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Brian May, Rock Legend, Publishes His Thesis
A year ago we took note when Brian May, guitarist for Queen for the last 30 years, submitted his thesis for a Ph.D. in astrophysics. The news now is that the thesis has been published. You, too, can read all about the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light. The completed thesis appears as the book "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008), available at Amazon for $71.96. May was awarded his Ph.D. last summer and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November.
I work for an outfit in Texas that installs these systems into patrol cars. It's hard enough to get a current database for these systems to compare the OCR'd license plates against. They currently have no ability to correlate all scanned plates with GPS coordinates and it would take a substantial development effort to put such a monster together anyway. All they do is compare OCR'ed plate numbers against a pre-determined database of already known stolen or wanted tag numbers and the systems as they exist today can barely accomplish that task with enough accuracy to be worthwhile to install at all.