Google's mapping products have been getting steadily worse for the last couple of years. On a phone, Maps 6 was the last great version, with My Maps and Latitude nicely integrated, half-decent offline caching, and sane road colouring (especially for, e.g., UK users). Now we have a dumbed-down app that's superficially prettier with the currently fashionable low-contrast look that's harder to read, poorer road colouring in various countries, Latitude swallowed by Google+, and My Maps pointlessly spun off into a separate app. The desktop version also has a trendier but largely poorer interface, and although the 'Classic' version remains for the moment, 'migrated' My Maps tracks and locations no longer work properly. Purely for offline use, the Nokia Here maps app is so much better it's embarrassing - on a phone, you can cache an entire country or US state in a form that's fully searchable and routable with turn by turn navigation, and doesn't expire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

At the time, the presenter joked that the sequel would be 'Space Cadets: Mission to Mars'...

Windows versions of Java now come with a control panel applet that lets you turn off the browser plugin, and I think this setting persists when Java is updated.

A scientifically inclined artist, Zoe Papadopoulou, had some fun with this idea in an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London a couple of years ago. Visitors were invited to eat 'yellow cake' which, while sharing a name with processed uranium ore, was actually a real cake made from edible but naturally slightly radioactive ingredients (enough to pick up on a Geiger counter):

http://zoeworks.co.uk/projects...

I don't know exactly what she used - Carbon-14 is ubiquitous, of course, though hard to detect in small quantities, but the ingredients seem to include brazil nuts (which tend to concentrate environmental radium) and she might have added some 'Lo Salt' for the potassium-40.

Neither is as good as the Classic Shell start menu, which works on both.

They already found that: http://blogs.artinfo.com/artin...

"A statue of the Roman half-goat, half-man god Pan - who was the Greeks' god of the wild - getting wild with a female goat (see above) has proven so NSFW (or, in this case, NSFM) that the British Museum has placed a parental advisory in the gallery where it will be on view as part of the upcoming exhibition 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.' The statue was excavated from beneath some 100 feet of Volcanic ash that enveloped the Villa of the Papyri, the residence of Julius Caesar's father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, on the slope Mount Vesuvius."

So, basically you're saying that you Love the Power Glove?

Philip K Dick was right after all - 'The Empire never ended'. King Felix!

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/...

I used too be abel too, but sinse I turned the currant up too 11 I carnt thync strait enuf too spel my name.

It would be very interesting to run some double blind tests and ABX comparisons between a $50 Sansa player and the new Sony. 'Audiophiles' tend not to like these sorts of tests, for some reason...

Prof George knows this of course:

"All of these things in our home do seem to work most of the time and because they don't break we just get used to them. They have almost become like Black Boxes which never die. And when they do we throw them away and buy something new."

The Daily Telegraph, knowing its readership (traditionally rather conservative and not exactly in the first flush of their youth) has chosen to emphasise the 'young people are lost generation' angle, which is reflected in the summary. But the message she's putting across in the Christmas Lectures is much more positive - the talks are intended for a general audience, especially kids, and she wants to get them excited about using everyday technology in creative ways, in the spirit of the Maker community.

Nice article here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

If you have a UK IP address or VPN, the Lectures are available here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

They're part of a series goes back to the time of Faraday, and has featured many eminent scientists (including several Nobel laureates). They've just been broadcast on national TV, as they have been since the 60s (I suspect quite a few of us who ended up being scientists in the UK got early inspiration from one or more of these lectures).

Since Prof George is (a) under 40 and (b) not a 'he', that seems rather unlikely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Yes, the EMBOMM article mentions this:

"This [the hollow tree] may have resulted in massive exposure to bats and have created a situation similar to the one described for Marburg virus for which transmission from bats to humans has occurred in caves occupied by large bat colonies."

(Kitum is one of the caves where Marburg, a virus from the same family as Ebola, has been transmitted).

Previously, they just had a probable index case. They've now done a followup field study that confirms this case and identifies a hollow tree where the kids used to play as a possible source of the infection - it contained a bat colony at the time. They didn't find evidence that other wild animals were infected, suggesting transmission directly from the bats rather than from other bushmeat. The paper is very readable and not paywalled:

http://embomolmed.embopress.or...