unordered thoughts

Many years ago I read James Gleick’s ‘Chaos’ trying to acquaint myself with the science buzzword of the day.

In reading that book I learned of Strange Attractors, Mandelbrot Sets and the Butterfly Effect among other fascinating concepts.

Now, some twenty-plus years later the concepts related by that book have percolated down and I find myself thinking of them when I look at things going on around me.  Mostly the things that give me a laugh or otherwise cause me to pause for thought.

It’s strange what will make us laugh and the connections we make between the little details of life in various disparate and apparently unrelated times, places and experiences.

Chaos theory predicts that these connections will appear random but have an internal order and consistency not apparent on the surface.

Life’s complexity is really the product of some very simple rules applied consistently it is just that we can’t see the order in the apparent jumble that life seems to be from time to time.

To understand the order you need to understand the strange attractor at work underlying the application of the simple rules.

I’m still looking and damn it’s interesting.