A Rule of Thumb

"Fingerprints have been found on ancient Babylonian clay tablets, seals, and pottery. They have also been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs and on Minoan, Greek, and Chinese pottery — as well as on bricks and tiles in Babylon and Rome. ...on some pottery, fingerprints were impressed so deeply that they were likely intended to serve as the equivalent of a brand label." [wiki]

There is something eternally fascinating about the ridges and whorls on our hands and feet, those unrepeatable patterns which cover most of what is termed our "volar skin", that is, skin of the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet. When I was a kid I spent hours staring at the swirls and lines, looking at where they ended - and wondering why they were there. "Designs" I called them, when I was young.

I even went through a period, when I learned about fingerprinting and the idea that everyone has completely different fingerprints, where I made everyone around me (mostly adults) squash their fingers onto my ink-pad and leave their mark on the paper which I carried around for the purpose. Of course, it wasn't washable ink, so there seemed to be an inordinate number of long-suffering, black-fingered folks around my household.

The other night I got to talking with friends about fingerprints. How do they work? Why do we have them? The conversation didn't go very far, but it did make me decide to go look it up. Forty websites later, I am still no expert, but I continue to be fascinated.


(Koala fingerprint, above, versus human, below)

For example, did you know that koalas are one of the few mammals besides primates who have fingerprints, and in fact even with an electron microscope, it is difficult to tell koala prints apart from human prints? There's a mystery story in there somewhere, like The Murders in the Rue Morgue only (hopefully) more believable (anyone met a murderous orangutan lately?). Fishers are also said to have fingerprints, which seems to me very strange: if fishers do, why not stoats? Weasels? And so on?


Spider monkeys, whose prehensile tail-tips are so sensitive and flexible that they can pick a dime up off a floor, also have prints on the bare spot at the end of their tails. Since the tails are used not only as a sort of third arm when swinging in the trees (as a safeguard from falling), but often supports the entire weight of their bodies while they feed, this would make sense: fingerprints, and other places with "friction ridges" - the volar regions - generally tend to occur where one needs to grip something. This can mean gripping an object to keep from dropping it, or (as in the case of trees) to keep it from dropping you, or simply to keep your feet steady on the rocks so you don't fall off a cliff.

But how does it work? One source I was perusing posited that there could be a Van der Waals force element, like gecko's feet. The person cited the fact that our fingertips can feel the grittiness of a powder down to about 150 microns, and then it just didn't feel gritty anymore; since Van der Waals' forces tend to show up more when something is 150 microns or smaller, he conjectured a connection.


Other sources, however, didn't support this idea, even if it appealed to me. The general belief among my local pundits was that friction ridges weren't deep enough, enclosing enough or wet enough for either suction or for cohesion; and their structure wasn't complex enough for Van der Waals. The consensus was almost entirely on friction. Given that the flesh in these dermal ridges (to use another term) are notoriously squashy (thus making crime scene fingerprints - known as "latent prints" seriously difficult to decipher), the friction thing holds up as an answer. Just as tires made of squishy gel are more likely to stick to the road than ones made of hard plastic, so do the flexible, moist areas on our hands and feet provide an excellent surface to grip with. Thus does the fingerprint contribute to our development as tool-users.


Dermal ridges develop in the womb, and are pretty much developed by seventeen weeks. The patterns on our fingers are influenced by our time in the womb: subtle stresses and tensions affect how they grow, creating uniqueness through a combination of genetics and in utero experience (as can be seen by genetically identical twins, who don't have identical fingerprints). Once the fingerprints are set, they cannot be altered easily:

"Should the top layer of skin suffer any injury, the ridges grow back after healing in the exact pattern they had before. Therefore, superficial cuts or abrasions alter fingerprint characteristics only temporarily. If the injury reaches deep into the dermis and destroys the dermal papillae, then growth of new epidermal cells is impaired and a permanent scar is created."
[New South Wales Police Department]


The way the ridges develop, oddly, depends on the arrangement of the sweat glands, rising to pores which, in the volar regions, protrude in papillae (nipple-like structures) above the baseline of the skin surface. As these grow, they also grow connections to each other in rows - and this is how the lines and whorls of the fingerprint are created.

