Mathematically Analyzing a War !!

This video from Ted Talks presents a wonderful idea. It shows how a team filtered the noise and commotion out of an event as turbulent as a protracted war, derived a mathematical equation from their observations, analyzed it and attempted to arrive at conclusions which could then be used to predict outcomes or help manipulate the variables involved, to generate desired outcomes.
It reminds me of Steven Levit's book "Freakonomics" where the author investigates several topics both intractable and trivial by analyzing huge chunks of data to identify patterns.

There is probably no noise in the world we live in. The right minds equipped with the right tools could probably identify patterns or clues to an underlying grand design in almost everything that we see or hear but consider unworthy of our attention.