Geospatial

1. Cells and danger values

The map is cut into cells of 200 kilometres. Each detection that lands in a cell, a fire, an earthquake, a coded event, a ship contact, adds to that cell's danger value, called k. The rule is borrowed from immunology: a dendritic cell samples its surroundings and raises an alarm when danger signals outweigh safe ones. Here the k-value grows with the signals and decays when they stop. Thresholds turn it into low, medium, high or critical.

2. The shape of the whole picture

Take every event on the map as a point and connect points that lie close together. Count what remains: how many separate clumps of activity there are, and how many rings, activity around a quiet centre. Those two counts are the Betti numbers. Watched over time, they say whether the picture is fragmenting or merging. A tipping score adds whether the system is slowing down, which is what dynamical systems do before they flip.

3. Patterns across cells

Hot cells that sit next to each other are grouped into a correlated cluster, with a centre and an extent in kilometres. A hot cell with no hot neighbour is an isolated anomaly. A cluster that moves from one read to the next is a propagation.

4. Across domains

A flight, a vessel and a satellite pass that fall within 100 kilometres of each other are linked, so that a coincidence of three feeds can be seen as one thing.

Cells by severity

What feeds the cells

• fire233
• gdelt14

Counted per cell: a cell with fires and ships counts once for each.

Where it is hottest right now

One row per cell. k-value: the danger value, what all its signals added up to, minus decay. Signals: how many detections fed the cell. From: which feeds they came from.

Coordinates, not place names: the engine does not know what is there, only that something is happening there. The column on the right says what fed the cell; a cell in the far north with thousands of fire signals is a wildfire, not a war.

Shape of the whole picture

The Betti numbers from step 2, read once at the snapshot.

The tipping score is a reading, not a verdict: it rises when clusters merge and the picture slows down. It was tuned in March 2026, when satellites were taken out of it because they distorted it and the variance was normalised.

Patterns across cells

From step 3: clusters of neighbouring hot cells, single hot cells, and clusters that moved since the last read.

Largest clusters

Centre of the cluster, how many cells it spans, the average danger value of those cells, and its extent.