It also explains why fingerprints - the kind the police use for identification - are often made up of what appear to be rows of dots, rather than nice smooth lines:

"Such pore holes are critical to the production of latent prints since sweat reaches the surface of the hand and efficiently coats the tops of the fingerprint ridges with sweat. Sweat glands serve as small chemical reservoirs and contain a variety of water-soluble chemical compounds, produced or stored by the body."


In other words, we leave a chemical trace when we touch things, as rows of little oily mineral sweat-dots.

For those of you who have ever worried about the old hair-on-the-palm story, you can relax: both sebaceous glands and hair follicles appear in the dermal layer of other skin surfaces but don't in friction skin. Probably for good reason. How useful would it be to have painful pimples on the palms of your hands if your best escape from predators was to swing up into a tree?

Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer recognized in 1788 that although friction ridge patterns could appear similar, they never seemed to repeat themselves. Using fingerprints' unique patterns as an identification system, however came in much later, starting with the movement to the cities in the Industrial Revolution, when people began leaving their ancestral homes, where every face was familiar, and moving into more populous environments, where they were more difficult to identify and it was harder to find out their history.

"...felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements -- such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height -- and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise...


Francis Galton

"In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin's misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers -- now known as Galton points -- which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)"
-- [Michael Specter, from a fascinating article on the fallibility of fingerprints in the New Yorker]


Bertillon's method was actually quite popular in France long after fingerprints had become popular everywhere else (a member of the Bonnot Gang actually sent his fingerprints to the French police because he knew they only had his physical measurements on record). This popularity after his long struggle for the legitimization of his system meant that Bertillon was able to go on to implement such innovations as mug shots, systematized crime scene photography, ways to preserve footprints and ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering.

Now, after a nearly hundred and fifty years of fingerprint analysis being considered unquestionably right, despite any evidence against it in trials across the world, a few cases have brought the practice into the limelight. Much of fingerprint analysis hasn't changed since it was first created, and its status as a "science" is coming into question, since scientific method, not to mention actual studies of the practice to see how accurate it is, seem to be missing from the process.


Some people are, actually, born without fingerprints. A genetic disorder due to defects in the protein Keratin 14 lead to two different diseases causing embryos not to form friction ridges. It makes it difficult to do certain things, like turn pages or deal cards. Most of all, it makes it difficult to get certain kinds of jobs - such as school teacher, nurse, and so on. Not to mention working for the government in either law enforcement or classified work.


In the old days, safecrackers used to sand the ends of their fingers to make them more sensitive and to make their fingerprints less identifiable; but that seems to be going out of fashion in contemporary times. Nowadays, you are more likely to affect your whorls by picking up a tiny virus-based skin tumor called a plantar wart (veruca), which deforms the skin striae as it grows, making the ridges go around it. When the wart finally goes away, your striae never look quite the same...

So, the next time you are lying on the couch with a loved one's feet in your lap, have a look, and marvel at the fanciful shapes and swirling minutae of their toes. Think about how long they have been on our feet, probably millions of years, and how even though we wear shoes, our bodies still create these wonderful artworks. They really are amazing.




Links:

A simple timeline on the history of fingerprints

Michele Triplett's Fingerprint Dictionary: Every term you could possibly want to know about fingerprint analysis and police procedure.

A little YouTube of the beginning of my favorite story about safecrackers, Butch Minds The Baby

Website about Sir Francis Galton, above

Photoshop brushes which give you fingerprint effects over at DeviantArt

Writing Madly, Birthday NotMoney

My brain's been full lately of the novel I'm working on, based in the Neddeth's Bed universe ('ware: Neddeth's Bed is an intermittent, first-draft worldbuilding exercise, not to be confused with finished product!), and it (the manuscript) has been eating my life, in a much slower way than I would wish. Describing things always takes so much longer than reading said descriptions! It feels like the characters are moving at a snail's pace. So I apologize for being absent so much, but I really, really want to get this thing done! So close...

That said, I had a birthday (harrumph), and was given some very cool stuff. So, at the risk of eroding a reputation for actually having thoughts, I will present you with the following very interesting filler.

It seems that during World War I, in Austria and Germany, there was a moment when the metal that coins were made of became more valuable than the money it represented. People began hoarding coins, and during the war, the metal which was available was needed for the war.

