- In this, the New Age of Revolution, a supercomputer in a lab at the University of Illinois is predicting world events. Hundreds of millions of articles are inputed to the seven-foot tall machine (covered in a coat of fine metals — clean and sophisticated)… Sentiment mining then follows, “mood detection”… Locations are tracked… And through an inter-connected web of over 100 trillion complex relationships a picture of the world is born, what’s happening now and what will happen in the future. The computer, a Nautilus SGI, predicted (to some degree) the revolution of Egypt and also helped narrow down the location of Osama Bin Laden. Kalev Leetaru, the operator of the device, says: “I liken it to weather forecasting. It’s never perfect, but we do better than random guessing.“
Egypt and Libya are both in a panic. Who, or what, is next?
- Check out these photos from the “Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011″ on BBC. Excellent slide show, well worth 6 minutes of your life.
- Warren Ellis is featuring guest writers (“Guest Informants”) on his site right now. They are all very, very interesting but this one from Richard J. Lockley-Hobson of the Hauntological Society is absolutely fascinating. This is from Lockley-Hobson’s site:
“To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration” Derrida, Specters of Marx, pg.202
