Many years ago, I was a bench chemist doing research for Atlantic Richfield (since morphed into a different entity). Complex experiments requiring commercially unavailable apparatus such a glass vacuum lines had to be handmade. So I learned to be a glassblower. The Atlantic Richfield research facility (then in Anaheim, California) was a veritable maze of research laboratories. You could walk down long, seemingly endless hallways and on either side were hundreds of individual laboratories each about the size of a small studio apartment. Upon employment, each research scientist was given his or her own laboratory, and a difficult research project; then left completely alone and unsupervised except for monthly progress reports. This, I soon discovered, left me ample time to play. The first project I was assigned required the construction of a large, convoluted, glass vacuum line. While I was teaching myself the art of glassblowing (they never teach you truly important, actually useful things like this at university), I discovered the beautiful geometries of spun glass art. Being as I was, completely unsupervised, I began to spend hours perfecting this art. If you heat a one eighth inch diameter glass rod until the flame turns yellow and it is just barely malleable, then rotating it between your palms (the cold end, obviously) while drawing it into a threadlike strand, you can create the most beautiful, delicate geometries. Some of them are so delicate that you can break the glass strands just by blowing on them. Today’s rendering is a typical example of what they looked like. One day, the laboratory director (a professor of synthetic organic chemistry from Harvard [he wore obscenely colored bow ties in deplorable taste]) wandered in and saw a number of these objects on the bench. “What are these?” He asked. “Procedural errors” I replied. “I am building a vacuum line”. “Ah! Just so!” he responded “Tricky business, that” and wandered out again. I discovered from ‘The Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology’ (no Internet or pc’s back then) that various metallic salts, added to the molten glass would impart beautiful colors. Well! My laboratory came equipped with a whole wall full of chemical compounds (including Potassium Cyanide [provided, I assumed, in case the obstacles of my project proved insurmountable]). Soon, I was adding beautiful colors to my creations. This rendering uses a special coloring procedure called ‘Phong Coloring’. Created in Ultra Fractal