The opening of “Science Fiction No More,” Will Doig’s fascinating new Salon article about pop-up, sentient cities, which use sensors to collect a non-stop stream of data:

“Formula One car racing is the most viewed sport in the world. On any given race day, half a billion people — one-fourteenth of the globe — are watching it on TV. But it’s what they’re not seeing that wins races today: More than 300 sensors are implanted throughout each vehicle to monitor everything from air displacement to tire temperature to the driver’s heart rate. These data are continuously transmitted back to a control room, where engineers run millions of calculations in real time and tweak their driver’s strategy accordingly.

Through this process, every last ounce of efficiency and performance is wrung out of each car. And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere ‘smart city’ — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

‘We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,’ said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, ‘thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.'” (Thanks Browser.)