I was reading about epidemic modelling and thinking how it could be applied to things other than disease. Information/ideas/politics and things like that. If you take the various agents in an epidemic model (the virus, mutation, immunity, drugs, migration etc.) and swap them out for things like information, patents, mainstream media and stuff then, I dunno, you can watch it and tweak things.

I didn't get very far with it. Just a scrappy first-sketch. Very first version was this (click to infect). I made it 3d so you could move around it more easily (mouse buttons and cursors to move), here.

I got the population data from here, some free GIS software from here and after a bit of struggling, managed to produce maps like this:



Which I think is quite pretty.

I'm not sure there's much point to this idea but I might pick it up later and do something with it.