Stuff You Should Know - Fractals: Whoa

Episode Date: June 7, 2012

In the 1980s, IBM mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot gazed for the first time upon his famous fractal. What resulted was a revolution in math and geometry and our understanding of the infinite, not to mention how we see Star Trek II. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, hanging on by my fingernails. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bright doing much the same as we were about to start speaking on Stuff You Should Know. About fractals. Yay, more math. Theoretical math. Even. Yeah. A new

branch of geometry. It's non-Euclidean. Since you brought it up. Okay. Very new. Euclidean geometry was like 300 BC. Yeah. And fractals are 1975. Yep. So there's a little bit of a gap there. There is a little bit of a gap. And there's a lot of animosity among the Euclideans toward fractillions. Fractalians. They need to loosen up and look at some of those far out pictures. I know. It was funny. Did you watch that one, Doc, on? Yeah. Okay. Did you see the other, the Arthur C. Clark one? No. It was made in like maybe 86, 87, and it had nothing but like delicate sound of thunder ripoff music going on the whole time. It was really, really trippy. Well, I posted a picture, I don't know if you saw today, on the Stuff You Should Know all of the

of the Mandelbrot set. It's beautiful. It is. And it's very cool. And I didn't even say what it was. I just posted it. And like, I'd say about half the people were like, very cool, man. This is rad. I love the Mandelbrot set. Like, fractals. Talk about fractals. And then the other half were like, oh, you guys tripping out? Like, what are you, the Grateful Dead Day? No, this is actually math, believe it or not. But it does look very, it's very tie dye in nature. And I think that's why the hippies like it. Plus also, I mean, if you've ever seen a fractal play out on a computer screen like, yeah. So we are talking about fractals. I don't necessarily want to give a disclaimer. Chuck and I are not theoretical mathematicians. We're not even like normal

mathematicians. I balance my checkbook by hand just to keep that little part of my brain going. So I don't like forget how to add and subtract later on in life. I make myself do that. And I don't let myself jump ahead. I show my work. Oh, really? Yeah. And that's about the extent of math in my life normally. See, I was the kid in math that when they said you're not allowed to use calculators, I would go like, but there are calculators in life. So why can't we use them? Yeah, like they made calculators. So we didn't have to do math. Right. But at the same time, I find that shoddy because it's like you're not, you're not, you're just circumventing learning something. And it's like the calculators there to support you after you know what you're doing.

I disagree. Well, I think this is a pretty prime example of like going around to get to the end. So when, when I was researching this, I was like, oh, okay, well, they don't really know what they're doing with this stuff yet. So we can just totally be like, well, it's, it's anything you want it to be and nothing at all. And then like I started looking a little more deeply into it. I'm like, oh, no, they do kind of know what they're doing. So we really do need to know what we're talking about. So I feel like I have just from researching this a little bit, something of a grasp of what fractals are. You need to a little bit. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, like take a second to look up just type in fractal and search images on your favorite search engine.

And you'll be like, oh, yes, of course, it's a fractal. And that's what we're going to talk about because fractal fractals are a new field, like we said, in geometry. And they do have use and they have usefulness that I think people haven't even considered yet. But the stuff that they have figured out how to use it for is pretty amazing stuff. Can I say what a fractal is? Yeah, at least so people know this should clear it all up. It is a geometric shape that is self similar through infinite iterations in a recursive pattern and through infinite detail. Exactly. So there you have it. Boom. Do we need to even continue? No, but it and that sounds like really that put me off. Like this article was pretty well done by a guy named Craig Hage. I don't know who that is,

freelance, I guess. Yeah. It's a pretty well done article, but that sentence like that can put a person off pretty easy. Sure. And he even put it, you know, you made a joke about it like, oh, you know, that you get it, you know, whatever. Right. But when you think about it, if you take that apart, one of the hallmarks of fractal fractals is that they're a very complex result from a very simple system. Yeah. And there's like basically three hallmarks to fractals that you just pointed out, right? There is self similarity, which is if you if you cut a chunk like a microscopic piece of a fractal off and compare it to the whole fractal, it's going to be virtually the same. Yeah. Or a fern. And the cool thing about fractals is, is to me, the coolest thing is

