Hormuz, Oil, And The Pentagon Pizza Index

A fun link crosses my path for the 2nd time around-the 1st time, I'd not paid much attention-Another project, more mature had been already percolating in the background- I just saw this as a copy - thought nothing of it- moved on.

Few months pass and crossing my path again, my YouTube feed presents me with the project again.

OK- it's come around full circle-there must be a bit more here than just a copy of another project. Surprised-This time around, way-way- way-more developed.

An incredible amount of data feeds all flooding into this world map 2D, even option to switch to a 3D version (warning-the 3D version is very resource intensive... slower, older computer? You'll have some struggles loading data streams... and will bog down your setup ). So, I am presented with a link to a map of the world with about forty toggles down the side, and I lost an afternoon to it. It looks like the wall display from a war movie, except the numbers on it are real- real-world events... current events.

These Data Feeds are Expensive

You'd think. And, I have dished out a pretty penny for some which funnel into this map- not the exact  ones, but data same same. Here? Most of it free. There is a “PRO” version... but I haven't dabbled with that version-there's more than plenty in the free version. I may dip into the paid Pro map, it isn't that pricey-especially for all that you are presented with. Any rescission maker at any level should not even think twice with “investing” in this consolidation of market-moving data.

Enter: World Monitor- World Monitor pulls hundreds of live public data feeds onto one map, then runs AI summaries on top. Conflict databases, aircraft transponders, ship positions, satellite fire detections, undersea cable routes, oil prices, internet outage stats, prediction markets. No signup for the core of it. And there's a live Pentagon pizza tracker in the header, which I'll get to.

What it actually is

Strip away the aesthetic and it's an aggregator with a map on the front. No single feed here is exclusive, and most are public and free if you know where to look. What somebody did was the boring part: collecting, geocoding, cross-referencing and timestamping all of them in one place.

Two Million Users Later

It started as a weekend project in January 2026. Elie Habib, who co-founded the music-streaming company Anghami, built the first version to see whether a day of chaotic news could be made legible on one map. It's since passed two million users in 190-odd countries. The whole thing is open source under AGPL-3.0 at github.com/koala73/worldmonitor, so you can read exactly how any number on screen gets calculated. That's more than you can say for most paid terminals.

There's no newsroom and no editors. Signals get cross-checked against multiple independent sources before anything becomes an alert, and outlets are ranked in tiers, with wire services and official channels above broadcasters above specialist open-source shops. A Pro tier exists at $39.99/month for chat analysis and scenario modelling, and you can ignore it. Everything I call free below actually is, and I checked each one signed out.

If you liked the tactical incident dashboard I put together, this is the funded version of the same instinct, and it makes my thing look like homework.

What you get without an account

I counted 38 map layers. Exactly one, structural country resilience, sits behind Pro with a padlock on it. The other 37 are open:

• Conflict zones, armed conflict events, intel hotspots, military bases, live military flights, nuclear sites, spaceports, orbital surveillance, sanctions, GPS jamming.
• Undersea cables, pipelines, fuel storage, fuel shortages, AI data centres, economic centres, critical mineral deposits, internet disruptions, cyber threat actors.
• Ship traffic, trade routes, shipping chokepoints, civil aviation, refugee and displacement flows.
• Earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, climate anomalies, severe weather, disease outbreaks, radiation monitoring, and a category I've never seen on a public map before: gamma irradiators, the industrial radiation facilities used to sterilise medical kit.

Free gets you three dashboard tabs and data refreshing every 5 to 15 minutes. The footer reports its coverage each cycle. Mine read 121 publishers, 293 items, feeds 228/238, categories 17/17. Ten feeds were down, and it told me so without being asked, which is a nice change.

Who gets something out of it

If you're just here to look, the webcam and orbital layers are the best of it. Twenty-three live streams including Jerusalem, Kyiv, Tokyo and the ISS Earth view. Switch on the undersea cable layer, and you see the actual physical strings carrying your internet, then compare them against the outage layer when something breaks. If you've ever built an ADS-B receiver and watched planes appear on your own screen, this is that at planetary scale, running on the same volunteer networks you'd be feeding.