The shortage of metal meant people were having trouble, well, making change. So individual cities, local banks and citizen's organizations and so on began to take it on themselves to print what were called "Notgeld," which means "emergency money" or "necessity money", mostly colorful paper notes in low denominations (although they also used linen, tin foil, porcelain, and coal, to name a few unusual materials).

Notgeld began during the war and carried on into the period before and slightly overlapping the height of hyperinflation, when it took the proverbial wheelbarrow of money to buy an egg (more on that next post), which happened in the early 1920s. So I suspect a lot of these notgeld were printed. And, since they were really, really beautifully-designed (this was the height of German Expressionism, after all), people began to collect them. And, since people collected the pretty ones, there began to be some competition about who could produce the prettiest.

Which goes to show that even in the worst of all possible worlds, there are microcosms of beauty.

So the long and short of it is, my friend Gwyan got me some paper notgeld (and one porcelain coin which doesn't scan well) for my birthday. And they are really, really beautiful. So I will share a selection of them with you...

They Say of the Acropolis...

I really, really try not to just pass on stuff that's floating around the Web, but this literally had me in tears. I don't laugh easily, or at least not like this. I do love Gilbert and Sullivan.

There is also, apparently, a movement afoot to get Stephen Fry knighted. Too late to sign the petition, though.

In the comments they wonder why American TV always cuts this kind of wonderful stuff out. Good point.

La Mongolfiera

I bought these in a flea market in France this summer. I think they're wonderful. La Mongolfiera means "the [hot air] Balloon" in Italian. What they were doing in France, and whether they were even really antiques, as the man was implying, I don't know - and I probably don't care. They're really fun, and that's enough for me. Click on them for more details...









And thanks to peacay, over at Bibliodyssey, for this link to a flickr set taken of sketches from Lyon, France - the best of which peacay himself showcased in his recent "Collected Miscellany" post. Marvelous.

Evil, Incarnate

This past two weeks I've been suffering from what may be Giardia (warning: don't click and read if you're squeamish). It's a mild case, without the really horrific symptoms, but it has affected my self-image: giardia makes you bloated, dyspeptic, and flatulent, like the icky Baron Harkonnen (above) in David Lynch's Dune (but minus the pustules). Feeling like a gross person has made me really rethink the way we tend to associate the ugliness of the body with the ugliness of the mind: because I feel gross, I worry that people who don't know me will think I am a gross person. As a result, I've been hiding.

This idea that the corruption of the body is a manifestation of the corruption of the soul or the mind has a very long history, and is clearly a difficult idea to shake. Susan Sontag notes that language used by contemporary society implies a "blame the victim" mentality, as if the victim is the creator of his or her own illness; but historically, the victim is the disease, and the pauper is poor because that is their destiny, the place they have been put for some hidden sin. The divine right of kings, manifest destiny and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination are three big expressions of a deep-seated belief that quality of life is an expression of divine will, that people who suffer - or do not - do so because they inherently deserve their destiny.


But on an individual level, the superstition goes deeper than that. The shunning of sick people, while evolved as self-preservation, often carries over into the shunning of people who have been disfigured by illness. Birth defects, when they showed up, caused much signing against the Evil Eye, muttering about what sin the mother had committed for the wickedness to show up in her child, and/or discussion of who in the village might be a witch. When Christ embraced the sick and deformed, actually touching them and welcoming them into his hearth, there was probably a huge number of the populace who were horrified that he would associate so with the evil and the impure: really a revolutionary moment, which like all revolutionary moments either opened peoples' minds or closed them.


Leonardo da Vinci was well-known for following people with odd facial features, and then going home to draw them, sometimes putting them together to make wildly creative faces. However, his fascination with the anomalies of the human form was actually typical of Rennaissance humanism: the belief that people can determine right and wrong - or the cause of events - using universal human qualities, such as rationality, and the rejection of transcendental reasoning, such as "God is punishing your wickedness by giving you the pox." Leonardo, famous now for his beautiful paintings and excellent "inventions", was at the time considered a difficult man, poor on follow-through and liable to try some new (and impermanent) type of paint for a commission. And he really didn't care much what people thought of him, or whether someone was evil inside.


