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Of course it's not an actual fractal, because you know, infinity... But take the Romanesco Broccoli, it really looks like a fractal. It can't be just random. T
by d--b 3y ago
Of course it's not an actual fractal, because you know, infinity...
But take the Romanesco Broccoli, it really looks like a fractal. It can't be just random. There definitely is some kind of mechanism that's fractal-ish somewhere.
- kqr 3y agoYou can estimate Hausdorff dimensions of non-infinitessimal things, like coastlines.
- Y_Y 3y agoIndeed, and there's a nice list of them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_... It's also worth noting that there are other ways of "measuring" fractal dimension that do not always agree so it can be informative to also look at e.g. box counting dimension too.
- wrs 3y agoIt isn’t random, and it also isn’t a fractal (as is explained in the very short article). In other news, the golden ratio doesn’t really occur in nature as much as people would like to believe. [0] [0] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_07.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_07.htm...
- kergonath 3y ago> as is explained in the very short article It’s a straw man. The fractal is an analogy; nobody seriously thinks you can zoom in or out of a cauliflower infinitely. We know about atoms and stuff. It’s just pointless pedantry.
- wrs 3y agoAnalogies are only useful to the extent they have explanatory power. The assertion here is that this one doesn’t: there are several distinct growth mechanisms applied in sequence, not a recursive application of the same mechanism.
- anigbrowl 3y agoDifferent mechanisms can use the same template. The Romanesco cauliflower is so obviously self-similar that ignoring this in favor of talking about mechanisms that vary according to scale needs is missing the forest for the trees.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoBiology has the concept of convergent evolution. Would you say a Thylacine is a Wolf, and that it's appropriate to treat one as the other? Fractals are a singular example of repeating patterns, but there are additional repeating pattern types that aren't fractals. Just like Thylacines and Wolves were/are examples of apex predators, not versions of each other.