the flapping of the butterfly and of the great flapper himself

That spreading tobacco thing, it sounds like an offering.  I suppose you could say that there is no idol right there in front of you, but that concept of Nature sounds kind of oh, spiritual, which is a close cousin to religion.  You're not expecting that it will move the spirits to bring more deer into the swamp, but then the Romans, well some Romans, weren't expecting anything from their spirits either it was just a show of respect for the empire, and it pissed them off that the Christians wouldn't do it. 

I guess there is a difference, Beagles isn't expecting everybody else to spread a little tobacco, or a drop of wine or Colt 45.  If you want to stand for the pledge or the flag that's fine, but when you want everybody else to do it, well I think that is asking too much.


I don't know if I served the nation by mopping the floors of Herrin Hospital.  The idea was that it had to be something vaguely connected to national service and it had to be somewhere other than where you lived and be low paying so that it was something of a sacrifice.  If I could have gotten out of it with a note from a doctor, and I tried, I wouldn't have done it.


Chaos is a great book.  I have a weathered copy of it, and if Old Dog plans to attend a seminar, which he hasn't for some time, I would be glad to bring it to the Ten Cat so that he could take it home and reread it.  The thing that struck me about it was that we normally think of math as being so staid, after all it is just an extension of boring old logic, but when you get into it, even just a little, all kinds of crazy things become apparent.  It was discovered when scientists would do some experiments that came out with crazy results, and they kept thinking they were doing things wrong, but when they studied the math behind it they discovered that the craziness was in the math itself. 

This guy, I think it was Lorenz, was doing research in weather. He used some complicated equations to forecast it from some starting conditions and ran them on a computer, but because computer time was hard to come by in those days he could only run it for so long.  He started it again using the numbers it gave before he was thrown off the computer and he got completely different results.  How could that be he wondered and then he realized that the computer was good for only so many decimal points and when he reentered the numbers he could only use so many decimal points.  It was like eight decimal points so he figured it wouldn't make any difference, but it made a big difference, and that's when he realized that even a small difference in starting conditions can make a big difference down the line and hence that flapping butterfly in South America can, down the line, be responsible for a tornado in Texas a few years hence.


This whole flap over the calls to the gold star mothers may now be moving into the background with the Flake and Corker speeches.  So much flapping, so little time.  That taking the knee thing is fading now, though the big flapper may decide to reawaken it again this very morning, the tweets that keep the nation boiling have yet to come over the transom this morning.