The Bactra Review   The Computational Beauty of Nature

---

I must confess the emphasis on fractals puzzles me; they can be pretty, and there are some interesting scale-invariant natural phenomena and objects, but not that many. And, in fact, they're not very complex, even in the Kolmogorov sense which Flake uses, precisely because they can be constructed recursively; in effect one says ``It's like that all the way down.'' (This lack-of-complexity is why Michael Barnsley's patents on fractal image compression are actually reasonably valuable.)