The Blarg of Fosnez

A pleasant surprise when I woke up today. An update seems to have been pushed to the HTC Dream in Australia overnight that enabled Latitude on Google Maps . What is latitude? In short it is a location sharing program that sits on top of Google Maps on your phone. It uses GPS and/or Cell Tower Triangulation to detect your location and share it with the friends of your choosing. It is of course, also shared with Google. If you are bumming around in a shopping centre and want to know if any of your friends are as well, it is as easy as firing up the app. So why are google doing this? Well the most obvious reason is location based advertisement, which, like advertisement in games , will be much more important when Augmented Reality becomes commonplace. The question now is... where is my cupcake ?

It must be that time of the decade again. Someone is claiming they have found the lost city of Atlantis. This time anyone can check it out on Google Maps . Now this is all well and good, but there are four three things that make this a little unbelievable. It is about 1000kms off the coast of Spain, so either the sea rose a lot, or the island sank a lot. The city itself is 130km x 150km - thats a big ancient city According to The Book of Critias by Plato, Atlantis was laid out in a circular fashion, not a grid. The story was published by The Sun - so there goes any credibility. Actually the truth turns out to be just as interesting. It would appear that the grid is from a study The Geology of the Madeira Abyssal Plain investigating its suitability for radioactive waste disposal ( PDF link ).