Branches 20090325

Out for a walk along Rockland with my wife Saturday morning, I threw out the idea that natural things differ from man-made things in one key aspect - natural things seem to inherently branch off where as man-made things are static and self-contained. The bushes, trees, clouds, and even human offspring and interactions all branch off to other, newer things that are pretty much structurally the same as the parent. Juan Armando Sánchez in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Columbia has even dedicated a website to his study of branching in aquatic animals. Fractals are like the ultimate abstraction of branching off. 'The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure at all scales, but the same "type" of structures must appear on all scales.' A suite of works of branching off, hmmmm...