that fractals, the point they made in the NOVA documentary is that all of our math up until they discovered fractals and described fractals was based on things that we basically created and built like all geometry, right? Euclidean geometry, you have length, yeah, width and height with which would be the three dimensions, right? Yes, we're like pyramids and buildings and sidewalks and cubes and all those things. And you it's extremely useful. And we've done quite a bit with this. But what Euclidean geometry, as far as the fractal geometrists or geometers insist, fail that is when they said, OK, look at that mountain. That's a cone. It's an imperfect cone. It's a rough cone. Yeah. But it's a cone shape, right? So yeah, Euclidean geometry holds

sway. What the fractal geometers say is, yeah, you could say that it's a cone. But if you tried to measure and describe it as such, you're not going to come up with a very descriptive, a very detailed description of that mountain. So what's the point? What fractal geometry does is it says we're going to describe that mountain in every little craig and peak possible. And so what you have is the fractal dimension, which exists in conjunction with length, width and height. And what the fractal dimension describes is the complexity of the object that exists within those three dimensions as well. That's right. So finishing my point, the cool thing about fractals is that everything that we had done previously in geometry were, because of things we built,

fractals help describe things that were, have been here since the beginning of time. Yeah. In nature. And one of the truest examples of that is the fern. Right. With self similarity, you take a little snippet off of a fern, although you shouldn't do that. Let's just look at it. It's going to look the same as the larger part of the fern and then the whole fern itself, very self similar, but not necessarily exact. No, it can be. There is a form of self similarity that is exact and precise, but in nature that's rare, if not just completely not found, right? That's right. So you've got self similarity, which is the smaller part is virtually the same or looks the same or structured the same as the whole. And this process of self similarity,

going larger, smaller in scale, it's called recursiveness, right? Yeah. And recursiveness is like, you know, those paintings where it's like a guy, I think Stephen Colbert, the one that he gave to the Smithsonian has recursiveness in it, where it's a man in a painting standing in front of like a mantle and above the mantle is the painting that you're looking at. And then it goes on and on and on and on and on. Yeah. Anything that's infinitely repeating. Right. Same with if you're in a dressing room and there's a mirror on either side of the wall, you just keep going on infinitely. It's recursiveness. And with fractals, the recursiveness of self similarity, right? So there's two two traits is produced through this thing called iteration. That's right. And that's where you say,

here's the whole, I'm going to put it into this formula. And the formula has has the formula, the output of the formula produces the input for the next round of that same formula. Yeah, it's a loop. Exactly. So it's self sustaining. And it can go on infinitely recursion. Right. That's right. So what we just come up with is the fractal is anything that has a self similar structure. And it's recursive through iteration. That's right. Okay. So a really I came upon this kind of easy one, easier explanation of a fractal from Benoit Mandelbrot site. He died by the way in 2010. Yeah, he seemed like a pretty good guy. He was definitely thinking different. Yeah. And the way that Mandelbrot described a really easy way to think of a fractal is there's this

thing called the Serpentski gasket. And you take a triangle, and you can combine them into a bunch of little triangles and spaces, triangular spaces that form a larger triangle. Right. So that that one initial solid triangle is called the initiator. That's the original shape. Right. And then all those other triangles combined that form that larger triangle, or a self similar version of that larger triangle, the original triangle, that's called the generator, right? So the formula for creating a fractal would be to go into that generator, the version that has all the little smaller triangles, and make up a larger whole triangle, and say, all the ones that look like the initiator, the original just solid black triangle, take that out and swap it with the

