if you start zooming in on a pattern, and the pattern doesn't seem to get more simple as you close in, there's a very good chance you're looking at a fractal shape. my new computer hobby is going on google earth (clean setting - no borders or labels) and zooming into random places to see if i can find these patterns. and they are everywhere. in rivers, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines and on and on. its genuinely stunning, and a little bit frightening, how the same shapes appear over and over again. the beating heart of iterative processes is plastered all over the globe at every scale. from above, the shape of a forest can look like a leaf, or a neuron, or a blood vessel. great place to have a zoom is at the bottom of tibet, where theres a sharp cutoff between the icy mountain range and the grassy forests of nepal and bhutan. pic below is of the nile river in southern egypt. happy travels everyone
