On Mon, 27 Sep 1999 11:09:40 -0400, Chris Maryan wrote:
>The area would be spherical when the center point is
>away from any other center point/area groups and would blend together
>with other groups when they are close (Think blobs, defined by a center
>point and having a specific radius when not influenced by other blobs).

This isn't true of the lava lamp in my son's room.  The blobs in his
lamp don't tend to merge due to surface tension and/or temperature effects, 
so most of them end up being either spherical or ellipsoidal after they
separate from the mass of wax at the bottom of the lamp.  They tend to
change eccentricity as they rise, due to oscillations induced by the "neck"
breaking and a large quantity of wax being pulled toward the center of 
the blob by surface tension.  There is also an area at the top of the lamp 
populated by a bunch of spheres of various sizes, packed together (and thus 
no longer spherical, but you might get away with representing them as spheres 
for POV purposes.)  Every now and then, one of those spheres cools off enough 
to sink back to the bottom but it doesn't attempt to merge with blobs on their 
way up; it seems to bounce or roll off of them.  How long it takes a sphere to 
cool and fall is probably a complex function of its radius (the ratio of volume 
to surface area is proportional to radius) and its position within the cluster 
(the temperature gradient is probably higher near the outside of the lamp, so 
heat transfer takes place more quickly.)

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