This week’s culture corner is going to attempt to break out of my own limits for it by using much more modern words to prove that culture is still being created. The word of the week is
Pretentious
Pretentious is an adjective used, nowadays, to describe a person or thing which has an exaggerated sense of value according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. The term is often applied to a person who thinks their ideas are much more brilliant and insightful than anyone else’s. The term is currently applied either in a self-mocking tone to ones self or it is used as a term of derision, with “He’s so pretentious” or “We’re so pretentious”. Furthermore pretensions themselves are preconceived notions about something or someone with little or no value, make up pretentious behavior.
Used in a sentence on it’s own:”Let us drop these pretensions and reveal our true natures””His poetry was incredibly pretentious because he had no thoughts; only words clumsily strung together.”
The subject of the weeks is:
Chaos Theory
Chaos theory is a theory which describes that tiny things can have drastic effects on a large scale, given enough time. It is more commonly known as the “butterfly effect” in which the example given says that a butterfly flapping its wings could conceivably create a hurricane on the other side of the world.
Chaos theory was first described by a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz in 1960 according to library.thinkquest.orgs link to chaos theory.
While attempting to model a certain weather sequence Lorenz put his data from the computer printout into the model and left for an hour to let it run. When he came back the data was very different from the original models output.
This was due to the computer’s printout rounding off to three decimal places instead of the six decimal places his computer had originally recorded. By normal scientific thought it should have worked, with three decimal places not being a very significgant difference from six, but it didn’t, proving that very small events can have a huge impact given enough time.
This discovery has vast implications in science currently. For example according to an article in the Sydney Morning Hearld new scientific research has found that “ALL blue-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived near the Black Sea 10,000 years ago.
A single mutation changed the gene that created the brown eye pigment into one that couldn’t.
This small mutation over the past 10,000 years or so has passed into Europe due to successive waves of migration after the last ice age.
Now, if chaos theory wasn’t true then this little difference wouldn’t matter at all and we would all have black hair and brown eyes, except for the small number of genetic weirdos who would get the mutation randomly.Chaos theory also played a huge part in Jurassic Park, where small mutations in the genome of the dinosaurs enabled them to become hermaphroditic and mate with each other, breeding far faster than the park’s security system could keep up with.So in conclusion the effects of the chaos effect can be well chaotic.