There is a strange attractor in Wikipedia: if you follow the first link on a page, and then go to the first link on that page, and so on … you will nearly always end up at the page for Philosophy. There’s an article about it on the New Scientist site: Feedback: Wikipedia’s strange attractor – 15 July 2011 – New Scientist.
And there’s a beautiful diagram at bit.ly/wikispace which looks very like a fractal, especially if you look at it as a pdf file and enlarge it a few hundred times.
I’ve just had a minor triumph: I’ve persuaded MS-Word to do what I want it to do.
For weeks I struggled with the layout of pages with pictures on. I need a lot of pictures in my book Of Infinite Beauty, so this was a big aggravation. I would place a picture at the right point in my text and then:
I tried varying all the positioning and text wrapping settings. I was systematic, but I couldn’t find the right combination and I couldn’t get a feel for what was going on: the program was simply unpredictable. I came to view MS-Word as an adversary, not as a tool.
Now I have a solution. I organise the space on each picture page by putting in a simple table, usually just two rows and one column, with the row height fixed to fill the page. (I set the borders of the table to be invisible.) Then I position the pictures as free-floating items ‘in-front-of-text’.
It seems to work, but I’ve no idea why.