The mundane uses are the ones that'll save you money. The aviation layer tracks airspace closures, which are what wreck a trip while your airline app says nothing. Search any country in the command palette and you get a brief with a real government travel advisory attached instead of a forum rumour. Wondering why something got expensive? Chokepoints and commodity prices in one view is a decent explanation engine: when Gulf shipping seizes up you watch gasoline futures move on the same screen and stop guessing whether the news is overcooking it. Weather alerts come straight from the US National Weather Service, Environment and Climate Change Canada and the WMO rather than a reseller, which pairs nicely with running your own weather radar dish.

Running a business, the pitch is that this awareness used to cost five figures a year for a terminal on a trading floor. Thirteen maritime chokepoints each carry a live disruption score, a war-risk tier, a seven-day incident count and an oil-flow estimate against their own baseline, so if your goods or fuel move by sea you know which straits are degraded today and by how much. Sanctions, trade policy and supply-chain stress cover the "is this supplier about to become a compliance problem" question. And the critical minerals layer maps processing concentration, which if you build hardware is the risk you normally find out about too late.

The best idea in it

A design choice here, one which matters more than all the layers put together. ?Headlines carry two separate scores,- they aren't blended. Importance asks how much this matters right now. Credibility asks how much you should trust this source on this story. Credibility is built from propaganda risk at 0.50, the outlet's track record at 0.30 and independent corroboration at 0.20. Severity, recency, and drama carry zero weight because none of them bear on whether a thing is true.

What's clever? A state-controlled outlet breaking real news about its government's military movements is highly important and poorly credible at the same time.
 Every other news tool collapses that into one ranking and makes you choose between missing the story and trusting the source.

I saw scores like CRED 44 sitting next to live headlines while I was poking around. If you brief people for a living, that number is the whole product.

Same spirit elsewhere: a freshness tracker that publishes what it cannot see. When feeds go down the panels say so and degrade rather than quietly showing stale confidence. The strategic risk panel in my session was labelled CACHED · 6/40 sources. That's an uncomfortable thing for a product to print on itself, and I trust it more for printing it.

Gems, and one genuine easter egg

Start with the pizza. There's a small 🍕 next to the DEFCON readout in the header, tooltip "Pentagon Pizza Index". Click it and you get a live list of real pizzerias near the Pentagon (Extreme Pizza, District Pizza Palace, We The Pizza, Papa Johns, Pizzato Pizza, and "Domino's Pizza (Pentagon Closest)"), each with an open or closed status, filed under the heading GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS. The folklore is that unusual late-night pizza volume near the Pentagon means staff are working through something. Somebody wired the joke to live data and shipped it, and the feed behind it is listed in the docs like any other source. I've never enjoyed a feature more.

Then the ones nobody advertises. There's a Canada Roads layer and a Canada Alerts (AB + BC + SK) layer fed by the provincial 511 systems and BC's Open511, sitting on a global geopolitics dashboard. If you're in BC, Alberta or Saskatchewan you have road conditions under the same map as the military flight tracker.

The docs have a machine-readable twin at /docs/llms.txt, and adding .md to any docs URL returns clean Markdown. There are also five themed clones on the same engine: tech, finance, commodity, energy, and the one that made me laugh, happy.worldmonitor.app, the identical apparatus pointed only at good news. Somebody built a doom dashboard and then built its opposite.

Headline classification and entity extraction run locally in browser workers, so parts of the analysis keep working offline with nothing leaving your machine, handy if you'd rather not broadcast what you're looking at. You can also plug your own AI in through an MCP server at https://worldmonitor.app/mcp with 75 tools. Almost all need a subscription, but get_sources is deliberately credential-free. I connected with no account and got the full registry: 761 providers, 505 outlets, 132 explicitly excluded, of which only 93 are marked fully reviewed. Companies don't usually hand you that last number.

