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Police Forensics Team Salvage Blind Authors' Inkless Novel Pages

Posted by samzenpus on from the show-your-work dept.

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.”

27 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. A Blind Eye... by vAltyR · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nice to see the police didn't turn a blind eye to a citizen in need.

  2. Used a technique called "rubbing it with a pencil" by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?
  3. Honest curiosity by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Honest curiosity by Kadagan+AU · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My sister is blind, and has been for her whole life. She never writes by hand, and even if she writes her name the letters tend to be imperfect and disconnected. No one can fault her for it, but it's a challenge to maintain your place on the page. And she's not even completely blind, she has a very small amount of vision in one eye (she can mostly just see light and darkness).

      If this woman is completely blind, I wouldn't expect too much detailed writing per page.. I can't imagine my sister getting more than a paragraph or so on a page if she were to try.

      --
      This space for rent, inquire within.
    2. Re:Honest curiosity by rHBa · · Score: 5, Informative

      Diabetes sufferer Ms Vickers, 59, lost her sight seven years ago and turned to the world of her imagination for solace.

      With a love of English poetry ditties were scribbed to entertain her mother over the years but it is only now she is embarking on her first novel.

      However, she doesn’t type or use a computer but has a system of elastic bands that guide her to keep lines.

      It appears she lost her eyesight later in life and (I'm assuming) had never learned to type before, she might find it easier to write with a pen/paper.

    3. Re:Honest curiosity by sunderland56 · · Score: 5, Informative

      She is 59 - so she grew up without computer knowledge - and she can't type. Learning computer skills at 59 while blind is probably a challenge.

      If you RTFA there's a picture of her writing setup - physical guide lines on the paper - so her method has been thought out, it isn't just random scribbles.

    4. Re:Honest curiosity by poity · · Score: 2

      For many creative people, a physical connection with the medium is essential to their creativity. I can't explain it, but I've felt the same way before -- the designs which began as rough sketches and refined on paper always turn out to be more thoughtful than those that begin in CAD. Maybe it's because there's no quick way to delete something on a whim, and those things that you thought were mistakes a moment ago come back to inspire you later on.

      --
      your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
    5. Re:Honest curiosity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hi, old person here. It's still strange She was writing by hand. Long before we had computers to do our writing, we still used keyboards. I know you kids might not be that familiar with them, but we called them 'typewriters'. They have braille versions of them, so a blind person could type pages they could proofread themselves years and years ago.

    6. Re:Honest curiosity by whoever57 · · Score: 2

      Still seems odd. Typing existed long before PCs. My mother is around her age and learned in high school on a typewriter.... hell I learned on a typewriter! It was just another class in public school that nearly everyone took. Maybe it's a US thing to learn to type?

      I grew up in the UK. I am not aware of any typing classes in schools when this lady would have been in school. At that time, I think there were specialist training centers (not public schools) that taught typing skills.

      Also, it's not so simple as just learning to type. The most common screen reader (JAWS) is very expensive and horrible to use. Other devices (such as Braillenotes) are also very expensive, and braille is quite complex. Yes, if you used the software or devices to do a job, you would buy them, but this lady doesn't appear to work.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    7. Re:Honest curiosity by MightyYar · · Score: 2

      I laseto slealren to type in highk scohkol and am stilklk quite proficetetnt.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    8. Re:Honest curiosity by StikyPad · · Score: 2

      Not to mention we've had these things called "dictation machines" for over a century now.

      --
      https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  4. Good job Dorset PD by HangingChad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That was truly an upstanding thing to do.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  5. Good Practice by ShooterNeo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

  6. First page of the novel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:First page of the novel by Kozz · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's clearly a slashdot reference. Just ask Google!

      --
      I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
  7. Re:Wait a tick by blueg3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Depending on the type of pen and the pressure used, that method may not be sensitive enough for good reconstruction of the data. However, since it's a destructive technique, if you try it first and it fails, you've ruined your ability to try any other techniques.

  8. i hope the taxpayers... by inerlogic · · Score: 3, Funny

    .....bought her a pack of fucking pencils.....

    1. Re:i hope the taxpayers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      A forensic team there worked on it in their spare time

      As a taxpayer, I'd be happy that the forensic team used their spare time (which, by definition, is when they are not actively forensicizing(tm) an active case) to hone their skills while doing something philanthropic.

  9. Simple to anyone who's watched any dime store by spads · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  10. Re:Wait a tick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It works in a pinch but it is not proper forensics practice because it damages the evidence and only brings to the surface the most defined of indentations. The more refined approach is graphite dust(like for lubricating door locks) and a vibratory table.

  11. Re:Warning: by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Funny

    He meant Mao, but his keyboard ran out of ink before it finished the top of the "o"

  12. Re:Used a technique called "rubbing it with a penc by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  13. 5 months/26 pages?? by PPH · · Score: 2

    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.
  14. But the Slashdot editors... by 6Yankee · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...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?

  15. Lebowski... by bdabautcb · · Score: 2

    ...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
  16. Re:Now. Transpose this story to the US by davester666 · · Score: 2

    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!
  17. Re:Fuck off by _0xd0ad · · Score: 2

    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)