Mandelbrot Fractals are endlessly fascinating. This is a video of zooming into a Mandelbrot Fractal, and one of the best I’ve seen. There is no limit to how far one may zoom into a Fractal. No math needed to enjoy this Fractal Zoom. Enjoy!!
For math nerds only: Benoit Mandelbrot discovered Mandelbrot Fractals (what a coincidence!). The math is Z= Z^2 + C iterated on the “Complex Plane.” The key to how amazing these fractals are is that they are laid out on the “Complex Plane,” which means the y-axis consists of imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers are numbers based on the square root of -1. This alone is awesome beyond belief because as any high school math student knows, there is no such thing as the square root of -1. They get around this by simply called such numbers “imaginary!” Moreover, there is no other way to get zooms of nearly infinite depth, complexity and beauty unless you DO use these impossible imaginary numbers!
All that aside, sit back and enjoy the following very deep dive into a Mandelbrot Fractal!
Hippies dancing during an anti-war demonstration staged by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam at Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Stadium on April 15, 1967.
Everyone likes to bash millennials. We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.
But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything?
That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.
I spoke to Gibney about these claims, and why he thinks the baby boomers have wrecked America.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Who are the baby boomers?
Bruce Gibney
The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.
But it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve basically been in charge ever since.
Sean Illing
So how have they broken the country?
Bruce Gibney
Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.
The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children.
We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education.
Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.“TIME AFTER TIME, WHEN FACTS COLLIDED WITH FEELINGS, THE BOOMERS CHOOSE FEELINGS.”
Sean Illing
Why hasn’t this recklessness been checked by the political system? Is it as simple as the boomers took over and used power to enrich themselves without enough resistance from younger voters?
Bruce Gibney
Well, most of our problems have not been addressed because that would require higher taxes and therefore a sense of social obligation to our fellow citizens. But again, the boomers seem to have no appreciation for social solidarity.
But to answer your question more directly, the problem is that dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the largest political class in the country — the boomers. There’s nothing conspiratorial about that. Politicians respond to the most important part of the electorate, and that’s been the boomers for decades. And it just so happens that the boomers are not socially inclined and have a ton of maladaptive personality characteristics.
Sean Illing
It’s interesting that Ronald Reagan is elected right around the time that boomers become a majority of the electorate. Reagan himself wasn’t a boomer, but it was boomers who put him into office. And this is when we get this wave of neoliberalism that essentially guts the public sector and attempts to privatize everything.
Bruce Gibney
Right. Starting with Reagan, we saw this national ethos which was basically the inverse of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” This gets flipped on its head in a massive push for privatized gain and socialized risk for big banks and financial institutions. This has really been the dominant boomer economic theory, and it’s poisoned what’s left of our public institutions.
Sean Illing
So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?
Bruce Gibney
I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won’t be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.
This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.
Sean Illing
I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?“THIS WAS A FANTASY AND THE RESULT OF A SPOILED GENERATION ASSUMING THINGS WOULD BE EASY AND THAT NO SACRIFICES WOULD HAVE TO BE MADE IN ORDER TO PRESERVE PROSPERITY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.”
Sean Illing
Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social policies.
Bruce Gibney
This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts.The irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for being too driven by feelings. But the boomers are the first big feelings generation. They’re highly motivated by feelings and not persuaded by facts. And you can see this in their policies.
Take this whole fantasy about trickle-down economics. Maybe it was worth a shot, but it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming. The experiment is over. And yet they’re still clinging to this dogma, and indeed the latest tax bill is the latest example of that.
Time after time, when facts collided with feelings, the boomers chose feelings.
Sean Illing
What’s the most egregious thing the boomers have done in your opinion?
Bruce Gibney
I’ll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism. It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is.
On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they’ve only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it’s a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along.
Sean Illing
So where does that leave us?
Bruce Gibney
In an impossible place. We’re going to have to make difficult choices between, say, saving Social Security and Medicare and saving arctic ice sheets. We’ll have fewer and fewer resources to deal with these issues. And I actually think that over the next 100 years, absent some major technological innovation like de-carbonization, which is speculative at this point, these actions will actually just kill people.