Two things worth stealing. The URL is the state, so any view you build is a bookmark and a citable link:

https://www.worldmonitor.app/dashboard?lat=26.56&lon=56.25&zoom=5&timeRange=7d&layers=chokepoints,ais,conflicts,hotspots,pipelines

And the live map embeds on your own site with no account and no key:

<iframe
  src="https://www.worldmonitor.app/embed?layers=conflicts,earthquakes,weather&center=20,0&zoom=1&theme=dark&variant=full"
  title="World Monitor live map"
  loading="lazy"
  style="width:100%;height:420px;border:0;display:block"
  allowfullscreen></iframe>

Swap the layers, center and zoom values for whatever suits the page. There's a <script> loader too, but the plain iframe is the one for Blogger, since the editor likes eating script tags.

Tracing a real event through it

Feature lists are cheap, so here's a run. On 10 September 2026 at 13:10 UTC I opened the dashboard cold and asked what the biggest thing happening was, using only the free tier. Every number below is what the app reported at that timestamp.

The AI brief had generated 49 seconds earlier, saying US and Iranian forces were exchanging attacks on shipping near the Strait of Hormuz. It also disclosed its own workings: 292 candidate stories from 88 sources, clustered into 270 groups, 107 dropped as inadmissible. A summary is still just a claim, so I went looking for corroboration in the numeric layers.

The chokepoint layer is where it got real. Hormuz was the only one of thirteen flagged red: disruption score 70, war-risk tier WAR_ZONE, a named hazard alert (HORMUZ-26), 640 incidents in seven days against Suez's 8, transits down 26.7% week on week. The oil-flow estimate stopped me. 2.6 million barrels a day against a baseline of 21, roughly 12% of normal, attributed to IMF PortWatch tonnage data.

Then the cross-checks. Commodities had Brent at $104.83 (+3.58%), WTI $99.71 (+3.81%), gasoline +2.97%. The anomaly detector independently flagged military flights at 1.6 times the normal Thursday-in-September level. Iran's instability score sat at 72 and rising. And the prediction markets, which are real money rather than opinion, priced the Israel-Iran ceasefire holding through 30 September at 85.5% with $29.3M staked, while "will the US invade Iran before 2027" sat at 14.5% on $65.1M. Traders were pricing a grinding blockade, not an invasion.

Five unconnected measurement systems, one picture, four minutes of clicking. Then I checked it against the outside world, which is the part people skip. Reporting has Gulf crude exports down from roughly 17 million barrels a day in 2025 to about nine by August 2026, direct crude through the strait near 2.2 million, and transits around ten a day against a pre-crisis 88 to 130. The dashboard's 12% figure lands square in independently reported reality. That's the test that matters and it passed.

One thing didn't match. Public market data for the same day put Brent nearer $101.25 and basically flat, not $104.83 and up 3.58%. Different contract months and venues can explain a gap like that, and the direction was right, but 3.5 points isn't a rounding error. Read the price panels as a sign that something moved, not as a quote you'd trade on.

Where it's weak

I like this thing, which is why it's worth being specific. All of the below came out of its own live output.

Zero and "unknown" look identical. The Hormuz record reported todayTotal: 0 transits alongside todayCountsAvailable: false. No ships and no data are very different facts, rendered the same way. That same record showed disruptionPct: 100 and 640 incidents next to activeWarnings: 0, so the navigational warning feed clearly isn't wired to the incident tally either.

Both the Hormuz and Suez write-ups end with "Threat baseline last reviewed > 120 days ago". Four months, during an active war, on the most important strait on the map. Credit for printing it, but that date belongs in the interface, not buried in a text blob.

The military posture panel contradicts the rest of the app. In the same payload that called Hormuz a war zone, Iran's theatre posture read "normal" with 4 aircraft and 0 vessels tracked. That isn't calm, it's blindness. Transponders go dark in conflict zones and the volunteer receiver networks behind this thin out over Iran. The one theatre marked "elevated" was the Baltic, where coverage happens to be excellent. Until it separates "no activity" from "no coverage", the panel is most reassuring exactly where it sees least.

Placeholder values get published as scores. Ukraine and Russia both carried a dynamic score of -1, a no-data sentinel, yet still published instability scores of 93 and 77 with the payload's own degraded and stale flags set false.

The pizza index is confounded by breakfast. It read DEFCON 5 and 0% because all six pizzerias were CLOSED. It was 9:20am in Virginia. An indicator that hits maximum calm every single morning tells you nothing in its quietest state. Normalise it against opening hours, or say "outside business hours".

