Space Goats

I've begun doing a little research on an interesting internet phenomenon known as "predictive linguistics", run by a group known as "Half Past Human". (Kudos to Jon for introducing me to this whole thing, by the way) What I learned about the project immensely intrigued me. Now, the concept of how this works is a little complicated, so bear with me.

Simply put, this technology searches the internet for specific kinds of words, usually posted on discussion blogs, forums, news sites, etc. Incredibly large amounts (we're talking terabytes of information, here) of these words are collected by programs known as "web bots", along with a snippet of their surrounding text. They are reduced to series of numbers and plotted on graphic charts as dots. These dots tend to cluster in specific areas around certain words.

Now, every word in every possible language has a meaning (barring some random, obscure, or relatively unknown dead language). In order to define meanings, one has to essentially boil a word down to its essence, what the word conveys. When broken down in such a way, we can cluster words together under common conveyances or meanings.

Okay, now that we've gotten past the "simple" parts, here comes the creepy stuff.

What the people running this project have discovered, is that for whatever reason (more detail later) certain groups of words or phrases repeat themselves in a kind of pattern over time, based on the change in the word's meaning. These patterns tend to develop around a specific event or occurrence, in the future. That's right. Using this web-searching and filtering technology, these researchers can isolate specific traumatic events in the future, based off of web chatter occurring previously to said catastrophes.

To break all of this down into a few sentences, here's a quote seen here, "It's like changes in language precede large emotional events. The larger the emotional impact of the event, the more advance notice the bots seem to give."

They use the example of a rock being dropped into a pond, creating ripples. If you approached where the rock was dropped, you would get stronger and stronger ripples the closer you came. These events tend to create "ripples" in web chatter before and (obviously) after the events occur.

Now the problem arises in that in this day and age, there is a LOT going on in the world. To continue the analogy, it's like pouring a dump truck full of gravel into a pond, then sorting through the ripples to find the biggest rocks. Not exactly an easy task.

The wonderful folks over at HPH have also separated the data into different categories, such as "terra" (ie, anything involving the earth, ground, life, biosphere, etc) "globalpop" (world population sans U.S.) "USofA" (specifically the United States) and a host of others, including "SpaceGoatFarts".

...yeah. Basically this category is for anything involving... well anything we don't understand. Things from space, the unpredictable, things we have never heard of or seen before, aliens, etc. ...and apparently, Space Goat Farts. As you can see, even the creators of this project treat it with a certain level of humor; they don't take everything they learn as the absolute word of God Himself. Yet, while their predictions are by no means completely accurate and all-encompassing, many of the timing and indicators given seem to align with real-world events fairly accurately. Here's a quote from Half Past Human's affiliates, Urban Survival:

"We have friends who have developed a groundbreaking predictive technology which we simply call "web bot" technology... The technology, which samples large portions of the public internet with an eye toward "sensing the future" based on subtle changes in language, seems to have given indications before-the-fact of a large number of major news events, including but not limited to our reports before the fact on things like:

• 9/11

• Sumatra/ Banda Aceh quakes

• New Orleans Katrina/Rita

• Cheney and his "accident"

• Degrading of Iraqi's and Iraqi youth rebellion against US

• Silver (prices) exploding, followed by Gold

• Pakistan earthquake

• Climate change (the life-changing event)

• The multiple extraordinary hurricanes (with another season coming like the last)

• The increasing unpopularity of the Bush Administration leading up to the inevitable meltdown

• Space Shuttle explosion

• The unfolding disaster in Iraq

• Commodity shortages with more coming this summer (2006)

• Emerging and ongoing, oil price increases

• Then there's the more recent China Quake warning 72-hours before events, and the forecast of a major economic crisis to arrive around October 7, 2008..."

Makes you shiver, eh? Kinda creepy. Now, by no means is this an exact science. Even the founders of the project advise people not to base decisions off of their technology. But still, the fact remains that many of their predictions have come true.

Now, how is this possible? Is there such a thing as a collective human consciousness, as some would suggest? Is it mere coincidence? Or something bigger than us? The evidence is controversial at best. Dean Radin (PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences) has conducted tests determining that human beings have the apparent capacity to see or sense a few seconds into the future (see pages 6-15). Interesting.

Oh, and by the way, apparently there's a large "tipping point" scheduled to occur on November 14th. That's this Sunday.

I leave the conclusion up to you, dear readers.