In the 70s weused to calculate peak oil and peak gas and came up with some great numbers that were consistent with what happened in the next three decades, but then things changed.
We then used data gathered for our annual Celebrity 100 list to calculate each star's estimated earnings on each film (including upfront pay and any earnings from the movie's box-office receipts, DVD and TV sales).
Over the centuries, we have applied some of the ingenuity used to analyze data about nature to building things that calculate data, whether organizations of human computers or machines of integrated circuits.