And a documented URL parameter doesn't work: the docs list time for the time filter, the app reads timeRange. I loaded ?time=1h and the view stayed on 7d.

Two more are about you rather than them. There's no free machine-readable path, because anything that isn't a browser gets 403 agent_request_blocked and the anonymous MCP hands you a source catalogue and nothing else. Fair enough as a business model, but "open source" and "open data" blur together in people's heads and this is the line. The upstream feeds are nearly all free at source, so pull what you need yourself. There's also almost no history: snapshots live 7 days in your own browser storage, so you can't ask what Hormuz looked like in March. For a tool built on deviation from a baseline, that archive is the missing half. A nightly cron appending the JSON you care about is boring and small, and in six months you'll have the dataset nobody else kept.

Worth it?

Yes, and it costs nothing to find out. It's the rare free tool where the free tier is the product rather than a demo, and the honesty is what sells it. A dashboard that prints "6/40 sources" and "review recommended" on its own panels has more credibility than one that doesn't, even though those are the least flattering strings on the screen.

Treat it as an instrument panel, not an oracle. The numeric layers are where the value sits, because they're measurements you can go and verify, and when I verified them they held up. The summaries on top are a reading aid. Check the pizza.

If you find a layer or a corner I missed, say so in the comments. I got through a fraction of what's in there, and the Canadian road layers were under my nose the whole time.

Glossary

• OSINT — open-source intelligence. Analysis built from publicly available information rather than secret sources.
• ADS-B — aircraft continuously broadcast their identity, position and altitude. Anyone with a cheap receiver can pick it up, which is why volunteer networks can map air traffic.
• AIS — the maritime equivalent of ADS-B. Ships broadcast position and identity, and switching it off to go dark is itself a signal.
• Chokepoint — a narrow sea passage that a disproportionate share of world trade must physically pass through, like Hormuz, Suez or Malacca.
• mb/d — million barrels per day, the standard unit for oil flow.
• Baseline — the normal level for a measurement, worked out from its own recent history, so deviation can be measured rather than guessed at.
• z-score — how many standard deviations a reading sits from its baseline. Above 2 is unusual, above 3 is rare.
• Sentinel value — a fake number like -1 used inside software to mean "no data". Harmless until it escapes into a calculation and gets shown as if it were real.
• Prediction market — an exchange for contracts on whether an event will happen, so the price acts as a probability backed by money.
• GPS jamming — deliberately broadcasting noise to stop satellite navigation working in an area. Mappable, and a reliable tell of military activity.
• Gamma irradiator — an industrial facility using gamma radiation to sterilise medical equipment and food, tracked because the radioactive sources inside are a security concern.
• MCP — Model Context Protocol, a standard way to expose tools and data to an AI assistant so it can query a service directly.
• AGPL-3.0 — a strong copyleft licence. Use and modify it, commercially included, provided you publish your modified source, users of a network service you run on it included.

Sources

• World Monitor dashboard — the live map; every figure here was read off it on 10 September 2026 between 13:10 and 13:21 UTC.
• Data Sources — full provider list per domain, plus the freshness tracker and its published intelligence gaps.
• Features & Interface — layers, panels, command palette, and the URL parameter table with the time error.
• News Credibility Score — the importance-versus-credibility split and its exact weightings.
• Chokepoint Methodology — how disruption scores, war-risk tiers and flow estimates are built.
• Plans & Pricing — what the free tier includes and where the paid boundaries fall.
• MCP Quickstart — connecting an AI client, and the credential-free get_sources allowance.
• Embed Panels — the no-account iframe embed and the paid key flow.
• koala73/worldmonitor — the AGPL-3.0 source for the whole platform.
• WIRED — how a music-streaming CEO built an open-source global threat map.
• Al Jazeera — independent transit and export figures, used to check the dashboard's flow estimate.
• Trading Economics — the independent Brent quote that disagreed with the dashboard's.
• IMF PortWatch — the tonnage and transit data behind the chokepoint flow estimates, free at source.
• GDELT Project — global event, language and tone database, free to query directly.
• adsb.lol — the volunteer ADS-B network behind the military flight layer, and the reason its coverage is uneven.