The Burrito effect

A monarch butterfly flapping it's wings in the Amazonian rain-forest, causes a tiny air current, makes a grain of pollen fly into a native's nose who sneezes, frightens a herd of elephants which then proceeds to stampede. The stampede raises so much dust that it alters air currents, causing it to rain, changing the local weather system. This small change interacts with neighboring systems, and eventually causes a tornado in Texas.

This is known as the Butterfly Effect which explains sensitivity of systems quite effectively. Highly sensitive systems respond dramatically to the smallest of variations in it's initial conditions. Complex, dynamic systems have inherently non-linear feedback loops, causing a small change to be amplified exponentially in time to manifest itself chaotically.

Sensitivity in the world is increasing, and I don't just mean emotional, political, or dermatological. The most notable changes have been seen in weather and society. Over the past few decades, the weather has been acting up. Hurricanes, melting ice-caps, crazy local weather, heavy rains when least expected, have become more frequent. Society has always acted in bizarre ways now and again, but the increasing frequency of crazy acts and degree of looniness may prove to be a trend rather than just an incidental occurrence.

These changes are so radical that we can't explain them using the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly phenomenon falls short by several orders of magnitude. Drawing inspiration from the Butterfly effect, I would like to propose a conjecture to try and explain the changes in the world. This conjecture offers explanation to phenomena like political upheaval, economic fluctuations, terrorist activities, gasoline prices, traffic grid locks, computer virus attacks, and other catastrophes. I call this the Burrito Effect.

Imagine a person who orders a Chipotle's grilled chicken Burrito with black beans, refried beans, green chilly and sweet corn, lettuce, jalapeno peppers, onions, salsa, sour cream, cheese and guacamole, with a cold-chicken salad, chips and salsa on the side and a Mountain Dew. As he is walking down the street after his lunch , he feels an imminent burp. Giving in to his instinctive diaphragmatic reflex, he releases some air audibly, causing the lady walking in front to say "How Rude! Hrrumph!". He scowls at her and goes back to his office. He then displaces considerable anger towards his colleagues. They, in turn, scowl at others and the day ends in a fist fight, divorce, suicide and a heart attack. These events form a chain reaction and cause some client in the Middle East to become angry who swears revenge, and causes a couple of bomb-blasts on the subway. The divorcee writes an internet worm that spreads rapidly to millions of machines, and starts spamming like there is no tomorrow. All this spam causes people to mistakenly delete important e-mail, causing further irreparable damage.

The original burp also causes a fly to choke and die, aggravating Animal Rights Activists who demonstrate in front of the White House and cause a gridlock on I-95, and a flood of expletives. The rising hot exhaust of so many cars in one location causes changes in the air currents, that cause an airplane to land hard, and this upsets the mood of 150 hungry, tired and cramped passengers. About half of them stop at a nearby Mexican joint and order burritos.

The 70 passengers, armed with 95 burritoes and 36 salads, cause 3500 gastrointestinal detonations and set off 286,000,000 chain reactions of varying magnitudes. Some of these chains end up as hurricanes like Katrina and Ophelia, as tsunami's and earthquakes, others as the market depressions, massive layoffs and inflation. Gasoline prices don't seem to be so bad now, do they?

The Burrito effect is a very powerful turbulent force of today. A malodorous burp in Time Square has orders of magnitude more potential to wreak havoc, than one tiny butterfly flapping it's wings in the middle of the rain-forest. No doubt, the Burrito is now the most powerful weapon of mass destruction. The really scary thing is, a burrito is cheap, easily available, trivially transportable, deliciously edible, acts in mysterious ways, and there is no way to stop catastrophic side effects.

So, what did you have for lunch today??

--Sandeep Ranade

Occam's RAZR

Occam's Razor states "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". According to the Razor, if there are two theories explaining a phenomenon, the simplest is often correct. I should mention at the outset that this law is a heuristic, and there are counter-examples. However, its been used prolifically in almost all fields including Computer Science, Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, Statistics and even Religion.

An attempt to apply Occam's Razor to itself yields the statement, "The simplest explanation is the best". This is a good heuristic that can be widely (and wildly) applied. Leonardo da Vinci extended this to the statement "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". He associated simplicity with sophistication and elegance. One can use this simple principle almost everywhere in life.

We use gadgets like computers, cell phones, music players, GPS navigation systems, etc. More often than not, these devices have very complex interfaces that only 13 year old kids can operate easily and with expertise. Almost everyone who was not 13 when the device surfaced in the market has trouble with intricate and often counter-intuitive interfaces.

There was a generation that defied Occam's razor and associated complexity and esotericity with sophistication and usability. Elegance was defined as a 3 mega-pixel camera that cost a thousand dollars, which only the owner's pre-teen nephew could operate. Computer programs would almost always boast hugely complex menus, large scary sounding dialog boxes, millions of features no one ever used, hundreds of buttons on the screen, etc. In fact, if it didn't have these attributes, it often became a marketing nightmare to convince the users that it was useful. Website designs, advertisements, musical scores, government forms, corporate processes, logos, etc were invariably full of intricate detail. Those years should be called the "Era of Complexity".

In the later half of this decade, people have been giving more thought to the fact that simplicity may actually enhance usability. This line of thinking is quickly ushering in the Era of Simplicity. Thinkers, Designers, Artists, Programmers, user interface developers for applications and devices, media people have started pushing the idea that the simplest interface is in fact, the best. This is a restatement of the Razor for the technology era.

Taking simplicity seriously, and the world by storm are Google (the minimalistic search interface created a fanatic fan following), Apple with it's IPod Nano and Motorola with the simple, yet elegant cell phone RAZR, both of which have become fashion statements. The Das Keyboard takes Occam's principle to the limit -- an all-black keyboard with completely blank keys!

