March the 5th 2013 marked the 501st birthday of Gerardus Mercator, whose map projection appears on virtually every web map you'll find on the interwebs today. It appears he's none too happy about the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn't Mercator's.

As children we all learn the hard way that gravity sucks though a succession of scraped and bruised knees and elbows. We probably also learned in physics lessons that there's the gravitational constant, denoted by a capital G.

It's been a while but odd, weird and even occasionally interesting stuff continues to fall down the back of the internet and gets captured in Delicious along the way. Here's the pick of the last few weeks.

• Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world ... mwah hah hah hah.
• A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow "harp" logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
• The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
• Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen "that's not right" when watching a film? You're not alone.
• Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
• Microsoft's new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
• Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
• You've probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
• If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

It's been almost two weeks since one of these posts; I've been pretty much conferenced out, with FOWA London taking up a sizeable chunk of last week and the AGI's GeoCommunity mopping up any spare time the week before that.

The hallmark of any successful tech conference is appallingly bad wifi which, despite the best protestations of the conference organisers, always buckles under the strain around 30 minutes into the opening keynote. All of which has meant that my Delicious account has been on a bit of a diet recently, but here's what did make it through the wifi ...* Yet more bacon products make it to market. Most of them are novelty value only but surely there's scope for bacon flavoured mayo, for those moments when the perfect BLT is just out of reach? * Twickenham Fire Station tested its' air raid siren last week and memories of the Protect and Survive public service announcements on British TV at the height of the Cold War came flooding back. * My talk's at the AGI GeoCommunity conference seemed to get people talking; both seriously and somewhat tongue in cheek and I also managed to out the (neogeographer) Geoweb chair as an old school paleogeographer. * The CEO of the company I work for finally managed to achieve the accolade of being faked on Twitter. * And the source of all the crop circles was finally found in a town in the US with a strangely familiar name.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous