Chaos Attraction

Trying On Names For Size

2002-03-19, 6:21 p.m.

Okay, I keep saying that I need to go change the name of this journal, but I haven't gotten around to it. I have, however, while really bored, managed to find a list of possible interesting names.

The kind of name I'm going for has to do with how I attract chaos to me. I didn't think "Chaos Attraction" or "Chaos Attractor" sounded all that great, so I've been trying to find some other kind of reference/name that would work for it. Here's the possible variants I found that I'm looking at, with their sources.

* Attractor Theory.

* Complexity Theory: Seems to mean the interaction of several characteristics.

* Attractor Basin: You know how balls will roll around a bowl until they stop at the lowest point of it? That's what this is.

* Strange Attractor: An attractor that doesn't return to any place it's been before and operates in a random pattern.

* Resident Attraction: Why we think of one thing and not another.

* The Edge of Chaos: A point at which the mind has functions cooperating to maintain the whole.

* Law of Attraction: The law of attraction that keeps things from becoming utter chaos.

And here's a bunch of definitions:

Attractor: "A point to which a system tends to move, a goal, either deliberate or constrained by system parameters (laws). The three permanent attractor types are fixed point, cyclic and strange."

Butterfly Effect: "The possibility that a large change can occur from a minor shift in initial conditions. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon leading to changes in the location of a typhoon. Sensitivity to initial conditions, a chaotic system."

Chaos: "A system whose long term behaviour is unpredictable, tiny changes in the accuracy of the starting value rapidly diverge to anywhere in its possible state space."

Complexity Theory: "The study of how critically interacting components self-organize to form potentially evolving structures exhibiting a hierarchy of emergent system properties."

Edge of Chaos: "The tendency of dynamic systems to self-organise to a state midway between static (unchanging) and chaotic (random) states. This is also regarded as the liquid phase, half way between solid (static) and gas (random) natural states. In information theory this is the state containing the maximum information.

Strange Attractor: "An attractor whose variables never repeat their values but always are found within a restricted range, a small area of state space."

I'm thinking that Strange Attractor sounds the most like my particular problem (the chaos tends to hang around me, and it's usually different folks causing it), but I dunno if I like how it sounds exactly. What do you think?


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