Sean Illing
I hear you, man, and I’m with you on almost all of this, but I always return to a simple point: If millennials and Gen Xers actually voted in greater numbers, the boomers could’ve been booted out of power years ago.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s fair. But given how large the boomer demographic is, it really wasn’t possible for millennials to unseat the boomers until a few years ago. And of course there are many issues with voting rights. But that’s not a complete excuse.
More than voting, though, millennials have to run for office because people have to be excited about the person they’re voting for. We need people in office with a different outlook, who see the world differently. Boomers don’t care about how the country will look in 30 or 40 years, but millennials do, and so those are the people we need in power.“THE BOOMERS INHERITED A RICH, DYNAMIC COUNTRY AND HAVE GRADUALLY BANKRUPTED IT.”
Sean Illing
I guess the big question is, can we recover from this? Can we pay the bill the boomers left us?
Bruce Gibney
I think we can, but it’s imperative that we start sooner than later. After 2024 or so, it will get really hard to do anything meaningful. In fact, I think the choices might become so difficult that even fairly good people will get wrapped up in short-term self-interest.
So if we unseat the boomers from Congress, from state legislatures, and certainly from the presidency over the next three to seven years, then I think we can undo the damage. But that will require a much higher tax rate and a degree of social solidarity that the country hasn’t seen in over 50 years.
That will not be easy, and there’s no way around the fact that millennials will have to sacrifice in ways the boomers refused to sacrifice, but that’s where we are — and these are the choices we face.
This article was originally published on December 20, 2017.
Patricia Cotter poses with a Castro Street History Walk plaque honoring Daughters of Bilitis cofounders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.Photo: Courtesy Patricia Cotter, Courtesy atricia Cotter
Not far from where playwright Patricia Cotter lives in the Castro District, a bronze plaque in the sidewalk reads: “1953: Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon move into their first home together in San Francisco on Castro Street. They help establish the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian rights organization, in 1955.”
Just a few blocks away, on 19th Street, is where the Lexington Club, affectionately known as the Lex, served cheap drinks from 1997 to 2015, when its closure marked the end of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco.
People stand outside the Lexington Club, a neighborhood lesbian bar in San Francisco.Photo: Preston Gannaway, Special to The Chronicle 2014
These two chapters of local lesbian history comprise the two acts of “The Daughters,” Cotter’s comedy whose San Francisco Playhouse Sandbox Series world premiere runs through Nov. 2 at the Creativity Theater. The Chronicle met with Cotter at Spike’s Coffee and Teas, also on 19th Street, to talk about the arc of history she traces in the show.
Q: What was the initial impulse behind “The Daughters”?
A: I think it was really at the closing of the Lex, which, honestly, wasn’t my bar. I had come to San Francisco later, so by the time I got here that wasn’t my coming up and coming out, going to the Lex. But it seemed like an icon leaving, its closing.
Wendy MacNaughton poses for a photograph in the Lexington Club’s infamous bathroom, for the Lexington Club Archival Project.Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 2015
Q: What gave you that feeling?
A: It was a lot of women I know really grieving that it was closing. And then it’s like, “When was the last time you were there?” “Seven years ago, eight years ago.” … So if we’re not going — but then also the question, “Do we need it? Do we need a lesbian bar?” Because any bar can be a lesbian bar; it doesn’t specifically have to be one. But there’s something lost when you know this is the place where you’re going to be welcome.
I would have people in this neighborhood say to me, travelers, “Where’s the closest lesbian bar?” There isn’t one. Actually, there’s tons of queer bars, but (not one) specifically where you know it’s your place, where it’s created for you.
I think when (the Lex) closed, it got me thinking about lesbian history. I hadn’t really seen my history anywhere. I knew about Phyllis and Del. (They were the first legally married same-sex couple in California in both 2004 and 2008.) The play isn’t at all a biography of Phyllis and Del. It’s more of a tribute to the women who changed the world — in a room, at a party.
Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, who have been together for 51 years, are married at San Francisco City Hall by Mabel Teng. The longtime lesbian activists were the first same-sex couple to be married in the state.Photo: Liz Mangelsdorf, The Chronicle 2004
I was just so impressed with the risks they took. The women who started the Daughters were so different from each other. That’s all they had in common: that they were gay, that they wanted to meet other gay women, either to date or to just have friends, and they couldn’t do it in bars. They could, but you’re in danger of getting arrested. You’re in danger of a raid. There were tons of tourists at that time who would just come and stare at people.
