And now for something completely different.

I’ve always enjoyed screen savers. They outlived their original purpose of preventing phosphor burn-in long ago, but they’re art, and art…don’t need no reason….

My favorite, Dream Aquarium, is being ported to OS X, but it’s not ready yet. While waiting for it, I’m enjoying Electric Sheep, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Electric Sheep is a free, open-source screen saver; it runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The concept behind Electric Sheep is very interesting, using distributed processing to create amazing morphing fractal animations called “sheep”.

The sheep are beautiful and mesmerizing. You can vote on a sheep using the up and down arrows on the keyboard for ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, respectively. Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, producing a pleasing flock via natural selection.

Now tell me that’s not cool.

A couple of hints:

• It can take a few days for sheep to start appearing on your machine naturally, so it’s recommended to obtain a starter flock via one or more sheep packs.
• Electric Sheep can automatically play an iTunes playlist; I’ve found the dreamy soundtracks produced by pzizz to be very appropriate.

If all Electric Sheep did was display incredible fractal animations, it’d be one of the best screen savers available. Understanding what it really does is to say the least, impressive.

Baa….

The new Mac came with a number of desktop backgrounds. They’re nicely done and have the advantage of not being distracting, but they lack a certain cool factor. We can, however, address this.

Mando Gomez runs Mandolux, where he provides his work for noncommercial use as desktop wallpaper.

Mando’s work is beautiful, and quite eclectic; I’d think anyone could find something suitable in his archives. I use his Zen/Lantern as my desktop background.

Images are available in a size perfect for the native resolution of even the largest monitors, and for those with multiple-monitor setups, left/right and even triptych images are provided.

It’s a lot of fun just to browse through his archives; he’s very talented.

Mando does accept donations.