"Two men look out through the same bars : One sees the mud, and one sees the stars." - Frederick Langbridge, A Cluster of Quiet Thoughts

If you’ve placed second in a writing contest, will you jump for joy and push for better results the next time or will you be discouraged and find an excuse not to join again?

In life, you are always filled with choices. You may opt to have a pessimist’s view and live a self - defeated life or you may decide to take the optimist’s route and take a challenging and fulfilling life.

So why nurture an optimist’s point of view? And why now?   more »

Michael Barnsley, a researcher and entrepreneur in fractal compression, has written the successor to Fractals Everywhere. The first edition of the book SuperFractals was published last month. The following is a quote from the editorial review on Amazon

"Superfractals is the long-awaited successor to Fractals Everywhere, in which the power and beauty of Iterated Function Systems were introduced and applied to producing startling and original images that reflect complex structures found for example in nature. This provoked the question of whether there is a deeper connection between topology, geometry, IFS and codes on the one hand and biology, DNA and protein development on the other. Now, 20 years later, Barnsley brings the story up to date by explaining how IFS have developed in order to address this issue. New ideas such as fractal tops and superIFS are introduced, and the classical deterministic approach is combined with probabilistic ideas to produce new mathematics and algorithms that open a whole theory that could have applications in computer graphics, bioinformatics, economics, signal processing and beyond. For the first time these ideas are explained in book form, and illustrated with breathtaking pictures."

Check it out, this is one book I look forward to reading!