generator version. Right. And all of a sudden you have one that's exponentially more detailed. There's more to it. And that's a fractal. That's all there is to it. You know what else is a fractal? What? The coastline. Yeah, that was a big one. Lewis Fry Richardson was an English mathematician early 20th century. And he very brilliantly said, you know what, if you take a yardstick and you measure the coastline of England, you're going to get a number. If you take a one foot ruler, and measure the coastline, you're going to get a different number. If you take a one inch ruler, and measure the coastline, you're going to get a different number. And it's basically infinite in that the smaller you go with your unit of measure, or your tool, is the larger number you're going

to get because the coastline is so infinitely varied in its little nooks and crannies. Right, exactly. There's a very cool way of thinking about it. There's a second part to that too, Chuck, is that so depending on what you're using the measure, the tool you're using the measure, the number, the perimeter of that coastline could go on infinitely, but it still contains the same finite amount of space within. That's a paradox. That is a big time paradox because things aren't supposed to be infinite and finite at the same time, right? Right. And Lewis Frye Richardson, he basically established in that coming up with that paradox, this kind of revolution and thought that fractal geometry is based on, that you can have the infinite mixed with the

finite, and you can get it from pretty simple formulas that create very increasingly complex systems, right? Yeah. And Frye wasn't the, he was the first guy to really kind of put forth this idea of thought, but he wasn't the first one to notice this paradox. Yeah, and before people even knew there were fractals, there were artists like Da Vinci that saw this pattern in tree branches that was, I know in the NOVA documentary in the article they point out the Ketsu Shika Hokusai, 1820 Japanese artist created the Great Wave off Kanagawa, and those are fractals. It's ocean waves breaking, and at the top of the crest of the waves are little self-similar waves breaking off into smaller and smaller self-similar versions. And that's a natural

fractal, or in this case it's a depiction of one. So they were, you know, early African and Navajo artists were doing this, and they didn't realize that they were fractals and that there were fractals all around us. No, they just saw crystals in a snowflake or another good one. Yeah, exactly. They were just, they saw that there was, what they were looking at was a repeating pattern that was self-similar and recursive, right? Yeah, that's it, that's a fractal. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana.

Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Where were you in 92? Were you bouncing your butt to Sir Mix a lot?

Wondering if you, like Billy Ray Cyrus, could pull off a mullet? Yes. 1992 was a crazier for music and a crazy time to be alive. And now iHeart has a podcast all about it. I'm Jason Launfier, and on my new show, Where Were You in 92, we take a ride through the major hits, One Hit Wonders, and irresistible scandals that shape what might be the wildest, most controversial 12 months in music and pop culture history. They were angry at me. They thought I was uncontrollable and wild. I wanted to burst open. The president came after me. Everybody, I'm Warner with madness. Imagine trying to put a record like that out right now. We'd be canceled before it made it to the post office. Featuring interviews and special guests

like Sir Mix a Lot, Ice Tea, Tori Amos, and Vanessa Williams, this podcast poses the question, what was it about 1992 that made it so groundbreaking and so absolutely fabulous? So buckle up and tune into Where Were You in 92. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Listen and follow on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Right? Yeah. And Benoit Mandelbrot was the first one to say, you know what, we can use math equations to actually apply to this. And he was a big star for a while. And then they sort of turned on him and said, you know what, this is all cool and trippy looking, but it's useless. Right. And he said, oh yeah, screw you guys. Watch this. And he wrote another book which started to

give some practical applications, which are pretty exciting. Yeah. So the whole thing, the whole principle that this is based on is that you can take a formula and plug in a very simple, well, a relatively simple formula like Mandelbrot's formula. We'll take that one, for example. His is Zed goes to Z squared plus C. Right? That's what it's called. If you're in England. Zed. We say Zed. Zed, baby, Zed's dead. Anyway, Zed goes to which is and the goes to is the key right here. This is what makes it fractal. Goes to means that it's an error. It's an equal sign. It looks like an equal sign with an part of an arrow pointing towards Zed. Yeah. The other point pointing toward the rest of the

