From the Progress-Comes-In-Strange-Ways department: A theoretical physicist has figured out how to use an entertainment Web site to model human travel patterns, a capability that might come in handy if we ever have an avian flu epidemic.
The Web site is Where’s George. Since late 1998, the site has been letting people enter serial numbers of dollar bills (and tens, twenties, etc.) and track where those bills go. The site claims to be tracking over 96 million individual bills, amounting to over half a billion dollars.
The physicist, Dirk Brockmann of Germany, grasped that this bill-circulation data could be used to model how humans travel in the modern world.
I would guess the creators of the Where’s George site never imagined their work might be put to use to help combat the threat of infectious diseases.
(See Richard Morgan, Money-Circulation Science, NY Times, Dec. 10, 2006;
D. Brockmann et al., The Scaling Laws of Human Travel, Nature, 439:462-465, Jan. 2006.)
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