] Weird week. Weird, weird week, passing from alert orange
] to heavenly white and back to the usual muddle of slush.
] People keep trying to "gauge public opinion" at this
] moment of crisis. Fortunately, though, in the past year
] in New York we've had on hand a machine that can tell you
] what the world is thinking%u2014that actually listens to
] the world, reads its mind, and tells you exactly what's
] up in there. The machine, a Jimmy Neutron assemblage of
] display monitors and loudspeakers and copper wire, is the
] brainchild of a Bell Labs statistician named Mark Hansen
] and a sound designer and artist named Ben Rubin, and for
] most of the past year you could find it in a loft on the
] Bowery, where you could drop in on it if you knew it was
] there. For the past couple of months, though, it has been
] on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a
] rough week it was a pleasure to sit in the dark and
] listen

] Hansen and Rubin have written a program that allows them
] to probe into all the unrestricted Internet chat rooms in
] the English-speaking world and dredge up thousands upon
] thousands of random sentences even as they are being
] typed. The casual remarks, desperate pleas, and lecherous
] queries that are sucked out of the stream of world
] chatter are then relayed in various ways on the two
] hundred or so small screens and ten loudspeakers that
] make up the machine's public face. The found words and
] sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the
] display monitors or made to race across the screens in
] constant streams, like a Times Square zipper, giving the
] thing a Jenny Holzer-like gnomic and oracular quality.