If you followed the links at the bottom of yesterday’s post, you saw the wonders of the Julia set. Actually, the Julias are a whole family of sets. Here is one of them. In this representation, a white point is a member of the set. The other points are not, with a darker shade of grey corresponding to rapid disqualification.
The Julia sets inspired some famous crop circles that I thought you might enjoy. As you probably know, a crop circle is a pattern made in a standing crop. The early ones were just circles, but these days they are much more elaborate.
There is considerable controversy over whether crop circles are produced by humans, aliens, or even Gaia herself. Whatever their origin, they are beautiful works of art, well-qualified for August’s 31 Days of Wonder.
This Julia set-inspired formation appeared right next to Stonehenge (!) in 1996.
What could have caused it? Crop circle researcher Lucy Pringle interviewed an eyewitness who claimed it appeared under a mysterious, swirling mist during daylight hours. Circlemakers.org, a Website for human crop-circle artists, presents a more skeptical interview of someone who claims it was made the night before, by people, and was only noticed during the following day.
Also fun to visit is BLT Research‘s Website, which is largely devoted to the strange attributes of crop circles, which have convinced some people that some of the circles could not be of human origin.
If you just want to look at pretty pictures, CropCircleConnector.com has plenty of them. Enjoy and wonder!
Path of the Beagle 
Utterly fascinating! Dad