Hurricane may provide Obama with vital re-election boost

YOU’RE familiar with the butterfly effect, of course.

You know what I mean — when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can ultimately cause a hurricane in another.

I thought I was familiar with that notion — and had always dismissed it as some sort of fanciful parable — until I looked it up. It’s to do with chaos theory, and was originally named by a scientist called Lorenz. He was trying to find a metaphor for the kind of changes that can happen in utterly unpredictable areas (like how weather develops, for instance) from tiny beginnings. In fact, the first time Lorenz wrote about the phenomenon, he talked about the flapping of a seagull’s wings rather than a butterfly’s.