Thursday, February 1, 2007

First Friday Fractals - Feb 2nd 6:00 & 7:30, LodeStar Planetarium

Hi everyone, and welcome to all the new people on this list!

First Friday Fractals is happening again this week, and I encourage those of you who haven't seen this show yet to come check it out! And for those of you who have seen it a while ago, please check it out again, as it keeps evolving and improving. In fact, I'm in the middle of rendering perhaps the most-amazing-fractal-animation-ever right now, and you can see its world premier this Friday at 6:00 and 7:30 at the LodeStar Planetarium in the Natural History Museum in ABQ. This fractal sequence is designed to be not just beautiful immersive art, but also an engaging lesson into the nature of complexity. This fractal journey is a very good metaphor for many of the complex systems we live in, and it shows how small changes in the starting conditions can lead to dramatic and abrupt changes in the results. We live in a highly nonlinear world - one of the most important parts of the Fractal Foundation's mission is to teach people to think about the world this way. Come check out what I'm talking about, this Friday at LodeStar.
As usual, I recommend getting your tickets ahead of time, by calling the Museum's box office at 841-2869 starting Friday morning. We have sold out every single show (14 in a row!) since we started doing this last summer, so in all likelihood it'll fill up again. So get there early to get in and get the best seats. I sure hope we sell out - please, invite your friends too!

And yes, we really do need your support, especially now. Here's why: the laptop I have been using when I make fractal presentations in schools and other venues... has just broken. Inevitably, it was just 2 weeks out of warranty. So, I need to get a new one urgently. Now in most industries, you can get by just fine with an average, inexpensive computer. But in the [extremely sparse] fractal education industry, where we do real-time, high-res fractal calculations for live audiences, faster is always better. So I'm getting a good one. In fact, I'm jumping over to the other side, and getting a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, a smoking machine which I'm very excited about. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of Andrew Stone, an Apple developer at Stone.com, I'm about to get a $3000 laptop for less than half that. Yeay! And a big public thank you goes to Andrew also for creating the incredible new "Videator" software, which allows magnificent real-time video processing. But, we still need to raise a bit of money quickly, which is where your support comes in. Buying tickets to the First Friday show is a great way way to help, as the Fractal Foundation gets 30% of the proceeds. You can also buy fractal T-shirts at our website, or custom fractal fine art, elegantly framed and infinitely fascinating (contact me). Or, invite me to come speak about fractals and chaos theory at your child's school or at a professional function. Or simply cut to the chase, you can contribute directly via PayPal on our "Thank You for Donating" page.

Thanks so much, and I hope to see a bunch of you this Friday!

--
Jonathan Wolfe, Ph.D.
Executive Director
http://www.FractalFoundation.org


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