Psychohistory

Well, that's what it looks like: analysis of large aggregations of human behavior yeild enough data to predict the future of the DOW with 87.6% accuracy.   Its even more analogous when you figure in that if the tweeters learn about the predictions, the outcome will change.

Twitter Predicts the Stock Market | Singularity Hub

Bollen, Mao, and Zeng fed the 9.8 million tweets into OpinionFinder and GPOMS and compared the trends they found to the Dow. The emotional lens that seemed to have a strong correlation to the stock market was ‘Calm’. When the calmness of tweets changed, two to six days later the Dow would fluctuate in about the same way.

Google to place Dead Sea Scrolls online

Surely no one will step up with copyright concerns this time ...

Google to bring Dead Sea Scrolls online

The scrolls will be available in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and at first an English translation. Eventually other translations will be added and Google's translation feature may also be incorporated. They will also be searchable.

Excellent Post on The Difference Engine

 

The 100-year leap - O'Reilly Radar

 

In December 1837, the British mathematician Charles Babbage published a paper describing a mechanical computer that is now known as the Analytical Engine. Anyone intimate with the details of electronic computers will instantly recognize the components of Babbage's machine. Although Babbage was designing with brass and iron, his Engine has a central processing unit (which he called the mill) and a large amount of expandable memory (which he called the store). The operation of the Engine is controlled by program stored on punched cards, and punched cards can also be used to input data.