Or the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, at 3am, on nights when Trump is resident.
Hmm. Virtual flash crowd protests in geo-apps…
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These heat maps are interesting too in that they clearly show off which neighborhoods can generally afford fitness trackers and which ones can’t.
ETA: Also interesting: not seeing much light-up at golf courses… are the golfers too old or do they know something everyone else doesn’t?!
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They got tired of having to turn off the trackers every time they had to retrieve a ball from the rough?
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It is for containing Yog-Sothoth, as any fule kno.
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Wait till ya see Tinder’s “anonymized” maps!
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Rough draft, revision 0.9
Working title: The Data Tapes
A computer science student gets a job helping to clear out the basement of one oft he faculty buildings.
He finds a container full of reel-to-reel data tapes, possible for an IBM /360 or similar. Labels on the reels indicate that some of them were once used at ARPA, dating them pre 1972 (when ARPA was renamed DARPA).
His interest is aroused, and since the contractor doesn’t care whether anything from the basement ends up in a landfill or somewhere else, he gets to keep the tapes.
The student wants to find out what’s on the tapes, but he doesn’t know anything about them – file formats, hardware used, etc.
And even if he knew that, there wouldn‘t be any hardware available to read the tapes outside of a computer museum.
But he knows some people doing post grad work on new methods to reconstruct data for archiving purposes.
The basic idea is that the physical properties of magnetic media are scanned by determing which bits oft he medium have been magnetized and which bits haven’t; in other words getting a raw readout oft he zeroes and ones as they are stored.
The student joins the team. They develop a scanner for data tapes.
The raw data is formatted in several old formats that are likely to have been used and compared with samples of old code and data. Matches are tested further on virtual machines emulating old time mainframes.
Over time, they discover that most oft he tapes have data from an 1960ies US Air Force satellite program, the Samos-F / Air Force program 102. They were SIGINT reconnaissance satellites designed to monitor electromagnetic emissions.
The team is satisfied that they have developed a way to reconstruct old data tapes, but the student wants to know what all the old data actually means.
So he pores over the data in his own time and discusses it with various friends and acquaintances.
Eventually a picture emerges. Some oft he satellites had experimental sensors that picked up emissions they were not supposed to monitor. At one point they try to visualize the data and, as it is Earth observation data, combine it with a geographic computer model.
The result is something resembling a radar map of the Earth.
Large structures like really big buildings show on the map, apparently as a representaion of a combination of their mass and their electromagnetic emissions. Distinctive structures like The Pentagon, Hoover Dam, Mount Rushmore, The Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower etc. can be clearly identified.
So far so good – but the structures seem to be moving.
Sometimes they are exactly where you would expect them to be, sometimes they are thousands of kilometres off.
They can’t make heads nor tails of it. At first, they obviously think it’s some sort of bug somewhere and try to fix it. They find some errors (as it was tob e expected) but the map still shows displaced structures. So the next idea is to try to obtain newer, possibly current data from modern satellites, so they contact NASA.
NASA reacts friendly – until the „what do you want the data for“ part of the conversation. At this point, non-disclosure forms appear suddenly, and unnamed suits join the conversation.
Several things become clear:
- the phenomenon is known to NASA, DARPA, the national security council and several other agencies
- the old tapes are backups that were mislaid and should not have ended up where they did
- at the time (1960ies), all that was known was that there was something extremely odd with the satellite data, but it wasn’t until the early 1980ies that computer models showing just what was so odd were feasible
- after the end oft he cold war data from the soviet space program became available, corroborating the US data
- the rate of displacements is steadily increasing
So far, no one can really explain anything, but there is a theory that the readings the satellites pick up (that show up on the computer maps as displacements of large structures) are something like echos or leaked emissions from other Earths that exist in the same space, but in different dimensions/universes. So there is another Earth on which The Pentagon was built at a place that would be somewhere in Nevada on our Earth. And so on.
The problem is: the pattern oft he displacements seems to suggest that at some point in the future, emissions from a structure won’t be the only thing leaking from one dimension to another. At one point, the structure itself might make the jump from one dimension to another.
781 words.
There are several ways the story can develop from this point on, I’ll have to think about this.
References:
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Intriguing I’d read more. 
Nice use of historical references; ever read The Long Earth, by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett? Might be your thing.
The conspiracy kooks would work that into their Unified Conspiracy Theory.
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Honest question: is there any official statement besides the “we are investigating” from the US DoD, and the army? Is this really of any consequence?
Those base sites are hardly secret, are they?
In the military everything is secret. Or classified. Or need to know.
Take for instance ■■■■■, or ■■■■■. And don’t even get me started on ■■■■■.
Dang. Well, you get the point.
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Spot on, they are my thing.
Although I probably should credit the idea of multiple Earths in one location to Douglas Adams.
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Yes, but which one?
All of them. In the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory, they’re all true, even if mutually exclusive. The Earth is flat, hollow and 6000 years old. We’re ruled by the Illuminati, controlled by lizards, who are descendants of Christ and protected by the Templars. It’s a top secret vast conspiracy that everyone belongs to.
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Either I didn’t get the memo, or holy crap it IS all about me!! 
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Well, as to the illuminati my sources tell me that their current HQ is located at an underground facility at 51° 21′ 22″ N, 7° 8′ 2″ O.
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