Hi folks.

Some of you may remember my old "chaos pendulumn" animations. (Magnetic 
pendulumn swinging above three magnets.)

In case you don't remember, see
http://www.btinternet.com/~andrewcoppin/Secret/Map1-Post.m1v
(MPEG-I, 640x480 pixels, 25 frames/second, ~1MB)

As you can see, there are three coloured points - these are the magnets. 
The grey thing is actually a shiny silver ball - this is the magnetic 
end of the "pendulumn". (Constraining it to a sphere was too hard, so 
it's actually constrained to a plane instead.)

Notice how each magnet was a circular border drawn round it. Also notice 
the silver "launch pad" the ball starts rolling from. As the ball enters 
a circle of a particular colour, the launch pad changes to be that colour.

So what's this all about?

Well, I once saw a video tape where they showed you a graph of each 
possible ball start point, and which magnet the ball comes to a halt 
over. IT'S A FRACTAL. (Suprise!)

Anyway, I decided to go one better; I've made an animation! See:
http://www.btinternet.com/~andrewcoppin/Secret/Map2-S4-Post.m1v
(MPEG-I, 640x480 pixels, 25 frames/second, ~2.5MB)

I've also rendered another animation with a much heigher grid 
resolution. It's wonderful to watch, but it's ~85MB. (Larger than my 
webspace.) You can see the grid shape folding and warping as the balls 
fly, and the colour patterns are quite lovely too.

Next plan is to leave out the balls completely, and render a *really* 
high resolution grid! Will post the results if they are exciting enough...

Andrew @ home on Mozilla.

PS. Two things... First, the balls in the middle of the grid seem 
strangely stationary... there is a "gravity" force which (you would 
think) should accelerate them into the center - unless the magnets are 
exactly conteracting it I suppose.

Magnet  force = 1 / (distance to magnet)^2
Gravity force = distance from origin

So gravity is quite weak at the center I guess...

Also, not sure if BT's webserver is configured with the correct MIME 
type for .m1v; certainly when I view it with Mozilla, it tries to 
display it as text rather than PLAYING it... Please let me know if 
anyone else has trouble! (I'm pretty sure I set my FTP client to BINARY 
mode transfer...)

Note: I have no control over BT's webserver, sadly.

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