A visualization of chaos is given by fractals. I showed you the pictures of fractal trees taken during a walk at the Parc de Sceaux after a snowfall in Paris. But I had taken a few more pictures of the very beautiful French garden of this Park.
A French garden (“jardin à la française”) is a nice illustration of control. Basically, the gardener controls the shape of the trees. The proximity of the natural trees with their fractal shapes and the gardened trees allowed me to take great pictures that show this contrast between chaos and control.

Let’s begin with my preferred one:

I love the description given by the BBC for their documentary “The Secret Life of Chaos” (which you can watch here).
As I have written a few articles about fractals, chaos and controls lately, I have added links internal to this blog to the text.

“Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia - how did we get here?

In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science -

• how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life?
• How does order emerge from disorder?

It’s a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics.

Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans - after watching this film you’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.”

Notice that this introduction can be sum up by “Chaos vs God” or “Chaotical Design vs Intelligent Design”. However, anyway, one question remains: who created the laws of physics? Or how were created these laws of Physics, if you prefer ;-)

I have often privately said that James Gleick’s Chaos book gives clearer answers than the Bible about our world. Now is the time to say it publicly!

Enjoy the documentary!

The BBC aired on Thursday, January 14th an excellent documentary about Chaos, Fractals and Nature. You can watch it right here thanks to YouTube. If you are in UK you can also watch it on the BBC website at this address.

I am glad the BBC helps making these subjects popular and fashionnable more than 20 years after James Gleick’s Chaos book.

Part 1

All parts follow.

Thx Pixgeeks for reminding me of this nice Google logo involving fractals.

It was in memoriam to Gaston Julia’s Birthday.

In case I need to precise, the fractals you see on the logo are called Julia sets because the French mathematician Gaston Julia described them first. However, most of my readers already know that, right? ;-)

To say something only initiated people can understand: “The Mandelbrot set contains all Julia sets”. (That is why the fractal on the left is actually the Mandelbrot set.)

You can check all google logos here.

You probably already know that the snowflake and the tree branches are the canonical examples of fractals.

So, as in Paris we have the chance to have currently a lot of snow, I went to the “Parc de Sceaux” to make these wonderful pictures.
I only regret the sky was not as blue as in Normandy.

Children making a snow battle under a magnificient fractal tree.

Picture showing the fractal invariance of scale in a tree. Background is the Battle of Normandy (D-Day) Memorial, in memoriam to the allied forces who liberated Europe from the Nazi yoke, Caen, France.

I wish you to have all your wishes realized. But to be a little more accurate, I actually wish you to precisely know what you want and wish. Because wishes have a much better chance of becoming true if you can clearly formulate them.

That-is-to-say, in order to clearly know what you want, and how you can get it, you will need:

• Aims (requirements)
• A plan to reach them (control system)
• Means to act (actuators)
• Means to measure your effort (sensors)
• The ability to adapt to your environment and to what you have measured (back to the control system) Notice a good control system does allow you to change your aims as well as your plans along the road. Heading straight into a storm is probably not a good idea…

Mandelbulb by Daniel White

As we are still at the beginning of the holiday season, maybe you haven’t bought all your gifts yet. In that case, here are a few lifechanging books you can offer to your loved ones.
By lifechanging, I mean you will never look at the world in the same way after reading one of these books. There is even a good chance you will find the world a lot more simple after your reading because these books give you keys to the behaviour of nature and mankind.

Why Microsoft fails, Why Google Rocks? It is a matter of marketing. Don’t piss off your users, especially your potential fans.

This post was actually meant to be an apologia of Microsoft Pivot but it won’t be. I requested an invite on Friday. I got it today. This is nice and fast but it stops there. Let’s see why, worst thing will be last.

I have got 8 remaining invites for Google Wave. If you want one, just add a (nice) comment below with your email in the email field (not in the comment itself). I will invite you from Google Wave, asap. It will take a day or two before you receive an email from Google that will give you the actual access to Wave.

Once you are surfing the wave, remember, to search for public waves, use this query: with:public. To search for French public waves, use with:public tag:fr.

If you want to create a public wave:

• Add public@a.gwave.com to your contact list (press enter even if it tells you the user does not exist)
• Create a wave and add this contact.

Enjoy Wave.

As a control system engineer and Mandelbrot/Taleb fan, I want to bring this quick clarification (It will be worth a longer post another day):

Extremistan is the world of unstable systems (predicting a final state on an unstable system is a mathematical nonsense and predicting a transient state is computationnally impossible).
Extremistan is the fractal world of Mandelbrot.

Mediocristan is the world of stable systems (you can predict the final state and even the transient if you are good but it is already difficult to predict the transient state for a stable system).
Mediocristan is the Linear / Gaussian Paradise.