Chan's Personal Blog

It's about time that I wrote an article that wasn't related to politics, so here we go. I found a interesting site called wheresgeorge.com (American site) and its sister site whereswilly.com (Canadian site). These websites allow you to literally track where your money is.

How this works is, you go to the site, and enter in serial numbers of the paper money bills they have in their wallet. Then, you enter in your location by using a zip code or postal code. Finally, you write down a story about how you got the bill, what condition it's in, etc. Then you submit that information, and it becomes part of the database. This works because given enough people, the site can accumulate a vast database of information about where money is going.

When you punch in a serial number of a dollar bill, you can lookup some pretty interesting information about it (if the information exists). You can find out how far it has travelled since it left your pocket, where was its last known location, the average speed in which it is travelling, how long did it take to travel to a place, and much more.

What's even more interesting is that scientists have been able to use the information collected from wheresgeorge.com, and model how humans move, and how disease can spread.