Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Fractals - Whoa

Episode Date: November 30, 2019

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. Get blown away by fractals in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Slash host on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it Listen to hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Howdy folks Charles W. Chuck Bryant here in the corral and I'm gonna lasso up a stuff You should know select for you from June 7th 2012 Fractals colon. Whoa. This is a tough one for me. I'm not gonna lie Fractals is one of the toughest episodes I've ever had to learn in research. That's where we're gonna revisit it right here right now Welcome to step you should know a production of iHeart radios how stuff works Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark hanging on by my fingernails

With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant doing much the same as we are 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 And fractals are 1975. Yeah, 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 Fractilians

They need to loosen up and look at some of those far out pictures. I know you know it was funny Did you watch did you watch that one doc on yeah, okay? Did you see the other the Arthur C. Clark one? No man, it was made in like maybe 86 87 and it had nothing but like Delicate sound of thunder rip off 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 rattle of the Mandelbrot set like fractals talk about fractals Yeah, and then the other half were like, oh, you guys trippin out like we did the Grateful Dead day No, this is actually math believe it or not, but it does look very it's very tie-dying nature And oh, yeah, that's why the hippies like it plus also. I mean if you've ever seen a fractal play out on the computer screen like 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 I don't need later on in life. I make myself do that. Yeah, 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 what there are calculators in life. So why can't we use them? Yeah, like they made calculator 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 Discrete well, I think this is a pretty prime example of like going around To get to the end. Yeah, 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 I'm like Oh, no, they do kind of know what they're doing. Yeah, we really didn't 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 Yeah, me too a little bit for those of you who 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. Oh, yeah, but the 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 mm-hmm 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 um and that sounds like really that put me off Like this article was pretty well done by a guy named Craig Hage it. I don't know who that is freelance, or I guess yeah um It's a pretty well done article But that a 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 are 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. Yep, 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, like 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 describe 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 should be the three dimensions, right? Yeah for like pyramids and buildings and sidewalks and combs 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, okay, 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 right 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, right? And so what you have is the fractal dimension Mm-hmm, which exists in conjunction with length within 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 We're 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 Snip it 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, right? 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

Yeah, 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 Yeah, 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 hole I'm gonna 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've just come up with is a fractal is anything that has a self-similar structure and It's recursive through iteration. That's right. Okay, so Really, I came upon this kind of easy one easy explanation of a fractal from Benoit Mandelbrot site He died by the way in 2010. Yeah, well said. 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 Serpinski gasket Uh-huh, and you take a triangle and you can combine them into a bunch of little triangles and spaces triangular spaces Yeah, 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 combine that form that larger triangle Or a self-similar version of that larger triangle the original triangle. That's called a 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 Yeah, 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 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 the you what you're using the measure the tool you're using the measure Yeah, the number the perimeter of that coastline could go on infinitely But it still contains the same finite amount of space within it'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 The 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 wasn't he was the 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 there were artists like da Vinci That saw this pattern in tree branches. That was um, I know in the nova documentary in the article they point out the Ketsu Shika Hokusai uh, 1820 Japanese artists created the great wave off Kanagawa, and uh, those are fractals It's a 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 the early african and navajo artists are doing this and they didn't realize That they were fractals and there are fractals all around us No, they just saw crystals in a snowflake or another good one. Yeah, exactly Um, 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 Right. Yeah, and and Benoit Mandelbrot was the first one to

Say, you know what we can 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 um

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 um Zed goes to z squared plus c I'll say zed. That's what it's called If you're in england zed we say zed Zed's dead, 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 um, it's an error

It's an equal sign. It looks like an equal sign with an part of an arrow pointing Toward 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 uh, 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 um initiator for the The um 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 um, and mandelbrot set Uh, 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 the number that you put in It either goes toward 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? Um, 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 Um, 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 mandel uh mandelbrot 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 gonna look like what you just saw

And the 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 I saw that it's a pretty nice little fractal you have there Hey everybody when you're staying at an air bnb you might be like me wondering Could my place be an air bnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could air bnb her cozy backyard tree house And the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel

So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an air bnb too find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca slash host on the podcast hey, dude the 90s called David lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair

Do you remember aol instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your game boy blowing on it and popping it back in As we take you back to the 90s Listen to hey, dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts 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 the coastline and going off into the infinite but still containing a finite amount A guy came after him named hell gavon coke Yeah, he came up with a coke 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

Georg canter came up with the canter 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 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 hua mandel brought was Plugging all these into computers because that's what it took. Yeah, sure people realize this like georg canter Um, man, I hope that's how you say his first name. He was he was working in the 1880s