We had a party for the Daughters, trying to get the word out (about the show). My friends threw it at their house, and there were tons of lesbians and straight people and gay guys. It was just a party, and I thought, “Oh, 60 years ago this was transgressive — to gather in someone’s home.”
It is specifically my history, but I’m kind of embarrassed by how little I knew about it.
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin at their San Francisco home.Photo: Clem Albers, The Chronicle 1972
Q: How much did you know before you wrote?
A: I think my knowledge was like 25%. I interviewed a ton of different lesbians … younger lesbians, older lesbians, women my age, and, for the second act, trans men, to get a point of view that felt accurate and honest.
Q: What surprised you from the research?
A: The women in this group were teachers, government workers, so they really had everything to lose by coming out. If you got arrested, they put your name in the paper, they put your address in the paper, your place of work — that’s everything. That’s one of the things we’ve been working on in the production — to create that sense of danger in the room, like the danger of getting into the room and the danger of leaving the room. Then you get this break when you’re in the physical space.
You’re taking a big risk. I think that was partly one of the things I learned as well: what a need it is to be yourself and have an honest, authentic representation of who you are. How much courage it would take to make that happen and then invite people into your home! It takes courage to go, but they didn’t know who would show up. They had no idea.
Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, grand marshals of the Gay Freedom Day Parade on the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.Photo: Tom Levy, The Chronicle 1989
Q: And what did you learn from your interviews?
A: For young women, the relationship to the word “lesbian.” Some women were very much like, “I don’t need it. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense for me.” Other young women still really wanted to claim it, saw value to it.
Q:What’s your own feeling about the word, for yourself?
A: I like it. It’s never been unappealing to me. My whole feeling about words in general — and that’s basically what the second act is about — is the idea of “you tell me.” Whatever works for you, I want to include. At a certain point, we needed a word to identify each other and find each other. Now what if we don’t need that word any more? But what if you want it?
I’m excited by the changing of language, and I’m excited to incorporate that in my life. I don’t understand a resistance to it. To me, if “lesbian” goes away, which it seems like maybe someday it will, I will miss it. I will grieve it. But if that’s the natural way we’re moving, if that’s where momentum is taking us … .
In 1955, the first meeting of the Daughters of Bilitis gets off to an uneven start as members Evelyn (Olivia Levine, left), Mal (Katie Rubin), Griff (Molly Shaiken), Shorty (Em Lee Reaves) and Peggy (Erin Anderson) meet for the first time in San Francisco Playhouse’s “The Daughters.”Photo: Jessica Palopoli, San Francisco Playhouse
Q: What do you think of a San Francisco that doesn’t have a bar dedicated to lesbians?
A: I can’t believe it. If there were no gay male bars — Look at my neighborhood! That’s all there is! — it would be front page news. (The Lex) got a little coverage, but not that much.
Q: For the two groups of women from the two different eras in your play, in what ways are their concerns the same, and in what ways have they evolved?
A: Jessica (Holt, the show’s director) has been helping me find the thread, where they connect. The idea in the first act — they’re trying to claim their space. In the second act, they’re losing that space. In just the space of 60 years — that’s not a lot of time to have your space, experience your space and then, “Wait! It’s gone already! It’s gone so fast!”
Also, in the first act, they’re trying to, “If we want to be ourselves, we have to change. We have to be presentable, and we have to not scare the outside world.” In the second act, it’s more, “We are part of the outside world. We don’t need to worry about that anymore, which is why we don’t need this space.”
And then there are the simple connections of wanting to be in love and wanting to find your person and wanting to have fun — and then the other thing is not wanting to talk about politics, but there’s someone saying, “You know what, guys, it is political.” … Even though in the first act and the second act there’s this thing of “Oh my god, can we just have a good time?” it’s like, “Yes, we can, but somebody has to be the person going, ‘Hold up. We have to take this seriously.’”
“The Daughters”: Written by Patricia Cotter. Directed by Jessica Holt. Through Nov. 2. $30-$40. Creativity Theater, 221 Fourth St., S.F. 415-677-9596. www.sfplayhouse.org
Follow:Lily JaniakLily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak
[Phyllis Lyon and the late Del Martin are veterans of The Prosperos.]
