teenage kicks pessoa returns

heaven, a little surprising to be in heaven so early this saturday...

gillian welch on my stereo, just reached my favourite song (album - time - the revelator), just went out of my room to begin my morning ablutions and someone has placed my fernando pessoa book that has been missing for maybe 4 weeks now, outside my door...

i've been really missing it for all of this time but in particular last night i was writing some lyrics and i really wanted to get a little pessoa headspace in me...

the day i lost it was also a saturday, me & P had been out dancing the night before and we were having a party at my house... i put the book down somewhere when i got in the house, a little worse for wear... once i remembered about it the whole house had been transformed into a party house and back again...

and i wanted to briefly talk about the mandelbrot set that is currently residing over there in my links... the day i first met the mandelbrot set...

i was with K de B, a school friend, we were 16 or so, he took me to blackwells bookshop in oxford, my first visit..

now blackwells bookshop is a small looking building from the outside but if you go into it you'll find a stairway leading downwards into this cavernous space... much bigger than the shop above it, or so it seemed to me..

so it was with wonder that i was being led down this stairway into this huge space, and he led me directly to a stand with the new book chaos - by james gleik, and he opened it to the pictures in the middle and showed me pictures of this mandelbrot set, and my mind was already expanding at quite a rate just to take in this space we were in, looking at the 3 or 4 pictures of the set and then successive magnifications of the set... opened me right up...

i remember it really clearly, the wonder of these pictures...

in the end i bought the book and it was a real factor in me choosing to do mathematics at university, chaos theory made the whole of maths seem glamour itself...

and i longed for a way i could discover the mandelbrot set myself, not just rely on other peoples pictures, but our zx spectrum wasn't up to much back then...

so i urge you ladies and gentleman to just go over there and click on that little fella, click on the edge of that wierd shape and just keep clicking, going deeper into it, increase the resolution as you go in more and more....

ok, evangelism over...

thankyou whoever brought fernando pessoa to my door...

x