Connie Willis - Bellwether

Reading the Denver Post couple of Sundays ago and came across an article of Connie Willis. Never really entered my radar screen as an author I'd might like but then started to read the article and discovered she lives and writes in Greeley and has won 9 Hugo and 6 Nebula awards! Yikes being a fan of scifi why haven't I read her? Well she writes more in the Ursula LeGuin mode of scifi writing which I generally don't think of as scifi. Little more character and situation type writing. Personally I am a fan of the outer space type sci-fi like Niven. Anyhoo I read her novel Bellwether as it was one of the few books of hers I could find and one that seemed accessible. In this case about a scientist who studies fads (how is it that I find these books...this was simply an outcrop of the non-fiction Tipping Point that I read). This book also tries to wrap the scientific buzz word for 1996 into the story...i.e. chaos theory. Decent book some interesting points on scientists who made great discoveries in odd ways and interesting chapter headings listing fads that have come and gone. Henri Poincare first proposed the idea that chaos and significant scientific breakthroughs were connected. Chaos theorists say that Poincare went through a chaotic period that created a far-from-equilibrium situation in which unconnected ideas shifted into new and startling conjunctions with each other and tiny events created enormous consequences. Poincare believed creative thought was a process of inducing inner chaos to achieve a higher level of equilibrium. Is there a bellwether in chaotic systems? That triggers an iteration or serves as a catalyst to bring forth order? Chaotic systems create feedback loops that tend to randomize the elements of the system and allow for items to sync with different items which can sometimes bring a new level of order rather than more randomness. Anyway good read but the term "bellwether" was new to me. In this book it describes a sheep in a flock that unknowingly is the one sheep that others tend to follow. Obviously for our heroine in this book who searches for trends she is always looking for that trendsetter or bellwether. 

Anyway looking up the term bellwether at wikipedia. And determined an interesting fact:

"In the United States, Missouri, often referred to as the Missouri bellwether, is considered such a region, having produced, beginning in 1904, the same outcome as the national results in every presidential election save that of 1956. The American bellwether states are:

Missouri - 1 miss (1956) from 1904 on, perfect since 1960

Nevada - 1 miss (1976) from 1912 on, perfect since 1980

Tennessee - 1 miss (1960) from 1928 on, perfect since 1964

Ohio - 2 misses (1944, 1960) from 1896 on, perfect since 1964
Delaware - 2 misses (2000, 2004) from 1952 on, perfect from 1952 to 1996