Creating chaos on the computer

The fact is, that I'm a sucker for pretty pictures and there is a wealth of natural prettiness in the crazy world of strange attractors (I use the word natural in the mathy sense, obviously)

One of my favorite toys when it comes to computing is an absolutely gorgeous application called ChaoScope, a tool for visualising and creating high quality images of these incredible systems.

Here is a small rendering I created of the Julia set in quaternion space:
It's possible to spend hours at a time getting lost in the world that this application lets you into. Download it and play for a while and, if you need your programs to have a "purpose" then, I can promise you that you'll never be at a loss for a desktop background again.