ZIP codes have become part of our culture, organizing our locations and determining the flow of mail. There is an order and a structure to this mail system that is similar to that of many natural systems. Let's use the nearly-50-year anniversary of ZIP codes as an opportunity to examine their quantitative aspects.

Now, we can admit, at sufficiently high resolution we’re all effectively homeless a lot of the time. ​ Last week, I attended Ribbonfarm’s annual meetup in Los Angeles (which was fantastic). In Venkatesh Rao’s closing remarks, he observed that the audience wasn’t so much a community as an airport: a bunch of people on individual trajectories sharing the same physical space momentarily before dispersing again. ​ If we can instead learn to design parts of the world for airport-like assemblages and the fractal nature of physical existence — the world we currently inhabit — we might actually find that we get more of what we’re seeking from communities.