As we follow our impulses and daily priorities, we rarely realize that we submit ourselves to mathematically precise laws that describe our activities. The patterns are by no means new--they drove human behavior for centuries, dominating everything from wars to Einstein's correspondence. Our ability to collect these patterns is new, however, allowing us to extract the laws that govern some of our most intimate moments. And as we did that, we learned that everything we do, we do in bursts--brief periods of intensive activity followed by long periods of nothingness. These bursts are so essential to human nature that trying to avoid them is not only foolish, but futile as well.
If you believe this... Is it the beginning of Isaac Asimov's Pyschohistory writ large?