Here’s Fractalspin‘s top picks for geeky-yet-cool gifts for dads this year. There’s also a giveaway for a special edition Sage on Black Neuron Tie (pictured above) by Cyberoptix. To enter, you need to comment on Fractalspin’s wall and tell them “Who’s your favorite dad?”

Greeting cards are in full circulation during the holiday season, and I had been thinking a while about something that would be geeky and retro, so I went searching for old-school punch cards.

A punched card (also known by various synonyms) is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Now almost an obsolete recording medium, punched cards were widely used throughout the 19th century for controlling textile looms and in the late 19th and early 20th century for operating fairground organs and related instruments. They were used through the 20th century in unit record machines for input, processing, and data storage. Early digital computers used punched cards, often prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. -wikipedia

You can grab a set of them at Fractalspin: Punchcards.
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Benoit Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry died at the age of 85 this week. Fractals are a visual representation of an equation that is self-similar and based on recursion, and just so happen to mimic an incredible array of natural processes and formations, from mountain ranges to coral reefs, and interestingly, as the above video explains, explains not only the way branches of a tree are differentiated but how trees in a forest differentiate themselves. Pretty hot.

Mandelbrot Set featuring the song “Mandelbrot Set” by Jonathan Coulton

Here is a zoomed Mandelbrot fractal set to a song aptly entitled “Mandelbrot Set.”

Mr. Mandelbrot also did a lovely TED talk, which you can watch above.

For the geek boutique I run, Fractalspin (namesake obvious), I designed a paper toy called “Mandelbot” named after the man himself. You can download the PDF, print it out and assemble it for free.

RIP Benoit, and thank you for adding to our collective understanding.

Presented without comment. :-)

Check out two new earrings styles from Zelle featuring the love emoticon <3. The round version is available for $34 and the heart-shaped one is $38 at Fractalspin.
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