Murdering Butterflies

Murdering Butterflies
This one just struck me as really funny.

I always thought the butterfly thing was stupid. It is nice to see a comix that puts it in it's place.

He puts lots of things in their places. The thing about the butterfly effect that makes it stupid is that there's no way to link any atmosphereic effect specifically to any specific butterfly's wings. The idea of "chaos" from "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" isn't so stupid, though, and is experimentally demonstrable.

He puts lots of things in their places. The thing about the butterfly effect that makes it stupid is that there's no way to link any atmosphereic effect specifically to any specific butterfly's wings. The idea of "chaos" from "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" isn't so stupid, though, and is experimentally demonstrable. Right. Which makes the whole thing almost more disinformation than actual information.

Right. Which makes the whole thing almost more disinformation than actual information. Umm... which part?

What the HELL are you guys talking about?? ...... Never mind, I don't want to know..

Right. Which makes the whole thing almost more disinformation than actual information. Umm... which part? The possibility that a butterfly could, in fact, touch of a hurricane doesn't really give me any 'action items'. The comic seems to be making that point. It is one of those things that seems to be giving you information but in the end nothing is really learned. It is clever, it is amusing, but it isn't information.

What the HELL are you guys talking about?? ...... Never mind, I don't want to know.. Yes you do. If I understand the question right: "Chaos Theory" is a type of applied mathematics. It looks at how miniscule changes (ie "perturbations") at a starting point (ie "initial conditions") lead to wildly different results. For example: Suppose you dropped a marble such that it hit a wedge that caused the marble to go either to the far left or the far right. Drop the marble from left of the point, it travel to the far left. As you move the drop point from the left towards the right, the marble will suddenly stop ending up on the far left and end up on the far right. Assuming (for simplicities sake) the drop is constant, and only gravity affects the marble, there will be a precise point where this change occurs. The initial condition is the drop point. Moving from left to right is the perturbation. Results are either far left or far right. I forget what the point of change is called. Mathematically, such a case might be represented as f(x)=y. Where "x" is where the marble starts, "f" is a function of x that represents the path of the marble (ie shorthand for some hideous string of x's to raised to a bunch of powers multiplied by numerous constants), and y is where the marble ends up. Normally this "fucntion" is applie "recursicely," which means you plug in a value for x, get result y, use that result as you new x (call it x1 (ie x1=y) to get a new result, y1. continue repeating this cycle ad nausea. If you draw a line form x though all subsequent y's, you would trace the path of the marble. Lets say far left is negative infinite, and far right positive infinite. There will be some initial x where there is a change from the ending up at negative infinite to ending up at positive infinite. Starting immediatley right or left of that point, the initial results look the same. Then suddenly they go off in wildly different directions. So, you are actually still reading this and wondering what does this have to do with butterflies? Getting to that. One area where this type of mathematics is applied is weather systems. Essentially, small changes can result in large effects (ie you get a really nice day, or some horrendous hurricane). An extreme example often used is a butterfly in Africa flaps its wings and causes changes that leads to hurrcanes or tornadoes in th US. When I first heard that, it was not just a butterfly flapping its wings, it also involved whether the butterfly flew to the flower on the right or the left. All though a bit extreme, the point is the normally we would expect such a small effect to be dilted by all the other things that affect the weather. Chaos theory says there exists a tipping point, and that butterfly could be it. Like all such things, people tend to get carried away with it.

Believe it or not, that was actually quite interesting. Thanks

And here's the follow-up:

I need to start reading SinFest again -- it looks like he's gotten it back.

I need to start reading SinFest again -- it looks like he's gotten it back. He's fairly sporadic with "it" at the moment. He has "it" some times, but at others, there's no "it" to be found.

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