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Sunday, February 21, 2010 Okay, so we're doing 'The Sound of Thunder' by Ray Bradbury (lol I was like Rad Braybury) for English right now, kind of like analyzing it for Literature except we're doing stuff like vocabulary and comprehension instead of writing Literature 'PEEL' essays. In any case, it finally occurred to me after reading the whole story/excerpt for the comprehension bit that he actually used a butterfly, as the thing that causes a great ripple effect, instead of say something like a mouse. And I remembered watching a movie a bunch of years back featuring Ashton Kutcher titled none other than 'The Butterfly Effect' where he could go back into the past by reading his adolescent journals to make changes to it. There was a whole lot of hooha about it and every time he made a change in his past, it changed his whole future from that point. There were various endings to the movie, but the one that I watched was the one where he went back to the time when he was still a foetus in his mother's womb and strangled himself to death. Prior to his birth, his mother had two miscarriages (both of which were sons). His father had the same ability to change the past (though his method was through watching videos of the past, if I remember correctly) and he kept trying to save his previous sons. In any case, this particular ending of the film makes the main character played by Ashton Kutcher not the cause of the butterfly effect but rather the effect itself. This just clicked into my head while I re-read the ending of the story/excerpt. In any case, while the butterfly effect was first (assumingly, though there may have been prior works that were not noted or maybe the idea had formulated in the mind of another author but had never been written by the author) written in literature by Ray Bradbury, it seems the actual term 'butterfly effect' was coined later by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. Cool stuff man, we're reading up on meteorological theories without even knowing. ;D In any case, I read from Wikipedia (my best friend) that Edward Lorenz actually had this theory that a seagull flapping its wings in some faraway beach in say Brazil might cause a tornado in say somewhere else faraway like Japan. Which is cool. You running on the streets with a piece of cardboard might cause a typhoon in Indonesia! O: Yeah, I'm just really fascinated by this 'butterfly effect' theory and I think it would be cool to write something based on that theory. The 'butterfly effect' might have been known as the 'seagull effect' though, had Edward Lorenz not traded the initial example of a seagull flapping its wings into the more poetic (says the world) butterfly flapping its wings. I feel like the timeline written by Ray Bradbury was a little... unrealistic and incorrect. It wasn't flawless and I think it could have been written better, but nonetheless, it was a very enjoyable read. Eckels seems like a fat man with a moustache who is really rich but good-for-nothing. I never really liked people who go hunting for animals. Honestly, they have lives too, you know! And families! It's selfish to hunt them down and take them away from their happy lives. :/ I don't really know if the version we're reading in the compilation book, 'A Sense of Belonging', contains the full story or some excerpt of 'The Sound of Thunder' but I would also have enjoyed it more if Ray Bradbury hadn't been so stingy on descriptions on his characters and the shift in settings. There was no indication of two other hunters in the beginning, until they're suddenly in the Time machine and suddenly being transported to the Past. I figure that it is probably because its a short story, so less time for description and etc. or maybe it was just the way Ray Bradbury writes. I write like that too. D; I think I would like to find more works by Ray Bradbury and read up on him more. It's kind of interesting to observe the flaws and finer parts of a story and then to observe the writing style of the author. And now I'm hungry so... yeah. I shall leave this here. Random post is random and meaningless. Julle 주월 3:20 PM
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