www.simsforums.com - the Sims series, computer games & other nonsense since March 2008.

This is a lengthy tale into an investigation some people carried out on their own into solving the riddle of a German family that vanished near Death Valley & was subject to all sorts of conspiracy theories about being kidnapped by the military for straying too near top secret bases, alien abduction & all other manner of kookish ideas.

http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/searc...roduction/

I never knew much about how bad Death Valley's reputation was for its extremities of temperature until I read this, & it was good to see that one of the results of this case has been the positioning of a mobile phone mast so people who are stranded can be quickly geolocated when they call for help from cell phones so this sort of tragedy will never happen again.

Well now, Mr Green, you read some odd websites!

It is a good idea to have a phone mast there so that they can track people in remote areas. This made me think of a guy I went to school with. He always wore a big skiing jacket that was really only suitable for far colder weather than we got most of the time. He used to boast about it having some kind of GPS tracker sewn into it, the idea being that it you were lost in the mountains (while wearing a skiing jacket for skiing - a novel use for this garment), the rescue teams would be able to use it to find you, even if you had been buried under an avalanche. I always thought he must suffer terrible paranoia, as the chances of avalanche in the north-west of England seemed small. If the device was based on anything like satnav, it would probably be useless anyway, given the stories you hear about people determinedly following the instructions even when they cease to make any sense at all, then ending up in a river or on a ferry to France etc.