Don’t put anything in your diary for after December 21st 2012.
“Web-bot” technology has moved apocalyptic prophecy into the internet age, predicting that the world will end on 21 December 2012.
Conspiracy theorists on the web have claimed that the bots accurately predicted the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and that they say a cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.
Of some sort?
The software, similar to the “spiders” that search engines use to index web pages, were originally developed in the 1990s to predict stock market movements.
And that worked? I think not.
The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and examining the text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the “wisdom of crowds”, as the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated.
The wisdom of crowds applies to things like “Guess the weight of the piglet” contests at county fairs. It has nothing to do with the end of the world. Furthermore the sort of people who enter such contests tend to be agricultural types and the sort of people who discuss the end of the world on the web tend to be tinfoil-hatters.
However, the technology was later appropriated for another, more controversial – some say nonsensical – use: predicting the future.
Some say? Some say!
Its study of “web chatter” is said to give advance warnings of terrorist attacks, and proponents claim that it successfully did so ahead of 11 September 2001. George Ure, one of two men behind the project, says that his system predicted a “world-changing event” in the 60 to 90 days after June 2001.
Despite the vagueness of this prediction, many believed it to be genuine. Now its makers claim that the technology can predict natural disasters, and that it foresaw the earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the devastation that followed.
That is about the vaguest prediction ever. Something important will happen in the next few months. Well, if it didn’t then CNN and the newspapers would be batting on a very sticky wicket. As to web-bots… You should see some of the search terms that get people to this site… Some make sense and others don’t and/or are searches for the more er… recherche forms of pornography.
Its latest and most sweeping prediction is that 21 December 2012 signals the end of the world, possibly through a “polar shift” – when the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field is reversed. Believers claim that as well as the bots, the 2012 apocalypse is predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar, the Book of Revelations, and the Chinese text I Ching.
Why the quotes around a perfectly respectable scientific theory? And yanking the Mayans, Revelation and I Ching into the mix is just nuts. Anyway I’m curious as to the opinions of Doris Stokes, Nostradamus and David Icke. Do they concur?
Sceptics have pointed out several major flaws in the theory. First, the internet might plausibly reveal group knowledge about the stock market or, conceivably, terror attacks, as these are human-caused events. But, say critics, it would be no more capable of predicting a natural disaster than would a Google search.
The first major flaw with this theory is that it’s complete and utter nonsense.
Second, the predictions are so vague as to be meaningless, allowing believers to fit facts to predictions after the event: a blogger at dailycommonsense.com compares them to Nostradamus’s quatrains. They give the September 11 prediction as a case in point.
Third, the prophecies become self-distorting. “The more people publish about 2012 and the end of the world,” says the same blogger, “the more data web bots get pointing towards 2012.”
Bingo! This is not the wisdom of crowds but the idiocy of them.
The polar shift theory is based on a genuine scientific theory, “geomagnetic reversal”, which suggests the Earth’s polarity shifts every few hundred thousand years. However, the theory in its current form is not reconcilable with the web-bot predictions of it taking place on a particular day in 2012: best estimates suggest each shift takes around 5,000 years to complete.
So the mechanics of this ludicrous speculation don’t work. They could have at least come-up with a plausible sceanrio such as Iran nuking Israel and all hell breaking out as a result.
A film based on the predicted apocalypse, by The Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich and starring John Cusack and Danny Glover, is due to come out in November, called 2012.
It had better do good box-office because it’s got about two years of DVD sales to fall back on otherwise.
“The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and examining the text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the “wisdom of crowds”, as the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated.”
They write this, and then mention that there’s to be a film by blockbuster-maestro Emmerich, hotly anticipated for at least the last year, called 2012, and never think that two and two might just make five…?
I saw this bloke on a street corner with a big placard saying…
Repent!
The end of the world is nigh!
So I went over to him and asked him if someone was paying him to do this.
He said the the sectarian Church he belonged to did pay him a bit, but not much.
As I was walking away, he added that the pension was very good though.
