It Sounds Pretty Good, Anyway...

We present another in our occasional series of article headlines that sound too good to pass up, even if the amount of scientific education required to understand them far exceeds the basic astronomy course which we took as a freshman in college more than three decades ago:

Multifractals Point To Existence Of Unknown Physical Mechanism On The Sun

And as usual, we should note that "Multifractals" would make an excellent name for a band -- probably some kind of techno-revivalist outfit that covers a lot of M, Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls, with a couple of Devo's weirder numbers thrown in.

The story is actually about how a special kind of mathematical analysis of sunspot activity, called "multifractal analysis," has shown that something seems to influence sunspot activity in a way that provides an unsuspected correlation. Since "multifractal analysis" involves a fractal equation of a fractal equation, and since fractal equations are equations that provide answers that never repeat and never end (graphing them often makes those cool repeating psychedelic patterns), I have no way of knowing what exactly the analysis has shown. But at this point, neither do the scientists, although one suspects they will eventually arrive at an answer -- that I can later read about.