A Day of Inches

       Jessica and I woke up this morning with a purpose. We were going to pick up her dad from the airport. His name is Jesse and you can tell by the way he named his only child that there is just a pinch of Narcissism flowing through his veins. After that, we would be heading to Riverview, FL to meet up with her uncle (his brother) to play golf. Unfortunately, there was a storm in Syracuse, NY that unleashed 18 inches of snow on them overnight. The 6:00 am flight out of NY was delayed, thus causing Jesse to miss his connecting flight from JFK to Tampa. It was supposed to leave around 8:00 am, but the next flight to Tampa would not be departing until 1:00 pm.
       What is amazing is that 18 inches of snow caused a 1,300 mile trip to be delayed 5 hours. I have done numerous mathematical calculations since hearing the saddening news this morning. I did this because I wanted to understand the full breadth of the situation. The most glaring result was that it took only 0.0138461538461538 inches of snow to delay a mile of travel. The cleanest example is that for each inch of snow, the trip was delayed 1,000 seconds. I don't care what it is, one thousand of anything seems like a lot.
       This got me to thinking, what other small acts can make such great changes in our lives? We've all heard of the “Butterfly Effect” (the metaphor, not the terrible movie starring Ashton Kutcher). If a butterfly can flap its wings in Syracuse and cause a hurricane in Australia (FYI: they call them cyclones, not Willy-Willies), then what else is making a difference in world that the unfocused mind is unable to pick up?
       I have subscribed to the Chaos Theory since reading Jurassic Park and watching the movie when I was a teenager (Michael Crighton and Jeff Goldblum are much more convincing than Ashton Kutcher will ever be). Be it a Lepidoptera inciting a tropical weather phenomenon, the flexibility of frog DNA leading to the deaths of numerous Dinosaur enthusiasts or travel delays caused by tiny frozen water crystals; chaos is something that can not be planned or even explained. I think that is why they call it chaos.