Exercises for Chaos Under Control

Chapter 8: A Parable

19.[W] (a) Write a parable of your own. Specifically, take an instance from your life where a small choice, perhaps made in an offhand fashion, led eventually to a significant difference in your life. For your parable to be apt to the context of this Chapter, the course of events flowing from your choice has to be deterministic. Try to identify some of the nonlinearities in the "dynamics of your life" that helped cause your choice to initiate the unexpected chain of events it did.

(b) To emphasize the magnitude of the effect of this small choice, construct a plausible scenario of the result of your making a different small choice (under the same "life dynamics").

20.[W] Write a fictional version of exercise 19. No longer constrained by recounting the truth, use your imagination to tell a story emphasizing how small changes can result in arriving at significantly different stable states when the dynamics impelling change is nonlinear.

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