[LINK] The butterfly effect at work

[rfmcdonald]

Chaos theorists like to speculate how a butterfly flapping wings in Beijing might cause an earthquake in Latin America. But history could have something even more chaotic to say -- how a Japanese soldier's toilet stop near Beijing in 1937 plunged Japan into an eight-year war with China, rescued Europe from a decade of Nazi domination, and sent Japan to crashing defeat in 1945.

- Gregory Clark, writing in The Japan Times