Chaos Is No Catastrophe

I appreciated Phillip G. Armour's use of coupled pendulums as an analogy for software project management in his The Business of Software column "The Chaos Machine" (Jan. Chaos is already being exhibited when Armour's machine performs smoothly, in the sense future behavior is inherently unpredictable. What happened when the machine made a hop was not that it "hit a chaos point" but apparently some "resonance disaster" that caused it to exceed the range of operation for which it was built. Moreover, "turbulence" is not an appropriate description in this context, as it describes irregular movement in fluid dynamics. Chaotic behavior does not require three variables.