But what does it mean?

How does it serve me to close my mind to ideas? Ideas that may enrich me, make me healthier, make the world even more fascinating. The more we shut doors, or refuse to look through them because what's through them doesn't conform to our belief system, the more we hinder our chance for growth and deny the wonders around us. But if I accept that all things are possible, life suddenly opens for me. I do not need to commit to a path or belief. I only have to open my mind and heart to possibilities, and the world becomes grander and far more fun.

I wrote that paragraph sometime last summer and it's been hiding on my messy desktop ever since. I've no idea what triggered the writing, but probably I read or heard some narrow-minded diatribe and it set me off. I don't know what to do with it, so I'm giving it to you. You're welcome.

It's blowy and rainy here today and for the first time since spring I turned on the fireplace to cheer things up. That's laying a lot of responsibility on a gas fireplace, but it is what it is. We are only a few weeks away from an election which will or won't change the way we think about our future, so to escape wallowing in that I've been reading about Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) and George Zipf (1902–1950) and their contributions to our understanding of the world.

Mandelbrot, you probably know, is the man who coined the word "fractal" and was the first to use mathematics and computer graphics to display order from what had previous been considered chaos. He opened our minds to the "roughness" of nature and his work is now applied across multiple disciplines.

Zipf was an American linguist responsible for Zipf's law, which reveals a mathematical sequence to the use of words. (He had his students open Ulysses and count the words and how often each was used.) For example, the is the most used (first ranked) word in the English language. The second ranked word (of) is used half as often; the third ranked word is used a third as often, the fourth ranked is used a fourth as often, etc. Why this mathematical ranking exists remains unknown, but of course it's being studied.

Zipf originally believed his work only applied to English but it's now revealed to exist in every language—even the vocalizations of dolphins and penguins—and like Mandelbrot's work it's also seen across disciplines. As someone who chooses and uses words, this is mind-blowing.

There is, of course, a Mandelbrot-Zipf law, which I will spare you.

Much of this reading is beyond me, but such discoveries and puzzles carry me away from the sorrow and dread that exists in our current political landscape. It is not beyond me, however, to recognize that our world, and no doubt the universe and ourselves, can be captured mathematically and so are ultimately definable and understandable. 

We are not there yet, of course, we are babes in the mathematical universe, let alone in understanding. But how strange is it that the blowing wind and falling rain and the language I write with can all be described mathematically? And if such formulas can be seen in absolutely everything, what does that mean for us? Inquiring minds want to know.