The Butterfly Effect: Why Everything You Do
Matters
Author: Jakedanger

Chaos theory, a recent groundbreaking theory in applied
mathematics, asserts that even a butterfly flapping its wings
in Texas can cause a chain of events leading to a typhoon in
Japan a month later. It's called "sensitive dependence on
initial conditions". What that means in plain English is that
the matrix of cause and effect is so delicately balanced and
interdependent that if you change one thing, you change
everything.

What fascinates me is how that idea might translate into the
effect that our conscious decisions have on the world around
us. I am reminded of the film "Schindler's List", about a
German industrialist in World War II who ran a munitions
factory with Jewish slave labor. He kept requesting more and
more laborers, far more than he needed, aware that their
recruitment would save them from the gas chambers (and saw to
it that his factory produced nothing of value to the German war
effort). What is stunning about that film is the final scene -
actual footage from the 1980s, of hundreds of people filing
past his grave to lay flowers on his tombstone. I was curious
as to why so many of them were clearly too young to have been
alive during World War II. Until it hit me - these were the
sons and daughters of the Jews on Schindler's list. People who
never would have been born except for Schindler's heroism. Some
of the grandsons and granddaughters have yet to be born even to
this day. And hundreds of years from now, how many people who
will have never heard the name "Schindler" will unwittingly owe
their lives, indeed their very births, to the man who saved the
life of their great-great-great-great-grandmother during an
ancient war?

"What we do in life, echoes in eternity" - Russell Crowe in the
film "Gladiator"


About The Author: Jake Danger is a mcertified lunatic currently
residing in the cellar of Oakfield Institute of the Very, Very
Nervous. His website, Lunatic Wisdom: The World According to
Jake Danger, is at http://www.lunaticwisdom.com/blog
/2006/11/02/the-real-life-matrix. Don't believe a word he says.