A butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil and...

science looses another great. Edward N. Lorenz has passed away and somewhere there is a very guilty-looking butterfly. The meteorologist, seeking better models of weather systems, and in doing so be became the father of Chaos Theory.

The concept of the butterfly effect dates to the 1890s, but it was Lorenz in 1961 who reduced the concept to its modern conception and developed it into the theory we are familiar with. Interesting, his analogy first revolved around a seagull, "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." (1963 paper to NY Acad. of Science).

It is possible that his subsequent use of the butterfly is, at least in part, a hat tip to Ray Bradbury. Bradbury's 1952 short story on time travel, "A Sound of Thunder", revolved around consquences of the death of a butterfly in the days of the dinosaurs. It is hard to argue that the wings of a butterfly are more poetically pleasing than the wings of a seagull.

It has been a bad week for the sciences. Three days ago, another butterfly flapped its wings which ultimately opened a wee black hole that took the life of John Wheeler. Wheeler coined the term "Black Hole" and was one of the key brains behind the development of nuclear fission. Wheeler was the last of physics' rockstars...those whose names are nearly all ubiquitous. He argued the nature of reality with Bohr and Einstein, his grad students include the likes of Richard Feynman (whose Nobel Prize is owed, in part, to Wheeler) and Hugh Everett (of "Many Worlds" theory fame...to the pleasure of cosmologists and speculative fiction writers everywhere). Freeman Dyson said of him, “He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” (see, also and just for fun, Dyson shere).

I think in escapist homage I'll read, Who Got Einstein's Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[and yes, the MARIAB wrap-up is forthcoming...I need more time in the day]

Weather modification for fun and pleasure...

Admittedly, this is not really bookish...but it is amazing *and* I promise that at least on book *will be* published about it, so it is "proto-bookish":

MIT Review has a short, yet amazing, article on China's plans for weather modification to see that no rain falls on their 91,000 seat open air stadium. Last year China purchased an IBM p575 supercomputer. This wee bit of hardware is capable of executing 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. They are using it to model an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 sq. miles) and it is apparently accurate enough to generate hourly forecasts for *each kilometer*. They then use silver iodide, dry ice and a liquid nitrogen based coolant shot/dropped from field artillery and planes. From the article:

Unsurprisingly, therefore, China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers--mostly peasant farmers--who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

Personally, I find the very idea of "controlling" weather intellectually pleasing...admittedly, it will likely lead to some catastrophic disaster...but, after all, a civilization can only last so long. Really, mixing supercomputers, interesting chemicals, anti-aircraft artillery and rocket launchers...I challenge you name something more fun than that.

On the bookish front, it is worth noting that the origin of weather control began in 1946 in the labs of General Electric discovered that silver iodide could create crystals around which cloud moisture would condense and form rain...on of the lead scientists in this work was Bernard Vonnegut, the brother of the late Kurt Vonnegut). Work hard enough, and there is always a book angle...