There along the far wall was his favorite piece of art—a slab of cut blue-green glass six feet wide, four feet tall, and one inch thick on a three-foot-tall granite pedestal. Projected into the heart of the glass by an ingenious arrangement of blue, white, and red lasers and spinning mirrors was a map of the world, onto which was projected the current “mood” of every continent as derived from word forms flowing through the public Internet—data from Web search queries, blogs, social media entries, Wikipedia edits, news articles, and on and on. Tag clouds of the ten most common words and phrases
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