The nerd acronym for Occam's Razor is KISS (Keep It Short and Simple). This is a good heuristic for most things. We can apply the KISS philosophy to language, lifestyle, design, law, etc. The simplest way to say a sentence is often the cleanest way. The Constitution was written in the Era of Complexity and this excludes many from understanding the law clearly. Complex language also can create multiple interpretations thus making law a very lucrative career. Disaster often happens when people misinterpret complex instructions which were worded that way for sake of lucid comprehension. Adding complexity for disambiguating semantics often muddles it.

A simple formula gives us the amount of information packed in a given chunk of data, and redundancy reduces it's quality. This is a direct derivation of Occam's Razor. This means that the amount of information doesnt depend on the number of bits the data chunk contains, but rather on the lack of redundancy (also called entropy). Thus, a stream of a million A's has very little information content, as it can be simplified to the form {A, million}. In contrast, a stream of purely random numbers contains a large amount of information as further encoding may actually increase the size of the stream. This is a well known result in Information Theory, and the take-away message is -- "the simpler the encoding, the better the result".

Logos, scores, websites, Ads, posters, interfaces, clothes, furniture and even recepies are getting simpler. Some are almost minimalistic. This in my opinion is a good trend. If it's redundant, remove it. More of us should apply this law to make our lives simpler. In fact, the whole world needs a user interface review, to attempt to remove all unnecessary complexity and boil it all down to the simplest possible useful interface.

I am not saying that we should eliminate complexity. Its all relative. There will always be complexity in the universe. There will also be a threshold beyond which, adding any more intricacies will be useless, and even hamper efficiency. Every bit of complexity added increases the likelihood of error. Given a model, we should strive to find the simplest possible explanation; given a problem, to find the simplest possible correct solution.

The motto of the "Era of Simplicity" should simply be Simplest is Best.

Are we the weirdos on Planet Earth?

I visited the Smithsonian Zoo in Washington DC a week ago. It was very impressive -- a large campus splattered with a variety of trees, but it got me thinking. As I made the rounds of the zoo, a sudden realization shattered my homo-centric thinking patterns.


Humans think, that humans, by definition, are normal. We believe that we are the golden standard to which all living beings should be compared with. As I was touring the zoo observing various co-habitants of Earth, I realized that we may not be the golden standard after all. Do technological advances really mean that we are an advanced species?

We keep animals in cages and often charge people to gawk at them. The zoo officials get to play god to these defenseless animals while the management gets to sell Giant Panda "teddy bears". If humans are put in cages and made into an entertainment/educational show, everyone will agree, that is cruelty. But we do much worse to the animals and call it conserving wildlife! Zoos around the world are involved in conservation efforts, but I am not convinced that this particular method for preserving nature is the right one.
I observed the Zebra caged in an enclosure near the Spotted cheetah. That's like putting me in a cage adjoining one that houses my school Gym teacher. In both cases, normal digestive functions are suspended as the bowel retracts in fear. That, in my opinion, was beyond cruel.

As I was reading the names of exotic species outside their displays, I was appalled at the insensitivity we show towards our co-species. "Red-bellied Tortoise", "Three-toed amphiuma", "Rat-tailed Rat snake", "Black Tailed Prairie Dog" were the kind of names that we have given to spectacular animal species. Is this not politically incorrect? If I call someone "Lilly-Livered, Yellow-bellied chicken-hearted scardy-cat", I'm sure I will be subpoenaed. This insult is not only insulting to flowers, poultry and cats, its also colorist. Names like "Emperor Newt" and "Common musk turtle" are undoubtedly racist. If we make an effort to be sensitive and politically correct when humans are concerned, why cant we do the same towards other life forms?

The Giant Panda and it's new-born baby was the big new exhibit at the zoo. The Panda mother was sleeping in a creeper-lined cave that opened towards us. It was a hot afternoon, and the poor panda was catching up on forty winks. The people around noisily photographed her with blinding flashes. It is painful to imagine even one afternoon when I am trying to nap, and people are staring, talking loudly and photographing me with bright flashes. I felt sorry for the captive panda mother who has to face this torture from 6am to 8pm, 7 days a week.

The invertebrate exhibit fascinated me. The most spectacular, goose-bumpy denizen of the deep was the giant octopus. Floating in a glass cage barely 4 times it's volume, it was orange in color, it looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger when it filled it's "mouth" with water and expelled it, propelling it's body in the water. With it's eight graceful sucker-enhanced tentacles, it looked surreal as it hovered in the water. It's eyes made it seem angry towards the world, and its pulsating body gave the impression that it was cursing silently at it's predicament. The octopus almost looked alien (by standards established by most science fiction writers), which itself is an insult to it's species, as it has been in existence for more time than humans have.


Invertebrates like spiders, crabs, sea urchins, coral, anemones, ants, cockroaches, lobsters, centipedes etc inspired a thought -- if we think that they are weird and creepy, we must be even weirder and creepier. These creatures have inhabited earth for billions of years more than us humans, and deserve respect. We are the creepy ones with obsessions and perversions. We have been playing God with these innocent beings, and we must find better ways of giving them space and privacy, and the answer is not Zoos!

We talk about being inhuman, but is that the correct term? Are we humane by definition? Do we care, respect and love our co-habitants? Do we alleviate their suffering? Is 'Humanity' a human characteristic? I tend to disagree. Being cruel, uncaring, self-centered and dominating is the defining human characteristic. There are very few humans in the world that feel and do otherwise. They are the exceptions to the rule.

Thus the word humane in my dictionary would look like:

Humane (Adjective)

Lacking kindness, pity or compassion; cruel, deficient in emotional warmth, monstrous.

I have coined a new word to express this new insight.

Animane (Adjective)

characterized by kindness, mercy or compassion,as is the nature of animals (except humans)