Fractal friends

I was working on a program to make branching curlicue designs, when my kids came in and asked how the pictures were made.  I explained that the computer follows directions based on the numbers you give it.  I changed the maximum angle that the curls could bend at each segment, and these cool shapes started popping up.

We noticed that some of the images looked like recognizable objects (like finding pictures in clouds), so we took some of our favorites into Photoshop and drew on them.  We found a spaceship...

 A mermaid...

 

 A jumping bear...

 

 And some birds on a wire

 

Here's the program if you want to look for your own fractal friends.

Nelson's MagicTile

Magic Tile is a free program (possibly for Windows only) that provides a large number of Rubik's cube variations in different geometries.  Some of them are much simpler to solve than others, and viewing the different projections is fun in itself.