Right now I am reading Isaac Asimov's *Foundation* trilogy, which has at the core of it's plot the premise that a mathematician plotted a host of social variables out into the far future (a practice he calls *psychohistory*, predicting the fall of the Galactic Empire and the consequent 30 millennia of barbarism, and instead arranging matters so that a pair of organisations will slowly but steadily work over the course of the fall (~1000 years) such that the chaos would be minimized to a single additional millennium. Interesting to hear that, although it is on a much smaller scale both temporally and physically, and probably less reliable, the central idea has application in reality. -Arlo James Barnes
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