An example of an extremely significant, decidedly unintended result of a relatively tiny event can be nightmarish. This one is, at least for me. It concerns the role I played in getting George W. Bush elected president in 2000. That I was the butterfly whose fluttering cascaded into Bush's election still pains me. I had written an op-ed for the New York Times titled "We're Measuring Bacteria with a Yardstick" in which I argued that the vote in Florida had been so close that the gross apparatus of the state's electoral system was incapable of discerning the difference between the...