Fifteen Minutes

Fifteen Minutes

The map above is a representation of where visitors to my fractal site are from, as tracked by Extreme Tracking.com over the past five years. Light gray shaded countries denote countries that have had at least one visitor logged while the darker grays indicate those without hits. About 70,000 visitors have been recorded so far. Now, that’s not very many hits when one considers the daily traffic at Google or eBay, but...

When I think about it, it’s still pretty amazing that at least a few people in diverse locales like Mongolia, Peru, Kenya, and Albania have seen my fractal art and know my name. Without the Internet, this wouldn’t be possible.

This thought was reinforced when one of my fractal images was selected to be shown at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid this past summer. People were actually waiting in line to get in and see the exhibited works. And I never even had to leave my home to create and submit the image – It was all done via the Web, the data sent over the wires and fibers and printed/framed thousands of miles away..

Our kids take the Web for granted. My teenage girls simply can’t imagine living life without it. Or without cell phones and ipods.. But for most of my life the Internet wasn’t around. Up through most of the Nineties, the odds of very many people beyond my personal friends and acquaintances knowing that I existed as an individual were virtually zero. So, the Internet has empowered my fifteen minutes of “fame”.

On the other hand, some things don't change. I spent today installing a new radiator in number one daughter’s car, with anti-freeze and transmission fluid dripping into my eyes and the usual resulting set of skinned knuckles. I did the same thing one Saturday back in ’77 with my ’68 Buick..

\\ How 'bout those Detroit Tigers?
\\\ Eliminated the mighty Yankees today..


-Paul