Shakespeare's Richard III is a fine example of the reverse of this: although there is little evidence that Richard III was lame at all, Shakespeare, who knew his audience, made sure that they were reminded, at every moment, of how twisted the character really is by his imposed lameness. Dickens, the master of melodrama, also relied heavily on his villains' facial features, bent bodies, scars, and even modes of dress to signify their real natures - despite the fact that, at the same time, he advocated an approach to poverty and misfortune which claimed that it was not always the unfortunates' fault, and that charity and opportunity were required from those who were better off:

"Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist, shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story's Jacob's Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates," inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system." [wiki]


This popular change in attitude had begun in the late 1700s and grew, on through the 1800s, until by 1869 "In London alone there were about seven hundred philanthropic societies, devoted to every conceivable human misery or affliction." [link] People like E. Nesbit, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw joined the Fabian Society, dedicated to chipping away at the status quo and introducing ideas for changing society, trying to get at the causes of suffering: the Victorians were great ones for the notion of "Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can", a perfect motto for the Industrial Revolution, when so many people were getting rich on the backs of increasingly miserable labor, allowing the rich to continue to do so, while ameliorating their guilt by telling them to help those whom their gains have made miserable along the way.

Of course, despite their affection for the poor and miserable, the Victorians were great ones for manifesting evil physically in their villains. Dickens was wildly popular, as were the Penny Dreadfuls, which are full of villains of the most extraordinarily disreputable kind. The play-houses were crammed with bent and horrible men ruining the lives of blushing maidens (even Victorian porn seems to delight in this awful pairing).

Alongside all this, in the scientific world, the evolution is toward "once a character flaw, now a diagnosable illness." Think, for example, of the relatively recent changes in thinking on alcoholism and depression, which are now regarded as, respectively, genetic and largely chemical. ADD children are no longer treated as "bad" children, and even those people who shout obscenities are found to have Tourette's Syndrome. It seems that nearly everything is diagnosable, and the only person for whom we don't feel some sympathy is the total sociopath who kills four hundred people while looking like a CPA.

Which is probably why there are so many shows on television now about serial killers. Like the Victorians, our society seems to have become obsessed with one particular type of villain, and we play it over and over; we can't get enough.

This brings us full circle, for several reasons. One is the recent interest in more traditional stories, and the archetypical, corporeally ugly baddies found in places like fairy stories and myth. Neil Gaiman's witch-queen in Stardust, who is old and ugly but artificially remade to her former beauty, is a nice re-take on the traditional evil witch disguised as beautiful lady (and Diana Wynn Jones' Howl's Moving Castle does a wonderful flip on that same theme). Heath Ledger's horrific Joker blows its counterpart - the mad, scarred villain of melodramas - completely away, partly because he plays brilliantly off the scientific take on mental illness: he tells contradictory stories of how he got his scars, and we are given a terrifying glimpse of our own "not his fault" trope from the other side of the chasm.


Another reason why we are coming full circle: in an era where evil can be diminished to a diagnosable illness, how do you represent the time-honored role of the villain? How can storytellers supply that need for darkness, with which to showcase the Light? Aside from resorting to faceless villains, such as Sauron or the Tripods in War of the Worlds, who simply seem to represent Evil in a sort of blanket way. And setting aside the less-intellectually satisfying slasher movie/serial killer genre.

One answer right now seems to be about looking backward at older villains. The Lemony Snicket books, for example, are a perfect, tongue-in-cheek take on Victorian melodrama; or the recent comic-book movie trend: Batman, Iron Man, and V for Vendetta, to name just a few; or the remakes of myths like Beowulf.


Another answer seems to be to take the tools we have to hand, and, in our increasingly complex world, come up with increasingly complex villains, who at times are not always easily identifiable as such. Even the backwards-looking examples above are re-made with less surety about Right vs. Wrong; and in books like the Golden Compass and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is never clear about the Bad Guys - their badness is a of a strange, ambivalent type - even though the heros must eventually go against them in order to survive, complete their quest, or save the world.

