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I've noticed I have have a mild (or perhaps not so mild) love affair with graphs. And then it struck me while I was ogling over such squiggly lines just how prevalent and important graphs have become in our lives.

It's certainly no secret that our world is addicted to data, and that graphs are an excellent means of presentation of that data. Here's my question: when did it start? When did we get addicted to data? Was it with the advent of mass surveillance and social media? With the introduction of computers to the stock market? Perhaps with the invention of spy planes? What about with finance? Did money kick off the idea of data tracking? With an abstraction that far, maybe we ought to define what data is? Data, or information, is anything that can be recorded - so in essence, everything conceivable. So perhaps we're not obsessed with data so much as we're obsessed with the organization of the data, so much so that there are entire industries dedicated to collecting and analyzing information.

Unfortunately, that data is about you. Why? because it's cheap. People are literally spewing data out everywhere. While I am a big advocate for data privacy and security, that's not what this post is about. Imagine, if you will, if the efforts turned from sucking data from humans, to sucking data from nature.

Immediate profit is difficult to realize, but overall, there is significantly more information available there than what people can provide. This is exactly what human beings evolved to do, anyways! We have eyes to collect electromagnetic information, ears to collect (relatively low frequency) vibrations, noses to collect chemicals, and numerous other sensors to make some sense of our surroundings. The beauty of our wetware is that it can adapt to any needed resolution within the limits of the sensors themselves, meaning that it's not the computer (brain) that is the limiting factor, so much as it's the devices we sense with.

David Eagleman is a neurologist working on extending such senses by utilizing the adaptable plastic nature of our brains (I cannot recommend that TED talk enough).

Imagine a future where we can non-invasively integrate with computers, effectively creating new means of understanding the world. In a way, this began when we created the atlatl - just now we understand ourselves better, so we can integrate and extend ourselves with our tools even more effectively. Perhaps we could "plug into" a radio telescope and "see" black holes or remotely operate androids from a safe place.

Perhaps one day, and sooner than we can imagine, digitally assisted telepathy, instant collective human knowledge, and the addition of new senses will become a reality.

But for now, we just get to look at pretty g'raphs.