A mathematician writes about how to think about the universe. A lot of the math-for-the-layperson material was old news to me, but there were some new-to-me bits. E.g., I'd read about instant runoff voting, Condorcet paradoxes, Arrow's theorem and such, but I hadn't seen a comparison between election results and slime mold behavior. I'm not sure if I'm happier knowing that a democratic society behaves like a slime mold, but… uhm well yeah anyhow.