Mostly unrelated, but I find this disgusting, along with some of the other fractal visualizations I've seen. I don't really have a reason for it; it's just a visceral reaction that makes me cringe. All the little parts and the strange shape..

Does anyone know why this might be the case?

Some people have a similar reaction to porus/holey objects like http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1406/1093460880_2af2500cc8.jp... . It seems common enough that there's probably some instinctive reason for it. The image of the triangle has a kind of similar feel to it.

Wow that actually causes a mild fear reaction. It's like seeing something with many eyes and historically many-eyed creatures haven't been particularly friendly.

What plant is that? It's repulsively beautiful.

A lotus seed pod.

It's because it's ugly; the lines are not anti-aliased there is no sense of depth (the farther parts of the pyramid are not darkened)

That's a good point about the depth. I've swapped out the pictures for ones with fog enabled, and it looks a lot less like polygon soup.

As to the anti-aliasing, if there's a way to turn it on in OS X using JOGL (Java bindings for OpenGL), I haven't found it yet.

A bad experience with a toy pyramid as a kid?

On a more serious note I agree that it is not aesthetically pleasing. I put this down to it not being rendered in a manner that lets us see how the shape works (e.g. lighting, shading etc.) so it just seems artificial making it hard to see what 's going on. I've never seen one of these in 3D before either but in 2D I didn't find it that appealing either because of the way it reduces in size as it repeats fractically - it seems messy.

I don't get any sense of feeling uncomfortable. But then, I was watching Commodore 64 demos for most of my early teens.

It's likely that you're the only one able to answer that question (if you don't see any psychoanalyst).