We are all interested in inside the house, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, inside-the-house events such as these will affect you inside the house.Alternative title: When prophecy fails (the falling motion)

This is normally the time of year when we at the Riddled Precognition and Futurology Unit provide our subscribers with a list of predictions for the coming 12 months, which we derive through a complex algorithm involving yarrow stalks, animal sacrifice, quake-related orb sightings, and bare-faced plagiarism from the list published in the Nuremberg Chronicle Farmers' Almanac & Seed Catalog & Coloured Omen Supplement.

Left: Mystery of the luminous floating 'arrows'

This year is different, and offers a quantum leap in the accuracy of the presaging. For the nice people at Acme who supplied and maintain our Ktistec Machine persuaded us to install the Computer Intuition hardware upgrade,* and digitise the entire process.

Apparently this is what all the cool kids are doing these days. If they are not scanning Scientific Knowledge in its Entirety to find the hints that precede every future event, they are analyzing the content of the World Wide Web and using Asymmetric Linguistic Trend Analysis (ALTA) to predict future global trends.

 

We were initially skeptical but then the nice lady from Acme showed us a tweet she had received, signed 'tigris_in_August_2014", saying how well the Computer Intuition unit was performing. "The calls are coming from inside the house the future!" we exclaimed.
So without further ado:

January.
Doctor Who scriptwriters revise the design and capabilities of Daleks. AGAIN.

February:
Faced with bad news of failure in the NZ Gubblement's economic and educational policies, Justice Minister Judith Collins holds press releases about the rising tide of butterfly-related crimes against property and person, in which she announces Draconian new anti-lepidoptera legislation.

It is all the fault of those bleeding-heart liberals who abolished "Breaking on wheels" as a deterrent.

March:
Under the misapprehension that the new thing with the young people is architectural cos-play, a US TV network launches a comedy series about a group of 20-somethings who like to dress up as public monuments and get mortared together.

Despite a running joke about "what's a Greek urn?", hilarity is conspicuous for its absence of ensuing.

Phew, this 'predicting the future' lark is hard work. Whoops, is it walkies time for Milton the Griffin already?

* Warranty void if Ktistec Machine has drunk more than two Philips Screwdrivers.

Of course we didn't have the Interweaves in our day. If you wanted to trace the 'time ripples' leaking into the present from future events you had to measure the entropy flux within the space-time manifold itself. But try telling that to kids today!

'And in your theoretical Chaos fluid?'
'An effect similar to that of a spherical shock-wave spreading out from the point of origin -- continuously growing, continuously falling in intensity. It is observable only as minute ripples in the long tides of entropy. It's the inter-ripple and interference of these entropic wave fronts which we call the patterns of Chaos.'

[...]

'But how do you detect the ripples?'
'That is the least of the problems. Given a measuring system sensitive enough to show the acceleration of deceleration of its natural entropic change, it's fairly easy to see the ripples pass. It's the mathematical analysis of these ripples which is difficult.'

[...]

'Stay on-line, Ander. You spoke of cause and effect. I can see how you can locate the incident which was the cause of something, but what about locating the effect?'
'The one is only the converse of the other. There is no difference between them except for the direction in which you read time. Both cause and effect make detectable entropic 'sparks' which become the centres of expanding shock spheres. If you can analyse enough of the sphere to be able to determine the radius of its curvature and its intensity, you can locate the position of a cause or resultant both in space and time by extrapolating along the geocentric axis. But mark this: the significant thing about a linked cause and resultant is that those two correlated events, and those alone, will have coincident axes. If you can locate the one, you can usually find the other.'