Um, gas stone julia who came up with the julia sets for uh producing a repeating pattern using feedback loop All these guys were like 19th century early 20th century Mathematicians and it was strictly theoretical until the late 70s when guys like mandel brought who worked at ibm Started feeding these things Into these newfangled computers right and seeing the results like this fractals like the mandel brought set that he saw right right so um Almost immediately there was a practical use for fractals 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 2 the wrath of con right and uh, he was tasked with making a cgi Uh land surface like mountain range and pretty pretty mind-blowing wasn't 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, I mean 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 to do something within a certain formula. That's your fractal formula, right? And so what lauren carpenter the guy who created the um the star trek 2 landscape for the first cgi 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 the pattern slightly and then all of a sudden you have all these infinite variations The reason why when you go back and look at that shot that it still looks kind of You know today Yeah 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 dock about the the star wars. Yeah, I was making the lava splashing. Yeah, it was amazing Yes, it was because they showed the first one. They did it looks kind of plain right and then once you fed it through this infinite feedback loop it just like shattered and and 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 pretty amazing Well, that's where the word fractal comes from is Mandelbrot coined it in 1975 to say To indicate how the things fracture off and they form a regular patterns You can create a fractal that that Is regularly repeating but it doesn't look as natural in With like say if you're creating lava right 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 Right, which kind of leads you to think chuck then that there is a an application for studying natural phenomenon using fractals, right? Well, there are I I guess so all kinds. Um well, this isn't so much natural, but uh Uh, the 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 Um merely by the the 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 they did. Okay. Um 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. Yeah, so what cell phones now are based on is

Uh a fractal design called a minger sponge minger sponge Uh, yeah, I think minger and uh, it's basically a box fractal and if you Crack open your little cell phone. You're gonna 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, um, it's also all around us in nature. There's uh in that same Uh documentary that nova program. There was a team from I think university of arizona There was a team of academics. Yeah, that was pretty cool who um, we're trying to figure out if you predict the amount of

Carbon capturing capacity an entire rainforest has just by measuring Um and figuring out the self-similar system that a single tree in that rainforest. Yeah Um has that 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 uh system found in that tree Is similar to the the growth of the trees in the rainforest as a whole Pretty cool. Yes Hey friends, when you're staying at an airbnb

You might be like me wondering could my place be an airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about lisa in manitoba who got the idea to airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an airbnb too find out what your place could be earning at airbnb dot ca slash host On the podcast pay dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cold classic show Hey, dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair Do you remember aol instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your game boy blowing on it and popping it back in As we take you back to the 90s

Listen to hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Um Tumors in the human body. Yeah Uh, one of the keys to getting rid of 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 Uh 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 um, so they are now using uh 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, which is 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 the pattern that it follows if it follows like an Like a tree branching shape, right? It's healthy, right? Yeah, and then the tumors all 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 uh 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 um fractal geometries produced so far. I think um aside from CGI is what medical uh Well, just the that whole understanding that was first really kind of um voiced by lewis fry richardson with the coastline that there's um There are

Natural systems out there that we can't really 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 um, this is a kind of a biological paradox for a really long time and these guys figured it out using I guess kind of the um 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. Yeah, 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 But and then eventually you reach a point where it just gets easier and easier and easier Crazy to to use something simple to create a complex system. I love it. I do too Uh, I got one more thing. You heard this guy Jason Padgett This is pretty crazy. Um, this guy like Nine years ago. I think um Was mugged in Tacoma, Washington. Okay got hit in the back of the head really hard

Knocked him out and he acquired Um, a form of synesthesia In which he sees fractals. Wow from being hit in the head. Geez and um, basically it's an acquired savant Uh, savantism, which is pretty rare to acquire this later on um And this guy hated math and his family used to make fun of him. He said because he was the worst at pictionary Uh, couldn't draw a thing couldn't draw a lick now. This guy can draw All

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 You know a huge, you know two by two Fractal that looks like it was plotted by like a super computer 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 like 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 they have it. Well And he's you know, he's fine with it. Although he says that he's a bit obsessive about it because he's 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 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. Um, 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

Um fractals and a lot simpler to understand. I realized 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, um Little fractal shapes like I would draw some kind of geometric shape then 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 was pretty awesome 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. I watched that nova documentary. Yeah, that's good stuff

What is it chasing the hidden dimension? Yeah, is that what it's called? I should call it chasing the dragon Well, there's the dragon curved fractal. It's pretty boss. That's right. It is boss. Um, 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 listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this uh, don't eat your peanuts around me jerk. Yeah, remember when the air traffic control I remarked that I never heard the announcement that Uh, 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 uh 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 Um, my allergy is bad enough to wear the smell of peanuts Which is really just the presence of peanut molecules in the air. Yeah will cause me to get itchy and swollen Uh, 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 Geez, 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. Geez. Um, if I do have a reaction I have 20 minutes plus the 15 minutes I have before normal anaphylactic shock would kill me Uh, there really isn't a way to save me in that instance unless I can be administered the proper treatment Uh, that you can get only at a hospital as you can imagine when the 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 Uh, 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

when it comes to flying Keep up the incredible work look forward to seeing the tv pilot Ian hammer, so incredible is right if we were uh 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 We're in one of the characters almost died because like some bully at school like gave him some peanuts

Oh, yeah, was that uh, it was the martin star the character the analog to paul from wonder years Oh, okay, which was um Can't remember his name. I love freaks and geeks. Yeah Yeah, it's good 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. Um, we want to hear about it You can tweet to us at sysk podcast

You can visit us on facebook at facebook.com Slash stuff, you should know or you can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart radios how stuff works for more podcasts from iHeart radio visit the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows On the podcast hey dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it Listen to hey, dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, i'm lance bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with lance bass Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander Each week to guide you through life tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen So we'll never ever have to say bye. Bye. Bye. Bye

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