Welcome to Fractal Forums

I see that Tim has gone through the Contest Entries, based upon the recent article he posted to Orbit Trap:

    http://orbittrap.ca/?p=1135 (http://orbittrap.ca/?p=1135)

He chose several images for his best categories, though he did not mention too much about watching all of the videos.  (They can be quite time consuming, depending on one's Internet connection.)
 

Wow, he has good taste!  O0

I figured you would like the review.   :dink:
 

I like it too :)

I can only agree, in my limited sense as art referee  :alien:
Had not expected the current voting... but his meaning of my first posting makes me happy  :)

The question why this forum still stays helthy is, of course, due to the passion- and helpfulness of the moderators!

I would say *the members* not just the moderators ;)

I think also it's because this forum has developed into much more than just considering the Art of Fractals and how to create it i.e. it also covers in some depth the Fractal Math and how to create the software too plus many other aspects of Fractals generally :)

Sure, but without the moderators, the members wouldnt stay  :dink:

Fractalforums was the first link with informations about 3D fractals and how to generate them, i spend a lot of time understanding just the half of the megathread about the holy grail.
And i think it still developes very fast...

it is nice to see such a remarkable mentioning in public, when i first visited fractalforums.com i thought: damn, why didnt i had the idea ;)
and i took the opportunity to overtake the forum once it was going to be offline, and it is true, it has always been a site for deeply discussion
of fractal themes of all kind, i for myself did never believe it could become really more than just a small fractal site with less than 100.000 hits per month,
but as mentioned in the article, the bulb really brought attention to the forums, and it seems that most people registered since then are helping
to thrive the forum further, although i do not really know how much more attention i could bare with my servers, i must say, i love what is going on
in the forum, we have enthusiastic members, and even more enthusiastic moderators :D , one thing is the personal greet every member receives
which presents him/herself. and over the time it even became a site for many fractal programs for support and release ...

so, people keep on :D

btw. even with the ads on the site it is far from makin money, i am still paying 30€ a month, and only get 10€ out of ads, but i love to see 100 new posts
every day, because every day something interersting new happens, a nice animation, a nice rendering, or just a new idea of something!

The thing I find most remarkable about FractalForums is how a new class of fractal formulas seems to be discovered every month. New optimizations and refinements for older, "established" formulas keep coming in, too. Rendering algorithms are being polished, showing "classical" shapes in new light. Then the artsy crowd takes over and explores colours and composition, until finally we get to watch breathtaking animations.

Much of FractalForums' appeal is created by outstanding individuals. But the remarkable thing is how many of them have gathered here and are working together (or are competing :-) to refine, improve, explore, produce fractal imagery. I regard the community here as an example of my personal intellectual utopia: people are not being organized and directed, but they are let loose.

We make astonishing discoveries because we are free to go where we want, and we do not have to keep secrets from each other. Every one of us can have a moment when he is the giant carrying somebody else on their shoulder to see even further.

The next step is to organise an in-person FF annual meeting to have those fractal gurus get out of their cave :):)

Wow, we see the forum with the same eyes hobold, look at my comment... http://orbittrap.ca/?p=1135

I posted it this morning...  O0

I don't know if it is sufficient to pile up bright minds and set them loose. But there are several historic examples, beginning with the Greek mathematicians and philosophers, who didn't work in isolation, but were teachers of remarkable students. Much later, the allies summoned a crowd of code breakers in Bletchley Park, and those people created the general purpose computer. In modern times, you have Xerox PARC and IBM's T J Watson Research Center. A lot of very influential ideas came out of those places, without anybody specifically asking for them.

And then there was a small company, which shall remain unnamed, that let me personally experience this same kind of buzzing superhuman hive mind. The ideas from those early days gave us so much velocity that we overtook everyone else in our niche. Sadly, we now play it safe. Having gained so much, we now have a lot to lose. I guess that's more evidence that freedom is more important to innovation than requirements.

yay, lets use google maps to find a place that is the least far away from all users :D
and meet there ( i think it will be a place in the middle of the ocean :D )

One of the strengths of ff is that there is no academic mathematical constraint on the ideas being tried because mostly the end goal is producing interesting Fractal Art in an optimum way rather than deriving new "correct" mathematical techniques.
This of course is also a weakness but I think does leave things more open to possibilities than more formal academic investigations :)
More formal investigation can then be done of ideas that merit such.

There is also the wow factor.

Not to mention a crowd of bomb makers in Los Alamos.


MIT Media Lab. Arguably the whole of Silicon Valley too, apparently because they don't enforce noncompetes there. (Is IBM's research center located there?)

Quite right David, and this is the way to go for mayor breakthroughs, often this way of not following conventions leads to the most interesting (and in the end, in this case,  it might end up “correct” mathematically) results.

I agree with the majority of what you have stated.  But there ARE a few secrets being kept.  This can not be helped, given the environment that some of the Members have come from.  It was ingrained into them prior to joining Fractal Forums, and it is now a bad habit for them to break.

And yes, the freedom to go in many directions, using many software applications, is the most influential part of this Forum !!!    :D
 

Probably will need to be several of these, one or two per continent, based upon Member population.

( Not really a fractal guru, but I like my cave.  Very, Very, Very Much !!!! )     :D
 

Then why do you wear sunglasses? :D

Mr. Trifox wrote >it is nice to see such a remarkable mentioning in public ...

That´s great Christian, I feel so too :)  O0  :) :-)))

>in the forum, we have enthusiastic members, and even more enthusiastic moderators ...

You can be really happy beside your own activities here too  O0  :)  O0

>btw. even with the ads on the site it is far from makin money, i am still paying 30€ a month, and only get 10€ out of ads

So let´s go a l l around a bit here having a * Klick *   :) - I already did & will do my best  :police:  :police:  :police:

Margit

Those were a bit too goal oriented as an example. I mean, the theory was already there, fission, chain reaction, amount of energy released. They "merely" had to work out the practical details of handling and processing the material, and how to put it together into a weapon usable by non-experts.

So they weren't really free to come up with something unexpected (other than plain failure).

Depends what you wanted an example of. Keep in mind also that though there was one goal-end-product there those physicists forged lasting relationships and went on to produce important results in quantum theory.