In a world where artificially-created beauty and power over our health are increasingly expected, we and our children are bombarded continuously by the idea that beauty and health are not a gift, but a necessity, and if we do not have both, we have only our own shirking of responsibility to blame. As a result of this, we are the bad guys, those of us with scars, missing parts, or illness, who don't work hard enough to hide our flaws. Like the witch-crone who looks nice on the outside, we know we are bad, and we hope no one else ever finds out.

"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."
-Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor


Links:

The Swedish government's truly amazing little demo on how retouching changes what we see - highly recommended. Wait for the star to appear, then click on it.

Where to find Charles Booth's bogglingly wonderful poverty maps of London in the 1880s to 1890s (see image, below)

Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (a book about same)

The Gears of Destiny

I stumbled on this wonderful image while walking through a music store: it appears to be blindfolded Fate, turning the Wheel of Destiny by means of a very simple, but possibly painful, gear mechanism. The guy on top is clearly... well, on top, holding a scepter and wearing nice clothes. The guy on the left is clearly trying to get up to where the upper guy is sitting. The other guy... I worry about him. Those teeth look sharp, and it seems he might have just come out from a rather unpleasant place.

The CD is a piece by Guillame de Machaut, who lived in the 1300s, and is put out by Ensemble Project Ars Nova, who do all kinds of interesting things, finding all kinds of ancient music and playing them well.

If anyone knows where this image comes from, I'd be indebted for the information; it is unfortunately not credited on the CD. I can always hope there are more like it...

My Own (Borrowed) Menagerie

My last post got me thinking, so here is a nominal set of interesting and strange animals I might consider putting around my Baroque pavilion.




• The Aye-Aye, a "native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unique method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out."


• The yeti lobster, a very recently-discovered creature which lives, of course, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where all the really weird and interesting creatures come from nowadays.


• The cyclops kitten was an accident, and unfortunately didn't live very long. Not totally unheard-of, just less horrible than most.


• Pill Bugs, or woodlice, or roly-polies, are weirder than you think: they are actually crustaceans, related more closely to lobsters and shrimp and so on than to insects or spiders. They are one of the world's old, (relatively) unchanged species, much, much older than the species I think of as old, like sharks and kauri trees, and they have some pretty interesting and strange habits.


• I thought the Liger was a joke when I first heard about it, along with its relative the Tigon. Or at least, some kind of hoax. But no, it's not - and they are enormous, I don't know why.


• My favorite creature: the Tarsier. I have a tiny picture clipped from a magazine of a tarsier staring with its trademark surprised look at the camera with a big bug sticking out of its mouth. For some reason, it's been a symbol for me of beloved dorks everywhere, and has inspired me to go on being silly despite everything.


• The Star-Nosed Mole is just odd. Always has been, always will be.


• Leafy Sea Dragons are something I have always wanted to see. They are endangered because they are so particular about their environment and eager collectors are always trying to take them home (where they die). But in their home environment - unbeatable.


• I had to include a Komondor because, although they aren't particularly exotic, they have great hair. They do make you scratch your head and wonder how many other strange kinds of dogs you didn't know about? (And yes, they look like a tall version of Dougal, from the Magic Roundabout)


• Grimpoteuthis, or Dumbo Octopi, are benthic creatures, living at extreme depths (up to 400 meters), and are some of the rarest octopi. Plus they use at least three different types of locomotion. Cool.


• Blobfish. What can I say?

There are a few others who aren't quite weird enough, such as Cantor's Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle,


the Long-eared jerboa,


or Pink fairy Armadillos, but they're definitely strange. If I had space, I might consider them.



Come to think of it, many of the above creatures are a bit too attractive. I'd want to make my menagerie a bit more creepy, but the strangest and most disturbing creatures I know of are all parasites, which would make them difficult to display - except in jars, and that is really something more for a Cabinet.


Just for balance, though, perhaps I ought to include the Coconut Crab, a giant terrestrial hermit crab. I do find myself actually glad that I don't live where these creatures roam, cracking coconuts and garbage cans with their bare claws (thanks, Jeff!).

In any case, my beautifully-constructed, circular, conceptual menagerie needs only a beautiful (borrowed) pavilion to complete it, and I can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I have expressed all the (borrowed) power and wealth I have to hand. Who needs royalty after all?





Thanks to World's Strangest Looking Animals for some of the pictures.