Data-mining for Cthulhu

I don’t ordinarily repost what other people have written, but this post by The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal is so beautiful that I feel the need to copy it. It really just consists of juxtaposing the buzzword Big Data with this quote from H. P. Lovecraft — one that I was already familiar with, but had never exactly put into this context. It is the famous opening of The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Safety of a new dark age. Hmm. If only I could turn that into a grant proposal…