This month's issue of practical electronics contains full plans and instructions for making a fully functional ground magnetometer.  After buying a copy, we are forced to conceed that it looks bloody complicated.  Anyone know where we can get our hands on a bunch of capacitors and a nine volt battery?

Thought for the day... If the last glaciation in UK only ended about 10-12k years ago, how do we define naive from non-native species? Is there a cut off date? Are Pines native because they arrived a few thousand years before Oaks got here?

I overheard a conversation about 'alternative' historians the other day. One chap was saying that archaeologists should embrace the authors of those 'lost mysteries of the ancients' titles as popularisers of archaeology. The rhetorical response was cutting. "Is Tony Blair be expected to embrace the BNP as popularisers of politics?"