But some problems are more like predicting the weather. That’s another situation where having plenty of fine-grained data, and the computational power to plow through it quickly, can really help. In 1950, it took the early computer ENIAC twenty-four hours to simulate twenty-four hours of weather, and that was an astounding feat of space-age computation. In 2008, the computation was reproduced on a Nokia 6300 mobile phone in less than a second. Forecasts aren’t just faster now; they’re longer-range and more accurate, too. In 2010, a typical five-day forecast was as accurate as a three-day
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