« Why MMORPGS suck | Main | The Bible -- IRC style »
January 09, 2004
The Butterfly Effect
We had a situation at work today. A rather serious situation.
Our payroll department accidentally distributed around a thousand pay checks that were uncashable due to an error with the check's routing code. While they looked fine upon initial inspection, they were, in fact, completely worthless. These checks went to a subsidiary that has locations throughout the US and were given to the employees this morning. We discovered the problem right about the time all of the employees were leaving for the weekend.
The implications were staggering. An employee would deposit his check and assume the funds would be available. But once it hit the bank, the funds would be withdrawn because of the routing error. The personal checks that the employee had written over the weekend would bounce. Now multiply that problem by a thousand and you can see the chain reaction that this incident had put into motion.
However, the crisis was averted. Of those thousand-odd checks, a single one had been distributed early-- to an employee who had been laid off on Wednesday. He deposited the check immediately, and it bounced today after the normal 2-day clearing period. That single bounced check set off the alarms early enough for us to issue a file to the bank that corrected the error behind the scenes. The faulty checks would be accepted by the bank because we notified them of the error in time. Had that single Wednesday-issued check not bounced, we would have all gone home and assumed everything was fine in the world. Then, on Monday morning, there would have been the utter chaos of a thousand checks being rejected and great financial burdens visited on our employees.
Have you ever thought about how the decisions you make effect the future? Or about how seemingly small actions can completely alter the course of history?
What about the effect you have on other people? Have you inspired someone to achieve great things? Have you damaged someone that you loved? All without even realizing it? This thing at work today made me think about the long-term ramifications of the choices I make every day.
On January 23rd a movie called The Butterfly Effect (quick flash demo/preview here) is being released. It will no doubt suck ass, as it stars that annoying bastard from That 70s Show, Ashton Kutcher, but the subject matter is fascinating. If you could go back in time and try to change the events of your life, would you? What would you change? And what would be the unintended consequences?
What could have caused that employee to be laid off on Wednesday? Was he late for work one too many times? Why was he late? Did he forget something at home and have to turn back?
If so, think of the implications of his one choice -- either going back home and getting his lunch that he left on the kitchen counter, or continuing on to work was the difference between a big financial crisis and a few hours of extra work for me and a few payroll clerks.
Here is a piece from the movie's official web site. It's an interesting read.
Out with a Bangs, in with a Fogg by Bruce Sterling
I’m a science-fiction writer, though the most popular story I ever wrote doesn't have much science in it. It’s about a dead rock critic.
In his real life, this rock critic, Lester Bangs, died of the flu and a Darvon overdose.
But since I get to write imaginative fantasies, I decided to give Lester a different and alternate life. So, instead of dying as he did, Lester Bangs almost dies under the wheels of a reckless New York taxi.
Shocked by this off-the-wall mishap, Lester buys an airline ticket out of town, ends up in San Francisco, discovers the love of his life, gets married, moves to Kansas, abandons his wild and reckless ways, and dies much later, in his sixties, while shoveling snow.
In other words, through a random twitch of the wheel, a human life takes a new course. The new road-map of Lester's life makes as much sense as Lester's relatively senseless death--maybe more, when you think about it.
This story of mine has been reprinted more, and in odder places, than any of my other works. That may be because people admire stormy characters like Lester Bangs.
I tend to think it’s because people really like metaphysics. They enjoy tales of fate and predetermination and ego and self-determination and moral responsibility and Imminent Will.
Folks just dig that stuff somehow. They want to feel vast, spooky powers playing out within their own existences. They can’t help but sense that the loose mishmash of events that forms their passing days has, well, a good story behind it. Something dramatic and meaningful.
It’s both disquieting and liberating to realize that freedom doesn’t require any free will. Even phenomena as dumb and blind as lightning, wind and rain have what physicists like to call “sensitivity to initial conditions.” Deterministic chaos. The Butterfly Effect.
This means some tiny fate-altering sneeze of a butterfly can lead to a Category Five Caribbean-born storm pancaking the pylons and powerlines in Pensacola, Florida. Due to random whimsy, really.
A hornet could do a hurricane just as well, or a housefly. We call this notion “the butterfly effect” because a butterfly is so pretty. Deterministic chaos is a glittering, graceful idea. As the Chinese say, “the butterfly never hurries even when pursued.”
What better symbol for the existential mystery of life, where meaning, resolution and intention crumble at the boundaries of randomness? It seems futile, yet it's full of vitality.
Through a kind of butterfly accident, I recently wrote an introduction to Jules Verne’s classic, Around the World in 80 Days, written in the 1880s.
Here we’ve got Phileas Fogg, this ultra-rational robot-man from Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe. Cool, predictable, imperturbable. Not the kind of guy to pay much heed to butterflies, it would seem.
And yet Phileas Fogg makes a senseless bet on a chance remark at a card game, then takes off like a bat out of hell. In a matter of hours Fogg is off to fight angry natives and rustle elephants.
There’s no question of Fogg ever backing off and returning to his previous rut. The book gets steadily more exciting as Fogg destroys every illusion of stability in human life.
The weirder he gets, the less likely he is to chicken out. It's like he's been given some tremendous source of storming energy that no rational act of will could ever have unleashed within his soul.
As Thoreau said, even the quietest of men is often topping-out on desperation. We never quite know what we can do till lightning strikes. Man, woman and child, we are all deeply contingent beings.
By nature, we are the heirs and heiresses of a genetic lottery...one female egg in the fertile, wriggling human soup of millions of possibilities. There is nothing so unlikely as the flesh we happen to inhabit, and we are all mysterious beings within our own minds.
Posted by Christopher at January 9, 2004 11:57 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lurid.org/mt-tb.cgi/85
Comments
#1
Your past experiences are what makes you the person that you are today. But, always remember no matter what has happened in the past, your future is still unknown.
Posted by: BAD at January 12, 2004 08:37 PM