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Police Forensics Team Salvage Blind Authors' Inkless Novel Pages
Blind author Trish Vickers wrote 26 pages of her novel's first chapter when her son noticed she was writing without ink. Her manuscript was saved however after they took it to the Dorset Police department. A forensic team there worked on it in their spare time, and after 5 months they were able to recover the lost pages. Vickers said: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen. I am so happy, pleased and grateful. It was really nice of them and I want to thank them for helping me out.”
Nice to see the police didn't turn a blind eye to a citizen in need.
We're not at liberty to discuss the details of this amazing new forensic technique at this time. But rest assured that the $5 million grant you gave us last year to develop it did not go to waste--and most certainly was *not* just spent on booze, cool new squad cars, and trips to Hawaii.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Sorry for the ignorance, but is it common for blind people to write at length using pen and paper? It strikes me as odd that someone would use a medium which they would not themselves be able to review later (excepting cases where review isn't necessary, such as for a short correspondence or the like). I'd have thought that a computer with a screen reader would be the preferred medium.
That was truly an upstanding thing to do.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Why didn't they just run the broad side of a graphite pencil up and down it? What on earth were they doing that it took them five months, when anyone else could have had it done in a day?
Out of all the things the cops could do with their spare time (and I assume a small amount of public resources), I'd say that I fully agree with this one. They helped somebody out, got to practice obviously useful forensics skills, and they were practical actual science. No one told them what the words on the pages were supposed to say, they had to figure them out (with help from the author, perhaps)
The story is nice, but it doesn't get close to the Novgorod Codex ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novgorod_Codex ) or even the Herculaneum papyri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri ) .
Nudedi tecuda giruler debi dir pa felo rum. Hat fohete dano nitimel hen ti tafadis ranaman. Telie itep gacir madacu inominov cotarit tebisi idegu paset ru. Fiegipec hir sarehew xemita ra narop. Nadine tafa esisilo len eyip roco rufogec. Tanayi ricu rileri semec. Isira cetati retiv wi catec arar edadire cemih tetosir nim. Lesipi femap her aricet beter. Rey otinaras ruto sohat pol desa siwal neyatoc go funi. Non nixot aleyed nita. Gubalol leso seliraw wolelef hes otatufe? Wicedis saheco tiqa nariseg eni ro. Iro pep rana minili; nat depe gesiy edomigat. Nu ha alon sutot sociya aboreca somob gag. Oharekag masiede etorinur lu rapiebe hup fopup ahemunef rena rino. Mulewab ton iyecapi inetud irucato rapas? Fav agew piyieno rec def asor.
26 pages in typical A4/Lettersize and 5 months sounds like something the novelist could have rewritten in few weeks with very little assistance (only knowing where the missing part begins).
Who's "Mau"? Are you talking about the Mau-Mau Rebellion in Kenya? Not sure what China has to do with that, though, or why they'd be mentioned in connection with Hitler and Stalin.
...subject says it all.
And this is in the UK, dumbass, not the US.
Oh good! So people in the UK don't drink booze, want cool new squad cars and they don't go to Hawaii?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
.....bought her a pack of fucking pencils.....
detective shows. You just shade over it with a pencil, revealing the indentations. Of course, first you make a xerox copy in case you corrupt the original.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
the problems with that are
1 you end up with a page with graphite all over it
2 what helps with 2nd/3rd/Nth impressions
3 they most likely used this to train newbies
4 do you think that this was considered before handing the pages to the police??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
does the photocopy contain the indentations ? :)
wtf? did you really Godwin this in under 5 minutes?
Nope. But it goes whoosh.
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
Well, duh! Obviously they must have been using the Xerox CSI model copier, or maybe the new Xerox NCIS with the built in network support.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...subject says it all.
And this is in the UK, dumbass, not the US.
Oh good! So people in the UK don't drink booze, want cool new squad cars and they don't go to Hawaii?
Sure they do, but they spend pounds rather than dollars. I'd use the currency symbols if /. didn't have its webserver claim to support utf-8 even though it doesn't (and it mangles the pound currency symbol).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Lighten up, Francis.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Make a 3-d copy. Indentations and all.
What really surprises me is that anyone thought it was worth getting in a twist about. Twenty-six pages of metrically tortuous poetry would concern me, but of a novel? If you can't recover your first chapter from memory--while making it even better the second time--then you aren't writing anything anyone would want to read.
Curious fact: I used to program this way, too, back in the day of tape drives.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
He meant Mao, but his keyboard ran out of ink before it finished the top of the "o"
Not in Hawaii they don't.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Not to mention how many times she could have revised it in the 5 months it took to recover. A 26 page paper was a lazy week (or mildly stressful weekend) in college.
They'd better find a way to work faster or they'll never be able to keep up with her writing the rest of her novel.
Have gnu, will travel.
The British police officers would still be spending their Pounds Sterling currency to buy US Dollars.
It's ironic how you imagine you're so smart that you "solved" the problem in a minute, while you're not smart enough to realize that they must have had the same understanding or better.
Just maybe there was a problem with your approach, nevermind that they did this in their spare time.
Spoken like someone who isn't a writer. I lost the first half of a story I wrote to the evils of hard drive failure, and while I had my plot notes, it never came out as good as the first time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Apparently it's only programmers that say -- this sucks, I need to re-write it from scratch.
It's a reference to Chairman Mao Tse Zedong, author of the "Little Red Book", google it.
Chinese people are fine; I hate their Maotai.
"Not at Liberty?" You can not tell who pays you what you did with the money? What could possibly go wrong? Was it spent on Overtime? To "prevent chaos?"
Recover all the photos that my Mom took with a camera that had no film.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
...couldn't even salvage the misplaced apostrophe. Maybe we can get Dorset Police to edit Slashdot in their spare time, since they like helping the blind?
Let's say to an equivalently bucolic setting, like Wisconsin outside Madison, or Dubuque Iowa.
One reason that the UK is still superior to the US, despite being blighted by The City, and laws made by silk breeches, and omnipresent camera vision.
In America, this story would have ended in a tasering, or pepper-spray: like that poor fellow who's MediLert malfunctioned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/nyregion/fatal-shooting-of-ex-marine-by-white-plains-police-raises-questions.html?_r=2
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I applaud their efforts and I'm glad they recovered the author's work. I just bristle a bit at this being presented as a professional forensic examination. It wasn't. It was something to do besides the crossword.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Wh. Oo. Sh.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Be sure to press the "enhance" button on the copier. It will make it much clearer.
In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.
"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."
"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."
The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him.
"Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"
"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
On an old Mac computer, the home keys were not marked on 'F' and 'J', but on some other keys. I typed several paragraphs of a report for class before my team members asked me what I was doing. They said, "You usually seem to know what you are doing so we let you go for a while, but that doesn't make any sense."
The output looked very much like what the parent is showing.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Not in Norfolk? Market Shipborough, perhaps?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...and after the cops rubbed her pages with a pencil, they discovered 26 pages of men with large erections.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
Yeah, except they didn't recover the text from the paper directly, but rather, they just went through the video records they had of her and figured out what she wrote based on that.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
well done to the bobbies in blue. :)
So, the tax payers' money was used to help an author profit from her work? Time to cut their budget; they obviously don't need it.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't mangle £
(Of course, it could still do so in order to piss me off).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
And then used an "entirely voluntary" d-notice to ensure that the newspaper's reported the CSI story as part of their campaign to show that forensic science services are just fine. To be honest, when you look at the stupidities of the UK system there's no logical way that the people in the UK can be more free than people living in the US, yet they are.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
It always seems to for me, at least in Firefox 11 on Windows XP at work. Lets try it on Google Chrome on Windows 7. Keeping in mind that I'm from the U.S. and don't have a key for it on my keyboard:
Typing alt-156: £
Pasting it from other websites: £
Pasting it from Windows Character Map: £
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Because the British people suspect that most everything is a lie. They are more cynical, and prone to morose sarcasm as a result - but it's a form of real humor, which helps cope in seeing things as they are.
Americans are slaves to what might be. They'll buy any bright shiny lie that tells them what they want about themselves, and promises them freedom from anxiety. They seem drenched in "sarcastic irony", but it's mere filppancy: a form of positioning that comes from underlying insecurity.
It would be hard to imaging a 1950's-style "Red Scare" in the UK. The entire proposition for this rests entirely in constructions of the imagination. Americans are richer in imagination, and very much poorer in perspective.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Slashdot's a tech site. Try the HTML entity...
£ © ® €
It's surprising just how many characters work fine if you insert them the correct way...
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The D2 posting system has been "fixed": it automatically replaces permitted characters with the corresponding HTML entities. It strips out any other characters and non-allowed HTML entities. Hence, "fixed"... it doesn't really work, it just works some of the time.
I.e. to enter £...
Alt-156 (£) works in D2 only
£ works in either D1 or D2
£ is stripped out in both D1 and D2; Slashdot doesn't recognize it and strips it out of your post.
That's probably enough of an explanation, but if you care to know the why and how...
The D1 posting system parses your post as 8-bit text. It is not actually 8-bit text; it is actually UTF-8 encoded. Since UTF-8 encodes characters with code points U+0000-U+007F in a single byte, it is backward-compatible for this range of characters; characters above U+007F require multiple bytes to encode in UTF-8, which is why Slashdot ends up garbling them. The D1 system doesn't do any conversion from UTF-8 to 8-bit.
Try it: paste £ into Notepad and save as UTF-8, then open the file a hex editor. The file will be 5 bytes: the byte-order mark (a zero-width non-breaking space, code point U+FEFF) encoded in UTF-8 (EF BB BF*), followed by the pound character (163, U+00A3) encoded in UTF-8 (C2 A3** - which, as 8-bit text, is the characters £ - which is what you ended up with in your post; it appears that you used the D1 system to post the comment).
Note that the £ character is actually code point 163, not 156. Typing Alt-156 produces the pound symbol as a throwback to the DOS code page 437, which contained the £ character at position 156. In Unicode, the £ symbol is code point 163 and can be typed Alt-0163.
* 0xFEFF, 11111110 11111111, mapped into the 24-bit mask 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx = 11101111 10111011 10111111 (EF BB BF)
** 0xA3, 10100011, mapped into 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx = 11000010 10100011 (C2 A3)