The crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls

In Mike Melanson's recent article in ReadWriteWeb, he made a reference to "the crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls with circles and lines and highlighted paragraphs to find the hidden common threads and secretly wished that you were crazy and smart enough to be that guy?" Of course one of the best references to this is "A Beautiful Mind," the 2001 movie about the mathematics genius, John Forbes Nash. In the movie, there were many scenes where Nash, played by Russel Crowe, surrounds himself with news clips that he attempts to connect as patterns. When I saw the movie then, I related to Nash's attempt to create a visual representation of connecting ideas. I also related to the idea that such methods might seem crazy.

But I did not think that visualizing these was crazy. In fact, my first degree and job were in structural engineering. You know, the engineers that build bridges and sky scrappers. We could not do our jobs as engineers without CAD, which is a visualization system supported by underlying calculations. So in many ways, the foundation of News Patterns is the goal to visualize patterns in markets, society, politics, and finance based on first finding patterns in the news, then creating visualizations that convey these patterns to users. With the flood of news, blogs and social media, I cannot imagine distilling understanding from so many articles without News Patterns engines.