Nehemiah Grew
biometrics
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Fingerprint
- People had noticed patterns
- on the fingertips.
- Babylonians pressed fingers into clay
- as signatures on legal documents.
- Nehemias Grew put them under a microscope
- and wrote in 1684 the first scientific description
- of the patterns of ridges
- on fingers and palms.
Dactyloscopy
- Pudd’nhead Wilson and Sherlock Holmes
- caught their perpetrators,
- but Scottish police
- falsely accused detective Shirley McKie
- based on a fingerprint at the scene of the crime.
- Patterns of friction ridges
- on your fingertips, your palms,
- and the soles of your feet,
- no two alike, uniquely identify you
- to the CIA, FBI, and your local police.
Loop, whorl, and arch
- Loops, whorls, and arches
- swirl like van Gogh’s Starry Night,
- but the chaos has been classified
- and reduced to a number
- for easy filing.
- This line of reasoning,
- emphasizing efficiency and consistency,
- dessicates reality to where
- idiots can follow procedures
- and artists despair.
Introduction of biometrics has proceeded slowly. Fingerprinting has been used for tracking criminals; it is not widely accepted that everyone should be fingerprinted. Token-based and knowledge-based identification systems have not raised the same privacy issues and fears of authoritarian control, although I have known people who did not want their children to be issued social security numbers.
See also in The book of science:
Readings on wikipedia: