Mandelbrot's Vegetable Stand
I can't say I expected to see fractals mentioned in an article about cauliflower — or a casual mention of "the Mandelbrot theory" by a cauliflower farmer — but I wasn't terribly surprised either. I've seen these Romanesco cauliflowers and they are visually astonishing, regardless of whether one is a "Caltech guy" or not. I'm not convinced that our author has a deep understanding of fractals, but she manages to capture the spirit and not do much violence to the idea of self-similarity (at all length scales), so Mrs. Scattergood gets the gold star in science communication for today.
But the Romanesco cauliflower is an heirloom and isn't to be confused with green cauliflower, or broccoflower, which is a cross between a broccoli and a cauliflower. Romanesco is astonishing in appearance, as much for its composition as for its color. Lime-green in hue, a head (or curd) of Romanesco is a near-perfect example of naturally occurring fractal: a fragmented geometric shape composed of smaller parts that are copies of the whole. The cauliflower resembles an M.C. Escher print more than something you'd find naturally occurring in your vegetable garden.
"The guys at Caltech come down and study them," says Alex Weiser of Weiser Family Farms, in whose farmers market stands you'll find all three varieties of cauliflower. "Something about the Mandelbrot theory." But you don't need a degree in mathematics to cook them. Whether they're fully grown or beautiful babies, Weiser prefers his cauliflower roasted, with just a little sea salt and olive oil splashed on before they're put in a hot oven.
[Amy Scattergood, "A Brilliant Comeback", Los Angeles Times via Baltimore Sun, undated, read on 19 January 2006.]
In: All, Food Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
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on Thursday, 18 January 2007 at 17.42
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Heck with the science; that roasted with oil and salt bit sounds tasty.
Seriously, I watched a PBS special that went on at great length about fractals and Mandelbrot theory. I think I got the general drift. But it was probably without an appreciation for deeper insight and larger possibilities that a really science-savvy viewer got. It's perhaps something lacking in me that the fascination with it all just wasn't there.
If there had been a tie-in to medical research or therapy, I probably would've gotten right into it. Funny how the mind sorts and selects. I was never much for biology, but found anatomy and physiology absolutely fascinating.
on Friday, 19 January 2007 at 01.42
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It's all part of my past because when I was in graduate school I did some fluid-dynamics research that concerned turbulence, so we paid attention to the newly fashionable research in chaos, and Mandelbrot was just making his splash with fractals, and strange attractors — which tend to be fractal and associated with chaotic systems — were all the rage….
In fact, I have seen some studies done about strange attractors that appear in studies of irregular heart rhythms, but that's a bit of a stretch. Perhaps you should focus on the roasted fractals with oil and salt. Well, until I get around to elucidating all this, of course.