Tonight I decided to grab the deck at dinner and let Baby Girl tell us the letter and see how many of the other cards the kids knew. I quickly discovered Daddy and I needed help with some!
Cell Membrane and Zoological oddity were rather easy.
Jovian Moons merely had us questioning if it was a particular set of the moons of Jupiter or all of them or ones like them (turns out it is just any old moon of Jupiter)
Then there was Mandelbrot Fractal Set. I really had no idea what it was. Without seeing the card Dude tells me it is a shape with a circle on a circle on a circle and it gets smaller with other circles around it. Pretty accurate discription.
The card has a version colored similar to that, only upended to look a bit more like a snowman.
Daddy and I figured a Mandelbrot fractal was a fractal discovered or defined by a guy named Mandelbrot. But what was a fractal? I knew it was 'a repetitive picture'. but that didn't seem like a very good description.
We of course headed to Wiki. Turns out a Mandelbrot Fractal is that. The picture up there, it is a math equation that when you plot the points it looks like that over and over again. If you zoom in on the fringes and edge circles they are a repeat of the big pattern. In fact I found this nifty online program that lets you do just that.
Cool Math Fractal generator though it isn't really a generator, it just colors the Mandelbrot fractal different ways and lets you zoom in over and over again. The kids thought it was pretty nifty.
Wiki also had some interesting info on fractals (and a better definition) Along with lots of pictures of different fractals in nature.
Ain't nature beautiful?
We only made it through half a dozen cards since we stopped to talk about them so much. Guess we will have to try again another night.
I'm delighted to hear you are enjoying them. Sounds like a fun dinner activity.
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