The Tumblr blog MovieBarcode offers us a very different look at some of our favorite films. Individual frames from each film are compressed into thin digital strips and compiled into barcode-like sequences, giving us a sense of how the color palette changes across a film and sometimes across a franchise.
An incredibly thorough analysis of how frequently words and characters …
It's terribly easy to get lost in Emil Johansson's Lord of the Rings Project, an extensive series of charts, maps, and genealogies analyzing J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. His latest update to the project is a real treat: a statistical analysis of the appearance of words and characters in The Lord of the Rings, The…
How weather prediction models can be used to forecast flu outbreaks
The complex computer models we use to predict the weather be used to predict illness, too. According to a new paper, these models could help us know weeks in advance just how bad this flu season will be.
As if mannequins weren't creepy enough already, now some spy on you as…
Online retailers are able to collect massive amounts of data on consumers and their shopping habits. Now brick and mortar retailers want to enjoy the benefits of sweet, sweet data gathering, and they're employing spying mannequins to do it.
The Pentagon has created a database of every bomb they've dropped since …
For the past six years, the U.S. Air Force has been compiling an exhaustive list of every bomb their planes have dropped since World War I.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray
At the end of the July, Star Trek fans get an extra special treat with the release of a high-definition transfer of the twenty-five episode first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Today at San Diego Comic-Con, we had the chance to see an extra-early peak at the restoration process performed on this historic…
Which data storage method will be the next to die?
The world is full of weird and obsolete old data storage forms, and they're a huge problem for archivists and libraries. The changing types of data storage are a particularly large thorn in the side of libraries catering to the preservation of the written word in the early decades of the digital age, like the…
How close are we to a real-life Person of Interest?
In the television show Person of Interest the Machine uses government surveillance data to predict individuals who will be involved in a crime, whether as a perpetrator or a victim. How close are we to a real-life version of the Machine? Current statistical modeling systems suggest we're not far off.
Artist transforms constipated Victorian photos into flamboyant scifi…
We've seen kaiju inserted into yard sale paintings
10 Ways Big Data is Creating the Science Fiction Future
Sometimes, it already seems like the websites you visit know more about you than you know about yourself — but this is just the beginning. Every day you're helping to generate masses more data, which computers are getting better and better at crunching. How long will it be before the predictive power of these systems…
