Remember paper maps, and how hard it was to fold them back up again, and how they would flap all over the place if it was a bit windy? All of that pales in comparison to the frustration of trying to figure out how to update our map in the new Google Maps system. That’s why this post is a week overdue, but I finally managed to add a few non-Finch-and-Pea spots:
Added in this update:
A visit to Bioparc Fuengirola
Another entry from Heather’s blog The Science Tourist. This time she visited a biopark in Spain. “The parc has many interesting species of ducks, birds, bats (fox bat!) and deer. Various snakes, turtles, tortoises, crocodiles (including a Pygmy one). Also, a Pygmy hippo which was hiding sleeping user a bridge so I didn’t take a photo. There was only one spider at the zoo, like most places they could make more of their creepy crawlie and bug section.”
Into the heart of CERN
Did you know that you can tour the Large Hadron Collider? Not when it’s on, of course, but it just so happens to be off until 2015. On Engadget, Joseph Volpe describes a visit to CERN and the LHC. “A good portion of this two-year downtime’s being dedicated to correcting damage from a 2008 explosion that wrecked many of the LHC’s super-conducting magnets. Though CERN’s engineers managed to get it back up and running in the time since that incident, the LHC’s never quite been the same.”
Kathmandu’s Natural History Museum
I didn’t know Kathmandu had a Natural History Museum, and when I figured out where it was, to add it to the map, I realised I must have walked right past it when I visited Nepal a few years ago! A missed opportunity for me, but Fiona Roberts made it there, and writes about it on My Destination. “In front of me was an unusual variety of embalmed creatures and plants. As I stepped inside and handed him the fee, he showed me the museum’s first treasure – a jar containing a carefully preserved-in- formaldehyde goat. I nodded my appreciation, unsure of what else to do.”
All three locations are added to a new “map layer” called “from our friends”. We would like to add the previous friends locations to that as well, but Google, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to make it impossible to add old locations to new layers unless you do something complicated with spreadsheets. (Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out some time). See, it makes those unwieldy wind-flapping paper maps look easy!
The Finch and Pea 