The butterfly effect

When in 1969 American meteorologist Edward Lorenz forged his famous metaphor, he was just pointing out the complex interconnection among the different levels of phenomena that affect our lives. These connections are not only many (therefore hard to take into account), but in many cases are not even apparent (so that even if you had the resources to model every interaction you would not find the need to implement them). Besides, the relevant of these unaccounted effects grows with time. That is what makes weather prediction so hard and long-term weather prediction impossible.

However, this complexity is not limited to the maze of meteorology; as I mentioned some weeks ago, economists have described similar effects through the term unintended consequences, which refers to variables which were initially considered irrelevant but ultimately become important to the point that they derail the predictions. Economic bubbles, such as the late 1990s dot-com bubble or the 1637 tulip mania are premium examples of these "hidden connections" where the prestige of the assets, whether it is tulip bulbs or stock in technological ventures and for no obvious reason, widely exceeds their use value, so once the prestige wears out the market collapses.

Graph: Wikimol and Dschwen

 In my personal life, one of the most serious manifestations of the butterfly effect is the amount of effort I put into a given task. Depending wildly on a number of factors, including the weather, the mood of the kids, the amount of work that I have had recently or even the tone of my last video conference with my mother and brothers, I am ready to work much harder or not to attain my goals. Probably the fact that I find no shame in admitting that a given tasks exceeds my abilities or my capacity at a given point in time also makes quitting a lot easier, so I often end up finishing a job or leaving it half-way just by a sheer concurrence of circumstances.

On a side bar, yesterday I had an epiphany watching the second season of the Netflix series The OA, when one of the characters, who is a video game designers points out:

In a game you can win or lose, but in a puzzle you cannot lose: you get stuck. You just have to understand the language that the designer of the puzzle is using, and then everything becomes much easier.

The illuminating aspect of this quote is that, in life, many tasks are like puzzles: you just do not understand how to solve them at a point in time, so you just put it aside (admittedly sometimes forever) and eventually give it another try.

I come to reflect on this today, because I have just undergone one such case of long-abandoned task that suddenly gets disentangled. Growing up I spent a lot of time reading books, but I was also captivated by the allured of comic books. From a very early age I started reading not only the superhero sagas of Marvel and DC, but also the series by European authors like the French Goscinny (Asterix, Iznogoud, Lucky Luke), the Spanish Ibanez (Mort & Phil) or the Belgian Hergé (Tintin). Countless Saturday afternoons were spent choosing (or directly reading) albums at the public library, because my hunger for them exceeded the capacity of my parents to buy new ones. Later I got in touch with more elaborate books oriented to an older audience, but I was particularly fond of Jean "Moebius" Giraud with his beautiful depictions of alien landscapes and life forms, whose astonishing detail I loved to examine and admire for hours on end.

After I left the university I was for many years too busy to spend any time reading comic books, but some years ago I received an offer from the pay-what-you-want site Humble Bundle which was just too good to pass: for just one dollar I could get around 400 pages of comics in digital format. Some of the artists were unknown to me, but there were at least two or three that I knew about and, missing the experience of comic books for such a long time, I decided that I could devote one dollar to it. The books were, for the most part, good, the digitization was bearable and the files were not out of this world in size (certainly in the tens to a few hundreds of megabytes, but still OK for a hundred pages of drawings), but the final experience was a bit underwhelming. The recommended comic reader at the time was Moon Reader, but it did not offer and intuitive pinch-and-zoom interface and, by its very nature, comics are normally big in format, while the lettering tends to be small, so I laboriously read through one or two books before I decided that it was too cumbersome and I had to find another solution.

Some months later I saw another pack of comics, equally appealing, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the iconoclast punk series Tank Girl, by British authors Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. At the moment when I received the offer I was painfully aware that I had not found a working solution for my comic reading habit, but I decided to buy it anyway and promised myself to give another try to "the puzzle". But I never did.

Finally, last week I received a third offer including several works of my beloved Moebius, including the six volumes of The Incal, which I started to read many, many years ago and never had a chance to complete. That was precisely the kind of excuse I needed to finally sit down and finally solve my problems with reading comics. It did not take me much longer than ten minutes to understand that today's application of choice for the task was ComicScreen, possibly not the only solution, but usable enough for me, so I have been enjoying my newly rediscovered hobby a whole lot.

I hope that this example has been illustrative of my own human flaws and helps you feel somewhat better at your own. It might have also helped nudging you in the right direction to finally get on with that long-stuck project of yours. At any rate, have a nice evening, and I will talk to you tomorrow again.