Geographers do it better?

18 River cutting through ridge, Afghanistan
Originally uploaded by Phillage.

It would strike me as odd if the various covert and overt government agencies trying to find Osama bin Laden hadn't tried some of the methods posited in this article, but I still like reading them, having them spelled out so specifically. What among these haven't we tried? Let's try them . . . and hang onto Peshawar, if we can.

From MIT:

In informal conversations in the Geography Department at UCLA, we began to ask ourselves if the biogeographic theories we use every day -– theories that predict how plants and animals distribute themselves over space and over time –- employed in conjunction with publicly available satellite imagery, could shed some light on this question. The outcomes of this musing, presented below, are our thoughts and experiment. By bringing these methodologies to bear, it is our hope that a long overdue debate might bring bin Laden back to the fore of the public consciousness – and possibly to justice*.

I find this sort of geography fascinating, but I also can't imagine wanting to do it.

*PDF article