I read Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin multiple times, which started my journey through Chaos Theory. A lot of ideas and realizations stemmed from it, and it feels like I'm starting to grok things. Yet when the time comes to share those ideas with other, I realize there's a gap between the feeling of understanding and understanding. >"What I cannot build, I do not understand." >— Richard Feynman The easiest thing I could do to remedy that was build visualization for the models discussed throughout the book for myself. I picked something that was both interesting to me and looked simple enough to build. [Following this link](https://viz.theolouvel.com/sandpile) you will find an interactive version of a reduction of the Abelian Sandpile Model. It's demonstrates self-organizing criticality. Order arises from chaos, and complexity is born from simplicity. It's a step towards understanding emergent behavior, and how life might have emerged from the cosmic soup we're in. I can now say I had underestimated the gap between my feeling of understanding and my actual comprehension. I have already started building more visualizations, like synthetic financial data generation using MCMC. I might publish more in the future.