Zipf's law is related to the statistics of how word usage is distributed.  As it turns out, this is also strikingly reminiscent of how income is distributed, and populations of cities, and bug reports in software, as well as tons of other phenomena that we all interact with every day.

Relevant links:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/a-tale-of-many-cities/
http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412004.pdf
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law-and-the-pareto-distribution/

Hacking Neural Nets

Linear Digressions is a podcast about machine learning and data science.  Machine learning is being used to solve a ton of interesting problems, and to accomplish goals that were out of reach even a few short years ago.