John Lacey
The Butterfly Effect
According to Wikipedia:
The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Of course the butterfly cannot literally cause a tornado. The kinetic energy in a tornado is enormously larger than the energy in the turbulence of a butterfly. The kinetic energy of a tornado is ultimately provided by the sun and the butterfly can only influence certain details of weather events in a chaotic manner.
The Butterfly Effect was the second thing to occur to me after I watched two consecutive news stories this morning. The first was about severe flooding and hail storms to hit Brisbane (Queensland, Australia). There had been damage to buildings and cars, power outages, water contamination issues. A man had died after he and another man had entered a storm drain to take photographs. I can’t begin to imagine what the pair were photographing. The other news story related to the fires sweeping across Los Angeles. I was impressed that two places on opposite sides of the world could be affected by two remarkably different weather patterns and yet, somehow, the end result was largely the same. I wondered if they could’ve been triggered by the flap of one insidious butterfly or some other seemingly innocuous event.
But more than that I wondered about my friends in Brisbane and Los Angeles. I’ve never been to either though I have friends in both, and family in Brisbane. The internet has conspired to connect me to people from all around the world and every now and then a piece of news fodder will be followed immediately by the thought, “I wonder if [person x] is okay?”
Earlier tonight I was talking to one of my friends in Los Angeles. Yesterday she and her family were getting ready to be evacuated. She told me it was a scary feeling. I couldn’t begin to imagine. Fortunately evacuation didn’t prove to be necessary for her section of the region and other than staying indoors to avoid the particles in the air that would provoke her asthma she seemed to be largely unaffected. Then she started sending me photographs from different websites of the area in quick succession. She sent me one of her former high school - it was little more than a sign in front of a black charcoaled empty field. Then she sent me a video. She suggested that the burnt out building at 5:08 was actually her former classroom.
She said ‘brb - I need to show my parents these photographs.’ Within seconds, ironically, a friend from Brisbane appeared on MSN Messenger. She sent me a photograph of the storm. She informed me that the power had only just been switched on. Within minutes of the power returning she started uploading a video of her yard and her next door neighbour’s yard to YouTube.
Junkienet’s View Of The Brisbane Storm
Somehow it is a different experience hearing about these events from people who have experienced them. Sure it is good to know things. It is wonderful to hear about things on the news - but what (other than that they happened) do I learn in this way? It is the difference between memorizing battle dates and reading soldiers’ diaries. In an odd way we have taken new technologies and subjected them to age old traditions of storytelling. This is something we had lost as we allowed media sources to tell our stories. This was something we had lost in a world where the only authors whose voices would be heard were those selected by large publishing firms.
It is deeply exciting, and, yet, within the same breath deeply horrifying. We have a renewed medium for expression and the Australian Government is hell bent on censoring it. Perhaps they are fearful of the liberties it permits their citizens to have? Perhaps they liked the world better when the only sources of information were those handed out by the government itself and a handful of media operators? Part of me wonders if Senator Conroy’s opinion of the internet wouldn’t change if a tragedy befell a part of the world that contained people he loved. Perhaps then he could understand the need to permit the internet to continue to maintain its current speed and integrity?
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