Curious Phenomena: December 2005

In 1960, meteorologist Ed Lorenz was scratching his head over a piece of code that was definitely "buggy". When he tried to run the simulations again with the same initial conditions, to his surprise they spewed out totally different curves. Nothing like what he saw the previous day. After primping and ploughing around with his program, he found out that the only difference in code was in the level of precision he used to describe initial values. Apparently a small change in the preliminary conditions could change the results dramatically. He had stumbled into some serious stuff - the beginnings of chaos theory and chaotic systems. Since he was only a meteorologist and no condescending Caltech physicist, he came up with a moderately catchy phrase for his paper:

" One flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the
course of the weather forever".

"The Butterfly Effect" - A movie I recently watched - borrows heavily on this theme and it opened with a quote:

"the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon
halfway around the world".

[Cast: Ashton Kutcher (That 70's show), Amy Smart (Catch me if you can),..]

The typhoon causing butterflies are clearly more poetic than seagulls: butterflies flutter by from daisies to daffodils, whereas seagulls use their bowels to shoot smelly projectiles at people and statues. At this point, the movie had made me curious - an enigmatic opening statement, and the possibility of Ashton Kutcher in a serious movie. After sitting through it for about 2 hours, here's the story in a sentence: A guy visits his past to set things right, but screws up despite multiple attempts.

At the end of the movie, I believe the director wanted us to feel like Ashton Kutcher's character -- I think people would have left the movie wondering where in the story they could go back, change a bit and save the script. A good beginning, a good premise and a lot of promise. Unfortunately it did nothing more than make me write the following.

Conversation with a Killer Butterfly

I said to the bug:

Hey pretty butterfly, innocent thing
Hopping from bloom to bloom
Don't ever flap your tender wing-
You could send us all to doom!

It said:

[ why don't you speak for it? I'll put mine in some time?]

And flew away.