But I do, and I'd like to share a bit of why, or what, has led me to have an understanding about chaos and its role in control and creation.
1) This book.
I read this back at the end of high school right when I was applying to schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Olin, Stony Brook) for an EE/EME major. I love this book for the way it is written and tied together, and the way it is phrased to a nontechnical perspective just as much as it is to a bioengineering grad student. But mostly I love it because it helped change my life. The perspective and thought that shapes and patterns (which turn into crowds and events when human hands become involved) evolve out of pure random order made me look at things differently. It explains why trees grow like they do, how lightning is formed and how you win the lottery.
I am also a fan of Strogatz's book on Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos which I read during my sophomore year at Stony Brook. Something about it just worked with my brain at the time, I was learning signal analysis and microfabrication. One of my professors was working on Effects of zinc and tellurium doping on thermophotovoltaic cells, and talked about his work during lectures a lot. A few months later something clicked in my head and I realized I wanted to be a designer, not an engineer, and was left realizing that life was going to change if I wanted to do what I wanted.
2) The I-Ching and Buddhism.
My parents raised me to be rather open minded, and part of my childhood involved lots of explorations of foreign culture. This was mostly due to my extensive traveling from age 2 and on. I was made aware of the tenets of Buddhism when I was very young as my grandfather was a practicing Buddhist, American living in Brazil. While traveling in Japan in 2002, I was at the hight of my interest in Eastern religion and took the opportunity to read my i ching in a temple in Kyoto. I would recommend everyone come to understand what this is and how it can impact their life, regardless of their belief in the guiding forces of order that exist around them.
3) Lots of music.
Artists like Chris Clark, John Cage, Amon Tobin, even Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the growing-in-popularity Flying Lotus or harsher sounds like Skrillex or lots of drill'n'bass/dubstep musicians utilize this chaos in their music. It is not a new theme. Dizzy Gillespie was making crazy, uncoordinated notes before most of these people lived (née Cage), and his music was as popular as ever. Constantly exploring new music and putting up with the things that don't make much sense will open your mind faster than anything to the understanding that a lot of things can be called music. I'll leave this blog off with some examples to hopefully spark some further music interest and mind expansion.