2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
“Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love.” (Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy)
In the afterglow of doing a therapeutic RHS release. (a self-encounter technique taught by the Prosperos School of Ontology.)
In those quite moments after such a treatment (RHS) my thoughts come and go like on a slide projector moving through my mind =
How traditional religious codes of conduct can create empathy for others, and how they still make a difference in people’s lives. Glimpsing, those ideas and their relationship to our spiritual origin, – We as God’s manifestation and the healing effect it has – physically, mentally, and morally.
Thoughts now move forward –
It is strange to comprehend sometimes that while we go about the business of the day, those things we do almost every day, you know like the list, because if you don’t do the list at lease you’ve though about the list – Handling the demands of your job, having or preparing meals, running errands, caring for family members, chatting with friends, being online, watching TV – the daily routine stuff. – Yet in this afterglow, call it meditation, there’s something else that I’ve found deserves a place on the daily list. Something we all want: to live a fuller and more satisfied life, to create a wholeness within our existence.
How to put that feeling into words –
It is the need to see beyond the common conception of life as purely material, a concept flawed with limitations, suffering, and loss, these concepts constantly being reinforced by pop culture and media hype – all marketing to sell us on material products we can’t resist, material conditions that alienates us, and then material remedies designed to restore material health.
Buying into this may seem unavoidable and doing so, may seem to hold the answers. Yet below the surface comes that uneasy feeling of a vacuum, an absence of authenticity and meaning. But right in the mist of that is an opening to the opportunities and guidance derived directly from a mind shift to divine Spirit always present whole and complete as you.
I love history as teacher, for in it we find clues to living a freer, better daily life. Central to that is the spiritual teachings of BUDDHA (Siddhartha), MUHAMMAD, CHRIST (Yeshusa – Jesus). Notice I did not say the religions of, but the teachings of the teachers.
I think of Christ followers as not all that different from us today – people coming up against all kinds of problems and looking for ways to be free of the conflicts of them. Christ pointed the way of consciously breaking the shackles of their conventional, materialistic life view by introducing them to new idea of life. A concept of abundant life that is whole and present and that already belongs to each one of us – our perfect spiritual identity as Consciousness, Prosperos calls it Christ Consciousness – the ability to think, rather than what you are thinking. Then you are in the likeness of Spirit.
Our origin underpins’ spiritual teachings. It changes how we think of ourselves and of what we’re able to accomplish. As the ability to think and govern thought rather than what thought is about, we then can see ourselves not as creatures of the flesh, vulnerable and lacking, but Conscious aliveness, which gives us greater freedom and a more accurate view of our selves. That we are free to create and master the infinite ideas of our mind.
Grasping and holding on to that freeing admission within ourselves as a daily routine, day in and day out, helps us give up thinking constantly of ourselves as having been embedded in matter, with its inabilities and emptiness.
Thus, as Consciousness, what we think about – agree or disagree with, day after day, makes a huge difference over the outcomes within our lives. Thus our responsibility, that is “our ability to respond,” is to the assumption of self, the family, the School, the community, the nation, the world, knowing the isness of such is beyond a material materialization, we’re challenging ourselves to go beyond whatever would place limits on the presence and expression of Spirit.
That, in turn, makes it easier to see a greater expression of the life, love, beauty, and intelligence to be expressed in our lives. We realize that our real selfhood isn’t in matter. Since that real selfhood is the image and likeness of God, it couldn’t be.
Daily practice will very naturally improves our mental, physical, and moral condition. We find that we have the ability to experience more of this improvement as we more fully accept the true idea of humankind’s as the image and likeness of God. That we live more in accord with the moral and spiritual laws found in Christ Consciousness.
RHS is an outgrowth of another Prosperos technique, Translation – which is a step-by-step change of view that occurs moment to moment as we keep our thoughts open and focused on the spiral of Consciousness. Its practicality is seen in its healing effect on our lives.
gratitude in these moments of revelry to awaken to my true identity, that I have come to through the everyday routine, that have challenged me to add the spiritual, that then brings changed, in modest ways into my own life changes that become cumulative.
To be able to Set and advance on a course predicated on an identity of Consciousness becomes a natural, practical way to go about living a daily life filled with opportunities for doing good for all.
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