Patterns.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

― Oliver Sacks

Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature.

A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.

Fractals: they're famously found in nature and artists have created some incredible renderings as well. Fractals are purely a wonder -- too irregular for Euclidean geometry; iterative and recursive and seemingly infinite. They turn up in food and germs, plants and animals, mountains and water and sky.

From NOVA ...