The Myth of Fingerprints

So I came across my own post on fingerprints, from way back in 2008, and was suddenly captivated.  I wanted to find more out about spider monkeys and other prehensile tail-prints.  And to see if anyone else had any interest in fingerprints out there.

Much to my astonishment, there is one man, Jean-Francois Manguet, who is not only interested in the history of fingerprints but also in the science of skin and how fingerprint technology is portrayed in movies, among many other things.  It looks like Manguet is an engineer who "invented the sweeping technique for direct silicon fingerprint scanning." He was the chief scientist on the FingerChip, a fingerprint sensor project.  Since then, he has followed all things fingerprint-y, including the biometrics of fingerprinting and the physics of fingerprint sensor technology.  It's quite worth a browse around the site, despite the technical obscurity of some of the pages.

(Also, check out his blog and watch the progression of the apparently somewhat-failed fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5S).

Environment in a Book

 

Yusuke Oono, a Japanese artist, has discovered an amazing way to take the book form and make little environments out of it.  He calls them 360 degree books: you open them and fan them out into a round, and then his laser-cut pages come to life, creating incredibly intimate little scenes.

 Here is Jungle Book, from the outside in:

 

  

This one is called Sweet Home:

 

  

Here we have In a Cheese:

 There are many, many more pictures on his website.  They're so interior, they satisfy my instinct for secret little places; for odd, non-rectilinear architecture. Makes me want to get a lasercutter!

Found Poem

To Walter de la Mare

The children who explored the brook and found 
A desert island with a sandy cove 
(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground, 
For here the water buffalo may rove, 
The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound 
In the dark jungle of a mango grove, 
And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree - 
The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove) 
Recount their exploits at the nursery tea 
And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn 
Demand some poetry, please. 
Whose shall it be, 
At not quite time for bed? ... 
Or when the lawn 
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return 
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn, 
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;
When the familiar is suddenly strange 
Or the well known is what we yet have to learn, 
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change; 
When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance, 
Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range 
At witches' sabbath of the maiden aunts; 
When the nocturnal traveller can arouse 
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance 
An empty face peers from an empty house; 
By whom, and by what means, was this designed? 
The whispered incantation which allows 
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind? 
By you; by those deceptive cadences 
Wherewith the common measure is refined; 
By conscious art practised with natural ease; 
By the delicate, invisible web you wove - 
The inexplicable mystery of sound.

-- T. S. Eliot