formula, which means that the the there's that feedback loop where it's like, okay, once you have the number that this punches out, you have you feed it back in and you'll get another number and it'll just keep going and going and going. Right? And every time, remember, you're swapping out the original, the initiator for the the detailed version, the generator. Yeah. And it's just getting exponentially more complex with just that one iteration of that very simple formula. That's right. And Mandelbrot set. This is the one that's like, it's probably the most famous one. That's the one that the dead heads like, because it's like this crazy juxtaposition between like black and like different colors and everything. And with his formula, two things happen with

a number that you put in. It either goes towards zero or it shoots off to the infinite. Yeah. And what they did for this for the the Mandelbrot set fractals was they assigned a color to a number based on how quickly it goes off to toward infinity. Right? So let's say that you have like four, if you plug four into this, and in 10 generations, it'll it'll become an infinite number. Right. Then say that that would be grouped into a blue color, like 10 generations of blue, eight generations is red, 90 generations is orange. See what I'm saying? And then the other direction, like say if you put in 4.2 or something like that, it'll go towards zero. Right. And any number that eventually will go towards zero is represented as black. So what you have then is

this really intricate, depending on where you're zooming in or out on the fractal, this intricate change of colors. And what you're really just seeing are numbers that are plots on a plane. Yeah. And that's your fractal. And then the black parts are numbers that will eventually be be zero. Right. And most of the Mendel, uh, Mendelbrot set is black. Yeah. But if you zoom in, like that's the whole point, you zoom in on one of those little, uh, what do we even call those little spikes? Uh, I guess you could call it a plot. A plot. And it's going to look like what you just saw. And the Nova documentary is very cool when they zoom in on these. And it's sort of mind blowing. Yeah. It is very,

I strongly recommend watching that because they explain it way better than us. Well, it helps to see it for sure. Oh yeah. Big time. So, um, or draw it as I have done on my paper. I saw that it's a pretty nice little fractal you have there. Yeah. Um, Chuck. Yes. So we've talked about fractals. We talked about the Mandelbrot set. We talked about where they started to come from. Um, and the, the idea, remember Lewis Fry Richardson, he was talking about measuring, uh, the coastline and going off into the infinite, but still containing a finite amount. Um, a guy came after him named Helge von Koch. Yeah. He came up with a Koch snowflake, which is pretty cool. If you take a straight line

or you take a triangle and then on each side of the triangle in the middle, you bust out the middle into another triangular hump. You do that over and over and over again. It goes off into infinity, although it contains a finite amount of space. The perimeter goes off to the infinite. Right. A guy named, uh, George Cantor came up with the Cantor set, which is you just take a straight line and you take the middle out of it. And then for each of those two lines that produces, you do the same thing and it just keeps going on and on. And rather than going to nothingness, like you're like, well, if you take a six inch line, right, eventually you're going to bust it down in nothingness. Again, that doesn't happen. They found

that it goes off to the infinite. So they realized Ben Wall Mandelbrot was plugging all these into computers because that's what it took. Yeah, sure. People realized this, like George Cantor, um, man, I hope that's how you say his first name. He was, he was working in the 1880s. Um, Gaston Julia came up with the Julia sets for, uh, producing a repeating pattern using feedback loop. Well, these guys were like 19th century, early 20th century mathematicians. And it was strictly theoretical until the late seventies when guys like Mandelbrot who worked at IBM started feeding these things into these new fangled computers and seeing the results like this fractals like the Mandelbrot set that he saw, right? Right. So, um, almost immediately

there was a practical use for fractals, uh, that came in the form of CGI. Yeah, they interviewed that one guy in the documentary, um, who worked on the first CGI shot in motion picture history, which was Star Trek II, the Wrath of Khan. Right. And, uh, he was tasked with making, uh, a CGI, uh, land surface like mountain range and pretty mind blowing with it. Yeah. And he did. I mean, now you look back and it kind of looks silly, but at the time it was completely revolutionary. And once he learned about fractals and the geometry and the math of fractals, it was pretty easy for him. Yeah. And he made it seem like he was like, Oh, well, this is the key. This is how you do it. Right. So, well, and it is kind

