Patterns. In Nature. On T.V.

I noticed that there is a pattern (one might call it a trend instead) of female weather presenters on television wearing 4 and 5 inch spiked heels. I had to ask myself why a person needed to wear the most uncomfortable looking shoes to talk about the weather? Well it turns out there are a couple of reasons.

TV stations often have appearance guidelines meant to look “polished” or formal on camera. High heels are sometimes considered part of traditional broadcast fashion for women, even though this standard is increasingly questioned. Studios are designed with fixed camera heights and large weather maps. Heels can help presenters line up better with graphics or appear proportionate on screen. Some presenters genuinely like heels or feel confident wearing them. Others switch to flats or sneakers off-camera or between segments.

Broadcast TV has long followed fashion standards that emphasize a certain “look” for women more than men. Many viewers and professionals criticize this, and it’s slowly changing. <--got that from Mr. Google.

I have long noticed for many years a pattern between things in nature. For example: An aerial view of a river, how it winds and creates a bit of a spiral. And I compared that to the view of a big tree and it's branches from below looking up and it had a similar pattern.

Those similarities come from self-similar (fractal) patterns and optimization processes in nature.

Many natural systems form fractal patterns, meaning:

The structure looks similar at different scales

Small parts resemble the whole

Tree branches, river networks, lightning, lungs, and blood vessels all show this property.

Both rivers and trees are transport systems:

Rivers move water downhill efficiently

Trees move water and nutrients upward efficiently

Physics pushes both systems toward designs that:

Minimize energy use

Maximize coverage and efficiency

Branching networks turn out to be the best solution.

Even though trees and rivers are very different, they follow the same basic rules:

Gravity

Resistance

Least-energy paths

Growth responding to local conditions

These rules naturally produce branching structures.

No tree “plans” its branches, and no river “plans” its tributaries.

Simple local interactions

Repeated over time complex global patterns emerge

This is called emergent behavior.

Other examples you might notice

Leaf veins

Blood vessels

Lung airways

Lightning strikes

Cracks in drying mud

Neurons in the brain

All echo the same branching logic.

Nature often reuses the same mathematical solutions because they work well. When systems need to distribute or collect something efficiently, branching fractal patterns are hard to beat.

Learned some of this from a little group of big brains from the University nearby called "meeting of the minds". These young super-smart people gathered together to talk about topics like this and I loved going to their meetings, but soon felt pretty out of place due to the age difference, not to mention becoming intensely annoyed with the overuse and misplaced repetition of the word "like".

Have you ever taken note of these repeated patterns in our universe? In our galaxy? In our planet? In our everyday world? For me, this is proof that there had to be an intelligence behind all of this. But that's a topic for a different blog site.

Just mentioning that I noticed this thing with patterns. Oh the stuff that keeps my 'widdle bwain' entertained. LOL.

Why did the cell phone go to the dentist? Because it had a blue tooth!