Hmmm, we've never done this before: both candidates for SHARE President have been invited to give campaign speeches at the beginning of the general session. I don't have much stomach for this sort of thing, and the speeches were predictably full of motherhood, apple pie and BS. Heck, I should have stayed in my room and watched the Republican convention -- at least those guys are professionals.

The keynote speaker was Richard Voss, a 16 year veteran of the IBM Research Division's Yorktown Heights lab. Dr. Voss' current interest is fractal geometry, and he has spent the last few years doing high-octane mathematics with Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM Fellow and inventor of fractal geometry.

He talked mostly about visual interpretation of fractals, and brought lots of computer generated landscapes and videos. Most of these are way cool; fractals can be used to generate some very realistic mountain ranges, trees, seascapes and such.

Voss is the creator of a fair number of videos, one of which has been used as the basis of an IBM commercial. He laughs at one of the IBM commercials, first broadcast during the 1989 Super Bowl -- the ad agency actually had to rent time on a Cray system to do the commercial.

It turns out that lots of things in nature that appear random really are not. If you do a statistical analysis of DNA sequences for instance, you will discover that the distribution is not random, but fractal. Voss has found fractal sequences everywhere he looks: in music, art, biology and physics.

Not surprisingly, he is a little religious about this. His lecture was a kind of weird combination of mathematics, technology and Zen.