of easy, especially if you know what you're doing with computer programming and math, because what you're basically doing to create a fractal generator is teaching your computer to do something within a certain formula. That's a fractal formula. Right. And so what Lauren Carpenter, the guy who created the, um, the Star Trek II landscape for the first CG, all CGI shot ever. Yeah. What he basically did was created a computer program that said, Hey, computer, I'm going to give you a bunch of triangles because I think that was the earliest stuff he was working with. Yeah. Um, I'm going to give you a bunch of triangles and I want you to take those triangles and generate a new fractal set from it. Right. And then I want you to do it again and again and

again. And then every third time I want you to start turning them 40 degrees. So that's going to change the pattern slightly. And then all of a sudden you have these infinite variations. The reason why when you go back and look at that shot that it still looks kind of, you know, today is because the computer he was working at didn't have the computing power to do that many times. Yeah, sure. Now we have higher computer computing power. And so what we're doing is telling our computers to keep going and going and going, swapping out that initiator, that one single black triangle, everywhere it can find it in this pattern, this pattern of triangles in the fractal with a brand new fractal. So it's just creating more and more and more and more

fractals, which creates a finer and finer and finer resolution, which makes something look all the more realistic. Yeah. Like the part in the doc about the Star Wars, when the guy was making the lava splashing. Yeah. It's amazing. Yes, it was because they showed the first one they did is looks kind of plain. And then once you fed it through this infinite feedback loop, it just like shattered and fractured, not fractal. Although I want to say fractal off and just look more detailed, more detailed, more detailed until it looked like lava splashing. Right. It's pretty amazing. Well, that's where the word fractal comes from is Mandelbrot coined it in 1975 to say, to indicate how things fracture off and they form a regular pattern. You can

create a fractal that is regularly repeating, but it doesn't look as natural. And with like, say, if you're creating lava, you've got to have that one rule that like every third generation, it kicks 40 degrees or whatever the rule is that just kind of throws a little bit of dissimilarity into it because if something's too self similar, it's not going to look right. It's not going to look natural. It's not going to look real, which kind of leads you to think, Chuck, then that there is an application for studying natural phenomenon using fractals, right? Well, there are. I guess so. All kinds. Well, this isn't so much natural, but the documentary interviewed Nathan Cohen, who was a ham radio operator and his landlord said, dude, you can't

have that huge antenna hanging out of your apartment. So he started bending wires, a straight wire, into essentially a fractal and found that on the very first go, it got better reception merely by the fact that it was bent in that way. Right. And it was self similar. So he eventually used that to, I hope, make a lot of money. I got the impression that he did. Okay. By applying that technology to cell phones and the way they describe it is all the different things a cell phone can do. If you were to have a different antenna for each one of those functions, it would be like carrying around a little porcupine. So what cell phones now are based on is a fractal design called a minger sponge, minger sponge. Yeah, I think minger. And it's basically a box

fractal. And if you crack open your little cell phone, you're going to see it wired that way. Yeah, you're going to be looking at a fractal. It's a square, right? And then within it are a bunch of little squares in a recursive self similar pattern. And you friend are looking at a fractal. It's all around us. Yeah. It's also all around us in nature. There's in that same documentary that Nova program, there was a team from I think University of Arizona. There's a team of academics. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Who were trying to figure out if you predict the amount of carbon capture and capacity an entire rainforest has just by measuring and figuring out this self similar system that a single tree in that rainforest has makes sense. Well, it does,

but it's kind of a leap. It's like, Oh, okay. So as one tree, does it follow the same system that the whole rainforest does? And they apparently found that yes, in fact, it does, right? Yeah, the same branching system found in that tree is similar to the the growth of the trees in the rainforest as a whole. Pretty cool. Yes. Um, tumors in the human body. Yeah. One of the keys to getting rid of cancer is or any kind of tumors spotting these tumors early on. But with our ultrasound technology, you can only get so small and so detailed that you can't see some of these natural fractals that, you know, your blood vessels are fractals, essentially, just like the branches of a tree are. So they are now using geometry to now, if I'm not sure if I got this

