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