I am a compulsive list collector. If I can map one list onto another, it's even better. I think that the list that started this mania was the Dewey Decimal System. In Syracuse, NY, where I grew up, our public library had open stacks and a precocious kid, like myself, could wander through them for hours. It wasn't long before I noticed the numbers on the shelves and they got bigger or smaller, depending on which direction I walked. The next discovery was that the number had something to do with the subject of the book. A friendly librarian (there are some) give me an old classification schedule and I was on my way!
I remember that the the most fascinating concept for me was that everything had its place in the universe and Melvil Dewey knew just where it was! Later I discovered the Library of Congress Classification System, which didn't have the same appeal. Perhaps LC can slice the cake into thinner pieces but it seemed rather arbitrary and messy to me. I spent hours trying to map Dewey onto LC and it just didn't work for me.
A little later I found Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel where game masters with a movement of a single bead on a wire could switch from the representation a Bach melody to one of Max Planck's constant. Heavy stuff!
In my various readings I came across Aleister Crowley's book 666, about the size of a slim volume of verse, which contained nothing but lists mapped onto other lists in 1 to 1 correspondences. The validity of his system was less important that the fact that there was a system. When I was lucky the third dimension was invoked for accurate representations of list mapping, like the ten sephiroth through the four worlds.
In research on chaos I stumbled onto Mandelbrot and fractals. On the face of it, fractals have nothing to do with lists, as far as I know. Still, unlike bucko who obviously has little regard for the field, my intuition/impression/wishful thinking is that I am looking into a multi-dimensional space which will one day be useful for my lists.
Editors' note: This is node 1000000. | 