right, but I think it shows up, it shows the flow of the blood, because ultrasound can pick that up through these fractals when they can't even pick up the vessels themselves. Right. Is that right? Yeah. Early, earlier tumor spotting. Right. Well, for all intents and purposes, they're looking at the vessels by finding the blood because they see where it's flowing. But yeah, depending on the pattern that it follows, if it follows like a tree branching shape, it's healthy, right? Yeah. And then the tumors, the veins are all bent and crooked and go in all crazy directions. The readout of a heartbeat. Yeah. It's not consistent. It's a fractal. Yeah. So they use fractal analysis now to study your heart rate and use that to better understand how arrhythmia happens.

Through math. So there's the, especially with natural systems, that's kind of like the biggest contribution that fractal geometries produced so far, I think, aside from CGI. Is what medical? Well, just that whole understanding that was first really kind of voiced by Lewis Fry Richardson with the coastline, that there are natural systems out there that we're not quite paying attention to. Right. We don't really know how to deal with, that we're trying to apply something like Euclidean geometry to something that you can't really use that for. Right. That that's what fractal geometries really contributed so far is to basically say, hey, there's a lot of natural systems out here that are self-similar and recursive. And now that we kind of see in the

fractal world, we see them everywhere and we have a better understanding of them. One of the best examples of that I thought was figuring out how larger animals use less energy than smaller animals. They use energy more efficiently. And this is kind of a biological paradox for a really long time. And these guys figured it out using I guess kind of the same kind of insight that fractal geometry has that if you take genes and genes are the mathematical formula or the equivalent of a mathematical formula and you feed in these genetic processes, what it's going to put out is this self-similar recursive pattern to where the bigger the organism is, the more this thing goes and goes and goes, the less energy it's going to use because there's

more of it and it doesn't require very much energy to produce past a certain point. So if you have a very small animal, it's using a lot of energy to do these things to carry this out. But there's that economy of scale because you're still using a relatively simple formula, your genetic code, right, to carry out a very complex, seemingly complex system, which is your organs or you as an organism. Right. So in the end an elephant uses less energy than a mouse? Yes, because they're both using the same formula, the same input, and then eventually you reach a point where it just gets easier and easier and easier. Crazy. To use something simple to create a complex system. I love it. I do too. I got one more thing. You heard this guy, Jason Padgett. This is pretty

crazy. This guy, like nine years ago, I think, was mugged in Tacoma, Washington, got hit in the back of the head really hard, knocked him out, and he acquired a form of synesthesia in which he sees fractals from being hit in the head. And basically it's an acquired savantism, which is pretty rare to acquire this later on. And this guy hated math and his family used to make fun of him, he said, because he was the worst at Pictionary, couldn't draw a thing, couldn't draw a lick. Now this guy can draw reportedly mathematically correct fractals by hand. Wow. And he's the only person on earth that can do this. Holy cow. And you should see these things. They're like a huge 2x2 fractal that looks like it was plotted by a supercomputer,

and this guy does these by hand now out of nowhere because he got hit on the head. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's crazy. He got hit in the fractal center, huh? He did. That's strange that we would have that ability to lighten in us, you know? Yeah, well they studied his brain, of course, and they found that the two areas that lit up in the left hemisphere were the areas that control exact math and mental imagery. So there we have it. Wow. And he's fine with it, although he says that he's a bit obsessive about it because it's one of those deals where everywhere he looks now he sees fractals. Oh, yeah. Well, I got the impression that people who are fractal geometers have the same thing. Yeah. You know, they're like, look at that cloud. I can figure out how to describe

