This book is drawn from across many active fields of mathematics and physics. It has connections to atmospheric dynamics, spherical codes, graph theory, constrained optimization problems, Markov Chains, and Monte Carlo methods. It addresses how to access interesting, original, and publishable research in statistical modeling of large-scale flows and several related fields. The authors explicitly reach around the major branches of mathematics and physics, showing how the use of a few straightforward approaches can create a cornucopia of intriguing questions and the tools to answer them.