conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Ghost from the Grand Banks about Titanic, Setting, Childhood's with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Setting his novel in the near future, close to the centennial of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic , SF luminary the author ( Childhood's End ) spins an initially ingenious scenario that only partially fulfills its potential. Two mammoth corporations strike a deal to raise the long-submerged luxury ocean liner. Parkinson's of London wants to recover a set of priceless Andrea Bellini glassware; Nippon-Turner is looking for publicity for a number of new products. Both intend to open underwater amusement parks; because the Titanic split in two parts upon sinking, each company will raise and exhibit half of the ship. But due to a variety of natural causes, the project goes awry. the author uses the attempted salvage operations as springboards from which to describe the technical, environmental and political changes in the year 2012. His skill as a raconteur and his accessible prose style are as engaging as ever, but his attempt to develop a secondary plot hinging on a mathematical game called the Mandelbrot Set takes the novel off course. The characters here lack dimension; and the various natural and personal disasters, which usually add to the tension, seem to be capriciously introduced without purpose. Though the author's speculations are both thought-provoking and entertaining, this work falls below his legendary best. <BR>Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ghost from the Grand Banks
  My thanks to Kumar Chitty for information on the U.N. Law of the Sea Convention, directed for many years by the late Ambassador Shirley Hamilton Amarasinghe. It is a great tragedy that Shirley (the hospitality of whose Park Avenue apartment I often enjoyed in the '70s) did not see the culmination of his efforts. He was a wonderful persuader, and had he lived might even have prevented the U.S. and U.K. delegations from shooting themselves in the foot.
  Very special thanks to Navam and Sally Tambayah—not to mention Tasha and Cindy—for hospitality, WORDSTAR, and faxes....
  Undoubtedly the best way of appreciating the set is through the videotapes that have been made of it, usually with accompanying music. Most celebrated is "Nothing But Zooms" from Art Matrix (P.O. Box 880, Ithaca, NY 14851). I have also enjoyed "A Fractal Ballet" (The Fractal Stuff Company, P.O. Box 5202, Spokane, WA 99205-5202).
  Strictly speaking, the "Utter West" of the M-Set is at exactly -2, not -1.999... to infinity, as stated in Chapter 18. Anyone care to split the difference?
  The material that follows is extracted from my speech; another portion appears at the beginning of Chapter 15. I'm only sorry that I cannot illustrate it with the gorgeous 35-millimeter slides—and videos—I used at Riyadh.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now we're ready to turn on our radar. Most displays have range circles at 10, 20... 100 kilometers from the center. We will require only a single circle, at a range of 1. There's no need to specify any units, as we're dealing with pure numbers. Make them centimeters or light-years, as you please.
  But those zeros are slowly being whittled away, as the digits march inexorably across from the right. Quite suddenly, something appears in the third, second, first decimal place—and the numbers explode after a very few additional terms, as this example shows:
  Check it out on your computer. It can only handle twelve digits? Well, no matter how many you had to play with, you'd still get the same answer. Trust me....
  The results of this "program" can be summarized in three laws that may seem too trivial to be worth formulating. But no mathematical truth is trivial, and in a few more steps these laws will take us into a universe of mind-boggling wonder and beauty.
  That circle of radius 1 is therefore a kind of map—or, if you like, fence—dividing the plane into two distinct territories. Outside it, numbers which obey the squaring law have the freedom of infinity; numbers inside it are prisoners, trapped and doomed to ultimate extinction.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now we're ready to turn on our radar. Most displays have range circles at 10, 20... 100 kilometers from the center. We will require only a single circle, at a range of 1. There's no need to specify any units, as we're dealing with pure numbers. Make them centimeters or light-years, as you please.
  But those zeros are slowly being whittled away, as the digits march inexorably across from the right. Quite suddenly, something appears in the third, second, first decimal place—and the numbers explode after a very few additional terms, as this example shows:
  Check it out on your computer. It can only handle twelve digits? Well, no matter how many you had to play with, you'd still get the same answer. Trust me....
  The results of this "program" can be summarized in three laws that may seem too trivial to be worth formulating. But no mathematical truth is trivial, and in a few more steps these laws will take us into a universe of mind-boggling wonder and beauty.
  That circle of radius 1 is therefore a kind of map—or, if you like, fence—dividing the plane into two distinct territories.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now we come to the most important distinction between the two sets. The S-set has a nice, clean line for its boundary. The frontier of the M-Set is, to say the least, fuzzy. Just how fuzzy you will begin to understand when we start to "zoom" into it; only then will we see the incredible flora and fauna which flourish in that disputed territory.
  Computers can easily make "snapshots" of the M-Set at any magnification, and even in black and white they are fascinating. However, by a simple trick they can be colored, and transformed into objects of amazing, even surreal, beauty.
  Thus the colors, though arbitrary, are not meaningless. An exact analogy is found in cartography. Think of the contour lines on a relief map, which show elevations above sea level. The spaces between them are often colored so that the eye can more easily grasp the information conveyed. Ditto with bathymetric charts; the deeper the ocean, the darker the blue. The mapmaker can make the colors anything he likes, and is guided by aesthetics as much as geography.
  I began by saying that the Mandelbrot Set is the most extraordinary discovery in the history of mathematics. For who could have possibly imagined that so absurdly simple an equation could have generated such—literally—infinite complexity, and such unearthly beauty?
  The Mandelbrot Set is, as I have tried to explain, essentially a map. We've all read those stories about maps which reveal the location of hidden treasure.