, but this was a little creepy:

You took that photo from the parking lot of my old workplace.

Past the initial shiver of scrolling down past a picture of familiar hills next to the icon of a Seattle identity (which is pretty big cognitive dissonance in and of itself), the utter certainty of location was disconcerting.