it completely. Yeah, with math. Yeah. It's crazy. And then it's everywhere. Canopies of the trees. Like, I got that impression as well that once you start seeing fractals in natural systems, like then everything becomes fractals and a lot simpler to understand. I realize today that I have always doodled in fractals. Oh, yeah? Yeah, because I can't really draw. So whenever I doodle, it's like, it's always been little fractal shapes. Like I would draw some kind of geometric shape and split off from that and make it smaller. And in the end, they're sort of like fractals. Well, your fractal tree that you showed me is pretty awesome. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Where were you in 92? Were you bouncing your butt to sir mix a lot? Wondering if you like Billy Ray Cyrus can pull off a mullet? Yes. 1992 was a crazier for music and a crazy time to be alive. And now iHeart has a podcast all about it. I'm Jason Launfier and on my new show, where were you in 92? We take a ride through the major hits, one hit wonders and irresistible scandals that shape what might be the wildest, most controversial 12 months in music and pop culture history. They were angry at me. They thought I was uncontrollable and wild. I wanted to burst open. The president came after me. Everybody, I'm Warner with madness. Imagine trying to put a

record like that out right now. We'd be canceled before it made it to the post office. Featuring interviews and special guests like sir mix a lot, ice tea, Tori Amos and Vanessa Williams. This podcast poses the question, what was it about 1992 that made it so groundbreaking and so absolutely fabulous? So buckle up and tune into where are you in 92? New episodes drop every Wednesday. Listen and follow on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. So you got anything else? Uh, no, I would strongly urge you to read this article a few more times and then maybe go off and read some more about fractals because we definitely have not covered all of it. Watch that Nova documentary. Yeah, it's good stuff. What is it?

Chasing the Hidden Dimension? Yeah. Is that what it's called? It should call it chasing the dragon. Well, there's the dragon curved fractal. It's pretty boss. That's right. It is boss. So you want to type fractals in the search bar, howstuffworks.com to start and that will bring up this very, very good article. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listen to mail. Josh, I'm going to call this don't eat your peanuts around me, jerk. Yeah. Remember when the air traffic control remarked that I never heard the announcement that no one can eat peanuts on the plane? Yeah. I've flown a lot in my life. Yeah. I've never heard that before. Yeah. So Ian Hammer writes in on the air traffic control episode, you were talking about peanuts being

completely absent on some flights. And as a person that is really allergic to peanuts, I can shed some light. My allergy is bad enough to where the smell of peanuts, which is really just the presence of peanut molecules in the air, will cause me to get itchy and swollen. In the case that I am in contact with a peanut, I have the superpower of becoming a balloon. And I'll swell up to the point where I will be dead in a matter of minutes. I can delay the anaphylactic shock for 10 minutes, give or take with an injection of epinephrine. And this will only work twice. Like twice in his life? I think so. If I do have a reaction, I have 20 minutes plus the 15 minutes I have before normal anaphylactic shock would kill me. There really isn't a way to save me

in that instance, unless I can be administered the proper treatment that you can get only at a hospital. As you can imagine, when a plane is at 30,000 feet, there's not much can be done to get me to a hospital within that 35 minute time frame. So flying can be a pretty scary thing when someone near you decides that they really want a peanut butter cup. People do this sometimes and it's a real pain to have to deal with. I just wanted to give you guys an overview of peanut allergy sufferers. Now when it comes to flying, keep up the incredible work. Look forward to seeing a TV pilot, Ian Hammer. So incredible is right. If we were insensitive to that, then all apologies. He didn't indicate that, but I think we weren't. I just remember being surprised. Yeah, I was surprised,

but and I knew allergies could get bad. But man, but I think on the plane, I was like, what? I've known about this since I saw an episode of Freaks and Geeks, where in one of the characters almost died because like some bully at school like gave him some peanuts. Oh yeah. Was that a it was the Martin star? The character? The analog to Paul from Wonder Years. Oh, okay. Which was, I can't remember his name. I'll look for some geeks. Yeah. Well, let's see. Allergies. How about a fractal story? Yeah. If you know something about fractals that we don't or can correct us or explain it better than we did, which I'm not sure that that's much of a long shot. We want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can visit

us on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know or send us an email at stuffpodcast at discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you check out your podcast.