So loving this article on the correlation between reported cases of flu and aggregated search patterns for flu-related keywords. The thing that strikes me as strange is that anyone is surprised. We have in Google the world’s first universal resource. All human knowledge* is there, all humans** contribute to it, therefore one of the emergent properties of it will be that, analysed correctly, it can be as predictable as the individuals who made it.

*By which I mean, “more human knowledge than has ever been compiled into one place, from quantum theory to LOLDONGS

**By which I  mean, all middle class, white dudes. Which historically has amounted to the same thing.

(Loooooong ass post coming up in which I fully explore these ideas.)