Mutton Geoff

California most certain does have a legal minimum age for marriage. It's 18. Any younger than that would require a Superior Court Order, which would be extremely unlikely in almost any case.

The published rules of the geocaching game make it explicitly and abundantly clear that hiding and seeking a geocache must never ever involve burying or digging up anything. That would rule out geocache people as being suitable searchers for the grisly target which is the subject of this discussion. Furthermore, the same rules also make it clear that the WGS84 co-ordinates must be measured and submitted to the operating company for every cache that is published, even the mystery caches. As the murderer has been in a maximum security mental hospital for the criminally insane for the thick end of half a century, there is exactly zero chance that he has ever known the WGS84 (or WGS72) co-ords of the target. There's a really good clue as to when those geodetic systems were devised, in their names, just like there's a clue to OSGB36 in that name. So, that's two ways in which geocachers are disqualified from using their tupperware-hunting skills to find a buried item of unknown position. I rather wish I hadn't bothered to offer technical advice on co-ords in this discussion. Goodbye.

Something is very wrong with the 30 minute story by Hindley. Take a look at the map. It's about 1400 metres from the layby to the watercourse, on the reasonable assumption that one would use the two relevant paths rather than yomping in a straight line. At 3½mph, which is about 100 metres a minute in new money, that is a round trip time of 28 minutes. I don't know, or want to know, how long it took Brady to assault and strangle the child, but I do know how long it takes to dig a hole to bury an Alsatian in soft ground. It's about twenty to thirty minutes, by the time you've done the back-filling and replaced the turves. Something's wrong with the Hindley/Brady story. My heart wishes the amateur searchers all the best, but my head tells me that they've got only the slenderest of chances of finding what the professional searchers failed to find. It's a noble and worthy endeavour, most particularly for the mother, but the challenges are formidable and would be immense even if the earth had not already been turned over by the rozzers and their JCBs. The mapping is easypeasy, but the map is not the territory.

Google StreetView is certainly the tool for the job. Every metre of that road is imaged in great detail and with pannable zoomable panorama too. The infamous layby is easily viewed here. To obtain co-ords of the camera head, click on the "link" icon at the upper right of the screen. The second set of co-ords in the address string are the ones you want. The first set are merely whatever was the first search term you started with. Towards the end of the line you can even see the True Bearing to the centre of the image (003° in this case). The layby shown above is the one which formed the datum for the several unsuccessful searches. I presume the coloured balloons tied to the fence are some kind of memorial to the kid.

Assuming the stated co-ords relate to WGS84, the OS grid co-ords would be: 403 024E 405 187N The nation grid reference would replace the first digits (4 in both ordinates) with SE. There is a minor error in the conversion routine in most small GPS units. For the particular application mentioned, an error of four metres could make the difference between success and failure in a forensic fingertip search. To correct for that error, simply subtract one metre from the GPS indicated Eastings and subtract three metres from the indicated Northings to obtain the more correct co-ords.

Only a Brit would appreciate the .

Did the Indian girl turn out to have been from Delhi, not Delaware? (As in the similarly unsolicted calls from those phone centers?)

Is there a map of where these things lead to/through? Can we be told? Can we pre-plan our journey(s) with such information? It seems to me that the diversionary routes could be very useful data, though only if we can map them out sytematically and then use them intelligently. Isn't that what the 'road network' used to be all about before we had the M-routes imposed upon the countryside?

Recently I've noticed simple symbols upon motorways signs. They are quite small: black on a yellow background; mostly very simple shapes such as a triangle or a square or a diamond or a circle. Sometimes hollow shapes, sometimes the black is filled in. What are they? What do they represent? Should we be told?