An Arab Proverb About Forecasting

Working my way through Kishore Mahbubani's recent book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", and came upon this great Arab proverb on the topic of forecasting:

He who speaks about the future lies, even when he tells the truth.

At IFTF, there is a broad understanding based on experience, that no one can predict the future. But we rarely say that no one should... perhaps we need to be as aggressive about that as these ancient sages.

Seeing the future in stock photoraphy

An article in today's Slate looks at how stock photography houses commission photographers to shoot scenes that advertisers are going to want in the future. Essentially, "suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future."

Getty gave me lists of the most popular search terms on their database for 2006, 2007, and the first half of 2008. Only three entries showed up in the top 10 on all three lists: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first, which Waggoner attributes to the increasing global presence of women in the workplace and thus the increasing global demand for photos and video depicting women in the workplace.)

Other terms fade in and out. Soccer makes a single top-10 appearance in 2006—a World Cup year. (Getty will refresh its soccer content as the 2010 World Cup approaches in the expectation that soccer will be ascendant.) In a development that may be of no surprise to you, Christmas has been showing up earlier and earlier. "It hit the top 10 in June last year," says Waggoner. "We usually don't plan for it until August."...

Beyond the numbers, sometimes the composition of images can tell a story. "We saw a big shift after 9/11," says Waggoner. "Family entered the top 10 in search keywords and in revenue-generating subject matter for us, but there was also a change in how families were shown. Whereas before it had generally been everybody in a row, now a child was often moved to the foreground of the photo with the parents' attention focused on him. And there was a lot more black and white being used, suggesting a sense of nostalgia." In the last couple of years, the trend has shifted back toward photos of lone people looking into the camera. Waggoner surmises that this is "testimonial" imagery, playing on the appeal of real people as authentic-seeming message-bearers.

One can't make too much of this-- stock photography is as subject to the whims of fashion as any field-- but as an indicator of popular mood, it's interesting.

Long term future: Inner planets collide

Astronomers looking at the long-term future of the solar system have concluded that "a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years." USCS astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Konstantin Batygin, and Jacques Laskar of the Observatoire de Paris, ran computer simulations of the solar system. According to the New Scientist,

The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry....

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