In an unrelated search I came across Mike William's code that he posted here:

http://203.29.75.35/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.4864e13d83231c9ec59235590@news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=333125&toff=400

(answering part of my original question)

Two things struck me as I played with the code last night (don't worry - I was
not injured  ;) )

1)  Using the original #version 3.5, I got a very dim image.   I wondered why he
was using "rgb 4" in the colour_map.  When I edited that to #version 3.7, it got
MUCH brighter / whiter

2)  I would have probably tried to achieve something like this with a vertical
color map applied as a y-gradient pigment.
Surprisingly, Mike's method of implementing the contour lines seems to be
completely orthogonal to that, and instead uses the x&z components of the
function to generate vertical "cylinders" which are visible at the "y-surface"
of the isosurface.   Ingenious and unexpected.

I had some fun converting this to a noise-perturbed sphere, and then getting the
contour / isobar / isometric lines to be spherical shells as well.

But that process also highlighted the fact that I often have a hard time getting
a clear understanding of how certain functions work, and how their values play
out in 3D space.

While the isosurface documentation is clear and easy to _follow_, I think I
require a bit more instruction and learning to be able to create certain
constructs from scratch.

I'm currently having a devil of a time getting this converted to 3.7 syntax:

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/message/%3ChKu%24tCAgdR04EwN%24%40econym.demon.co.uk%3E/#%3ChKu%24tCAgdR04EwN%24%
40econym.demon.co.uk%3E

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