{"id":295,"date":"2002-11-09T12:07:08","date_gmt":"2002-11-10T02:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=295"},"modified":"2002-11-09T12:07:08","modified_gmt":"2002-11-10T02:07:08","slug":"detail-detail-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/2002\/11\/09\/detail-detail-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Detail, detail, everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting and thinking. About raindrop patterns on the window. Crenulated cloud edges, silver where they pass over the sun. Kinda reminded me of fractals, so I googled for “fractal viewer” or something, and downloaded the first one I saw – Fractal Explorer<\/a>. Wow! Suddenly its 1985 again…<\/p>\n

\"Mandelbrot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>\"Mandelbrot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>\"Mandelbrot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Somewhere, I’ve got a set of 5?” disks containing a lot of Mandelbrot set image files that I generated on one of my school’s  BBC Micros<\/a> in about 1984-85. I remember staying late after school to write the viewer software in BBC Basic. Even at the low screen resolutions that we had back then, it took ages<\/em> to run. If you made a mistake in entering the i<\/em>\/j<\/em> coordinates incorrectly, you’d come back half an hour later to find a blank screen, or something uninteresting.S<\/span>o I hit on the idea of rendering the image using progressively higher levels of detail – calculating z<\/em> for four evenly-spaced points and drawing four big squares with the appropriate colour, then repeatedly subdividing each square until I got down to pixel-resolution. This at least let you see what was happening, and cancel a bad run, but the program probably ran slower as a result.<\/p>\n

<\/span>I remember I really enjoyed<\/em> doing that. It all felt fresh and new. Ah, those were the days…<\/p>\n

I’m almost tempted to get hold of a 5?” drive, but its extremely unlikely that the disks are still readable after fifteen-plus years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting and thinking. About raindrop patterns on the window. Crenulated cloud edges, silver where they pass over the sun. Kinda reminded me of fractals, so I googled for “fractal viewer” or something, and downloaded the first one I saw – Fractal Explorer. Wow! Suddenly its 1985 again… Somewhere, I’ve got a set of 5?” disks … Continue reading “Detail, detail, everywhere”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}