Remember the “Bible Code” nonsense? Claimed that if the Hebrew text is read every nineteenth word or some such and then rearranged on a diagonal and sideways, all kinds of events are foretold.
They claimed it only worked for the Bible and was therefore a sign of its inspired nature.
Then someone ran the programme with the text of “Moby Dick”. Worked with that too.
End of theory - but not, I fear, of the believers.
Well December 21st is the wife’s birthday. If I forget there’ll almost certainly be some kind of apocalyptic event involving my genitalia, if that helps.
Has anyone heard from Doris Stokes since she popped her clogs, by the way? I mean, of all people you’d think she’d be on the telly every night giving it the old I-told-you-so routine, wouldn’t you?
I saw a film once (I think it was in the early 80s) where they’d invented the Ultimate Computer (it could probably run Attack of the Mutant Camels at the same time as Doomdark’s Revenge, or something).
The scientists solemnly asked it, “Is there a God”? I can’t remember what the answer was, but I remember thinking that even asking that question of a computer in the first place was complete bollocks.
Sam, Doris Stokes contacted me earlier this evening. She was trying to channel to me a picture of an 8-pack of Guinness. Cynical as I am, I don’t want to risk hurting her feelings, so I suspect that I’ll be sleeping well tonight…
Rob F…
30 ot 40 years ago I read a science fiction short story based on the same subject. They’d built the “ultimate computer” that was tasked to be in charge of running all the world’s economies, food production / distribution etc etc etc… The scientists asked it “Is there a God”, to which (if memory serves) the “punchline” of the story said “suddenly a bolt of lightning flashed down and welded the main switch into the “on” position and a voice thundered from the speakers ‘there is now…’.”.
Either that or “forty-two”.
ED, I think that was recounted in Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” - well worth reading. If you haven’t.
Doris Stokes - that old charlatan. She had a team who would scour the local press archives for tragedies beforehand.
Pogo, I had something to say to that but I nipped out for a pack of fags and it is gone. It might have involved Borges or quantum computation or some such but alas it’s gone. Sorry. Oh… Got it. I t was Dick. In Radio Free Albemuth an alien satelite starts transmitting all sorts of cool tech stuff to Earth and then someone shoots it down prompting the immortal line, “They shot down God”. Perhaps why Obama abaondoned the missile defence or maybe that was just Putin saying (to quote the Charlton Heston El Cid movie, “Before you die I want you to know the woman you love offered herself to me” which is something I wish to say before I die.
Before Running Lord Mandelson through with a rapier.
Oh, wait… there are a couple of problems there…
What is great is the strong implication of refusal which adds insult to insult on top of killing someone. Brilliant!
The most cold-blooded line not uttered by Clint Eastwood, ever.
And Lord Dowding hasn’t sent any messages either - not even to say thanks for the statues (one by the RAF church and the other by the office of the Spiritualist Society).
On the other hand, it could be detecting not the end of the world, but the next big scare about the end of the world.
As global warming fades into the mists of memory - I’m sure they’ll just slowly stop reporting it, there will, sadly, be no Great Debunking - they’ll have to come up with something else. It will turn out that the magnetic reversal is being hastened by man’s reliance on electromagnetic technology, and we’ll have to reduce radio emissions and shield our fridge magnets or something. Every battery and power cable sets up a tiny field, which all add together to produce a random fluctuating field that induces counter-currents in the Earth’s core. (Which according to computer models will push it over a tipping point.) This unnatural interference with nature - before man there was radio silence, and you have to ask yourself with a serious and significant sidelong look what the reason for that was - is unprecedented and obviously asking for trouble. Poor Bangladeshis unable to afford Western-style galactic proton shields will be doomed. You will have to buy emission bandwidth offset credits, and pop stars will lecture us on TV about cutting down on our transmissions. It’ll be called Man-Made Magnetic Decline, or M-M-MaD!
Obviously, picking up future people talking about the end of the world is not the same thing as it being the end of the world. I reckon they’re onto something here.
And if global warming dies by 2012, I’ll be happy.
PA,
You may well be onto something there.
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