i got back from a miraculous lunch, to find my coffee still warm at my desk.
how gracious. my code is getting fussier as i get closer to finishing..

last night i watched a pedestrian nearly get trampled by a bicyclist who was speeding around a blind corner, trusting his misknowledge about what lie around it.
had the pedestrian left his previous location just a few seconds earlier, that bicyclist would have seriously injured him..

i continued home on foot, through the neighborhood.
audibly, a car came hurdling up behind me at a ridiculously dangerous speed.
normally, i do my best to let these disturbing things not linger on my mind, even in the moment, i try to leap into a real-time forgiveness.
yet, this motorist was going so fast, so recklessly, that i stopped, stepped off to the side of the road, and extended my middle finger. this insecure behavist could easily kill any number of my friends on this street, young kind strangers, my love, etc.. anything.
i stood on a curve in the road, as he came around it,
i, with my finger held out.
he sped around the corner, and started up the hill, accelerating so fast, that he visibly almost lost control of the vehicle.
i immediately began to let it seep out of me, waiting for the sound of a crash somewhere over the hill.
nothing.

a little later, a roommate came home, asking us if we had seen the crash down the street.
i suspected.
apparently, the autofellow was speeding back down the same street that i was on, lost control around that same turn, and smashed head on into the electrical pole that i was standing in front of while middlefingering. he snapped the pole in half.
the initial crash knocked out the internet/cable wires,
and so, i know that the crash happened just minute or two after i got home, which was a minute or two after i had been standing in that very spot.

he crashed, apparently, with a female passenger. immediately after the crash, he got out, and ran away, with some witnesses chasing after him..
the female was seen being loaded into an ambulance with a neckbrace.

clearly, if i had left where i was coming from just a minute or two later, blah blah..

i wonder if he would have crashed, had i decided not to outstrech my finger.
i wonder if that fueled him, compelling him further.
i, of course, can not know.

in nonlinear dynamics,
this can be rephrased as "sensitivity to initial conditions".
tiny changes resulting in incredibly different outcomes..
as overused as it is lorenz's "butterfly effect"...
this sensitivity to small changes is what defines chaos, in the technical use of the word. yet, there is a strange question of determinism here.
where is the determinism? chaos only comes from deterministic systems. this is what allows the system to react to small changes. if small change happened in a random (stochastic) system, then the next change would be random, and ultimately unaffected by the small change. it gets lost in the noise..
there has to be some determinism, some rule which governs the way that the system evolves, in order for a small change to be amplified into a big change..
i suppose the notion of cellular automata
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) comes to mind.
there is a small-scale rule which governs the way that structure emerges, and sustains.. but then larger scale structures can emerge..
i suppose that, in the universe, when a new level of structure emerges from an older one (biological structure emerging from chemical, psychological structure emerging from neural, etc.. ) then the principles which govern these new phenomena are also emergent, they have properties, causes, effects, etc...
so, a concise description of how their properties, and the properties of things they interact with (on any level) are affected by their behaviors should constitute what we generally consider "rules",.. but in a loose sense.
translating principles into a formal language (like mathematics) usually creates something which we are quicker to recognize as a "rule", and so,
it is simply that, for social systems, there is not yet rigorous enough language for me to have some immediate recognition of a determinism acting.
this makes sense, while i keep in mind that,
such a determinism would not be the strict inflexible kind that is meant when talking about physics..
that determinism is a bit more intuitive.
a social determinism would just entail a perspective which would encompass the totality of all agents, their motivations, and the resources and behaviors being exerted to satisfy those motivations...

that is a large perspective to walk around with, on a beautiful night, with mortality speeding around blind corners.