2 November 2007

the butterfly effect

yesterday i watched 'sound of a thunder' on tv. haha yes tv. my long hiatus from the television took a turn for the better yesterday when i decide to work in front of the tv. and of course, as one might have expected, my efficiency got reduced to like 1%? haha before watching the tv, i wrote 4 paragraphs for my i&r easily. then once this controversial media have been switched on, i barely wrote a few words.

anw! back to the movie. it was really quite interesting. it's been a while since i've watched a time travel sort of science-fiction. mmm and eventually there were some insinuations of a butterfly effect on time travel, much like what those harry potter fanfiction often preaches - every action you do in the past, no matter how small, will eventually snowball into something of unimaginable proportions.

and last night i forgot what that effect - the butterfly effect - was called so i was searching for some chim term, but it turned out to be simply 'the butterfly effect' xD but anyway, i found an interesting article on it.
RW: Meteorologist Tim Palmer of the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, England says weather forecasts are sensitive to small data errors.

TP: People sometimes use the metaphor of "the butterfly effect" to describe this sensitivity of weather conditions to small errors. A butterfly flapping it's wings in a small area of Amazonia could affect the weather over London a week later.

RW: Whether or not it's literally true is a matter for debate, Palmer says, but the point is that the metaphor of the butterfly represents a small local air movement that can affect the weather thousands of miles away. Palmer follows a big storm backwards in time to show how it works. A few days before it arrived in London it was a smaller storm off the US coast.

TP: If you go back 10 days, it's just some little tiny disturbance somewhere over the Pacific or over east Asia...what caused that low pressure system over east Asia ten days ago? Well it might have been just some Chinese lady shaking her washing out on the clothes line.

RW: Another metaphor - but the point is that big weather has small beginnings. As a meteorologist, if you don't get those beginnings right - if you don't factor in the Chinese lady - you can end up making mistakes in the forecast. To increase accuracy, the European Center makes many forecasts a day, each time tweaking the data - adding a small inaccuracy, like the Chinese lady - to make more precise forecasts reflecting a range of variables.
increase accuracy by making more errors. =) interesting indeed.

ok i shall wait for photos from vinod before talking more about our fun and adventurous ubin cycling trip with 01/02 scouts. =)

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