Orwellian Black Opel II

Google's Orwellian Black Opels are back on the prowl, updating Street View. Here's me watching them watching me :)

I don't know this one (LJ08 VVC) is the same Opel Astra I pictured in 2009, but the camera assembly has certainly changed since then.

Police Fail

Never mind the slightly dubious issue of mapping crime hotspots, the announcement of a new service using data from the UK's police force to map crime was always going to generate a lot of interest.

The map is meant to look something like the image on the right (click to enlarge), but because this is the UK the server is clearly underspecified for the amount of interest that it is generating, because anyone who actually tries to visit maps.police.uk gets the rather predictable result below:


It's all a bit reminiscent of when the 1901 Census site went offline for months. Is it beyond the capabilities of the people implementing to judge demand?

Incidentally, the Met have a similar mapping system sensibly powered by Google, which seems to work quite well.

Orwellian Black Opel

I thought I'd get a photo of the Google Streetview car while it was having a rest.. and before it got me :)

"Body parts" murder II

The gruesome body parts murder has a new installment with the discovery of a fifth body part, quite near to some of the others. You can see a the distribution of finds on Google Maps.

This adds another element to the data set. The route between points "A" and "B" is curious and uses a lot of back roads, if that IS the route. Clearly these grisly finds have a pattern, but can they be traced back to the origin?

"Body parts" murder

One mystery gripping this part of the UK is the mysterious "body parts" murder, where part of a dismembered victim have been left near the roadside in several locations: Wheathampstead, Puckeridge and Cottered in Hertfordshire and the head was dumped in Asfordby, Leicestershire.

Given that the Puckeridge part was reportedly left by the northbound carriageway, that gives a clue as the the direction that the "dumper" was travelling. And making an assumption that the head was the last part to be dumped because it was the furthest away from the others, then you can take these four data points and plot them into Google Maps.

You can see more here. Of course, speculation is just that, but if does appear that the dumper did a loop around Hertfordshire perhaps near the A414, A10, A507 and then drove up the A1 for about an hour before turning off. Yes, there's a technology aspect here - a tool like Google Maps makes it very easy to visualise this sort of data.

OK, this is all pretty gruesome and don't forget that someone has lost their life. But there's a grim fascination as to where the next discovery will be. Will that fit into the pattern?