Truth is stranger than fiction

Here's a spooky little story. And its all true.

So Helen and me were in Hawaii day dreaming about a fiction where my data miners were used to reduce complex models of other countries to a small number of controllers.Those controllers were then manipulated by the bad guys to achieve some evil end.

In our day dream:

• New Zealand was used as a test case for this idea since it was small enough not to matter and far enough way so that if anything went wrong, it would not matter.
  
• Our hero would be "Jack Peterson", an N.Z. filmmaker with super-computer access (which he uses to do CGI stuff).
  
• In the stort, Jackson gets sent the wrong tar from the U.S. Instead on containing the new sub-routines from Son of Kong, it actually contained the N.Z. models with projections into civil collapse when the controllers got going.
  
• With the help of a Taupo heavy metal band, and a mysterious super spy known only a "dot", the day is saved and New Zealand lives on to have more cups of tea and bitch about the Ozzies.
  

Anyway, we riffed on that for a while then I went to my conference and gave my paper about my data miners. Afterwards, a guy from DARPA introduces himself. Seems that they run complex models of foreign countries in order to plan interventions (rescue missions, military operations, etc). He wanted better ways to understand their simulations. We exchanged cards and said we''d talk further.

So, be careful what you wish for. It may come true! E.g. never tell the DARPA guy about testing things on New Zealand!