BTW, the book that was briefly mentioned in the article, Fractals, Chaos, and Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise by Schroeder (http://www.amazon.com/Fractals-Chaos-Power-Laws-Infinite/dp/...) is truly excellent, it is written in the form of short pieces collected into chapters investigating a very wide-ranging set of phenomena, ranging from Brownian Motion to self-similarity, Cantor sets and cellular automata. For $10-$15 on Amazon, it's a great bargain!