Lost and not found

It's been a long time since I've read about the Butterfly Effect, maybe 25 years ago.  It was in a book by James Gleick titled Chaos: Making a New Science.  I used to buy a lot of books about that kind of stuff; chaos, fractals, and the like.  There is a certain beauty that presents itself in those forms and a mathematical underpinning that I find pleasing.  I've given up my search for the book because the books I look for seem to have disappeared.  I know I bought and read it and stuck it on a shelf but I just can't find it.  I've moved four times since I bought the book so it may have gotten lost in the shuffle, which is vexing.  Damn, I was hoping to impress Mr. Beagles with a few pithy insights.

A little online digging helped refresh my memory, and Mr. Beagles is close to the mark.  Simply stated, the Butterfly Effect describes how the flapping of a butterfly in South America affects the path of a tornado in Texas.  The term was created by Edward Norton Lorenz, an American mathematician and pioneer of chaos theory.  He was also a meteorologist, which I guess is a weatherman who knows what he is talking about and not just a pretty face in front of a green screen on TV.  Wikipedia has a lot of good info on the Butterfly Effect, Chaos theory, and fractals which I find to be fun reading but you guys may not like it.  Geeking out on math and geometry is another in a long list of my guilty pleasures.

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Sticking with guilty pleasures for a bit, I usually enjoy watching the reruns of the Law & Order franchise of police procedurals, especially the original version with the cops in the first half and the prosecutors in the second half.  Later versions have gotten away with that pattern and emphasize the cops' part of the story which I don't find as interesting and some of the programs, like the Special Victim's Unit one, are getting too creepy for me.

I thought I knew about all of the different Law & Order programs but a new one has gotten my attention: Law & Order:UK which takes place across the pond.  Same basic premise, and it's interesting to compare and contrast the differences between our legal systems.  They have Crown Prosecutors instead of District Attorneys and police interrogation methods seem very different in that they have more restrictions than the police do in the US but they also have a lot more CCTV cameras at their disposal.  Maybe it's bullshit and artistic license on the part of the program producers.  The little wigs the barristers wear in court are still a source of amusement for me, as is the very formal language they use; no 'your honor' nonsense in referring to the judges.  It's M'Lord and M'Lady, and sometimes there are more than one of them on the bench.  Also, both prosecutors and defense sometimes talk at the same time, which you don't see on Perry Mason unless one of them is raising an objection.

A little detail of English as it spoken in the UK, at least in the programs I've been watching, is the frequent use of the word reckon.  It sounds strange to my ear because in the US we usually only hear it from cowboys or other rustic types.  Reckon it will rain today, Cletus?  It's a word I associate with John Wayne or Gary Cooper and not some guy in a robe and a little white wig.