Listening to On The Media in my studio this weekend, I was lucky to hear a story about the age of the 'petabyte', a term I hadn't known of before. (Before I go any further, you can find the transcript here.) The man being interviewed was the editor of Wired Magazine, which strikes me as a bit odd. But it fits in nicely with the essence of the story, in a way.

Apparently scientist have started to look at data and process it in the way that Google processes data. There's no point in my trying to paraphrase:

Chris Anderson: You know, the old way of understanding who we are and what we do was to use kind of conventional human techniques, what’s called semantic analysis. So the old form of search, for example, was to try to understand, you know, what is this page about? And Google sort of said, give up, that, you know, you could do that once or twice but it doesn't scale to the huge volume of the Internet.

The way page rank works is they say, we don't know anything about this page but we do know that these other sites link to it. So what they're saying is there was a connection between this site and these highly ranked sites and those sites that are connected to those other sites.

And what we have here is a correlation but we don't know anything about causation. We don't know why they link to each other.

It's sort of an interesting reversal and move forward in the same step. (Is this equivalent to spinning around?) It reminds me of the process of categorizing butterflies or something, trying to figure out what species are connected, and constantly re-categorizing them based on a deeper level of understanding. But it also seems frightening, like pseudo-science that's prone to being all to easily misinterpreted by someone needing it for their own ends. Scientists don't study butterflies anymore; or at least not how they used to. It's a little frightening, this "we don't know why they link to each other" thing.

It started me thinking about how if we don't know where things come from, but they continue to function without us... I can't express it properly. I'm talking about man made things, though. Culture and science specifically. But it's almost a feeling of "Well, I hope everybody before me did everything right, because it's too late for me to fix it now, since nobody knows what's going on anyway."