Some student geographers, using techniques designed to track endangered species, came up with an 89 percent probability that bin Laden was living in Abottabad in a city less than 300 km from his last known location, a radius that included Abbotabad. Money quote:
Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called “island biogeography”: basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.
“The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town,” Gillespie says. “We hypothesized he wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.”
“It’s not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff,” he says. “But the same theories we use to study endangered birds can be used to do this.”
(Hat tip: Taegan.)
The Dish 