Etymology ain't nothin' to do with insects

[Old Koreelah]

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

That's spot on. Have you ever seen the coveralls the forensic people wear? They wear them continuously when doing any investigative work…

…even in our hottest weather; far from ideal working conditions.

[old man emu]

DNA is not a problem in that part of fire investigation because, like all carbon-based molecules it burns. She might be looking for the remains of an electrical component. If she should detect the smell of fuels ( accelerants) she would collect about 4 litres of ash into a sealed tin to send to the lab for spectrochemical analysis to determine the type of accelerant.

 

Crime scenes where victims and offenders have moved about are the places where contaminations suits might be worn - depending on the crime. 

 

When I joined up, one of the application processes was to have one's fingerprints taken. We were told that the prints were used as practical teaching aids for trainer F/print examiners. But I'm sure that they were first used to see if an applicant had a criminal record. I don't know if the recording system for names has changed, but when NW Police went over to computerized record keeping, everyone who interacted with police, wither as victim, offender or witness was given a ID number. If the person had never been fingerprinted - a victim/witness/first offender - the number was in a certain format - probably a sequential numbering. That number stays with a person as long as the database exists. However if someone has been fingerprinted, the format of the number is different - a different set of sequential numbers. So, if a Constable in NSW does a name check on me, the number coming back should cause the constable to delve deeper into my recorded history to see why I had that type of number. My ID would be associated with hundreds of entries, simply because I was involved in some way with the report - usually as arresting constable.

 

Just before I retired, digital recording of fingerprints wa introduced. So if a person was charged, they would be fingerprinted and those prints compared to existing records. That was good because if the report came back that the person was wanted in any way, you already had them locked up in a holding cell while you were processing the current charge. 

[old man emu]

In the Gripes thread, I bemoaned the effects of the YouTube algorithm in offering up suggestions for videos I might like to watch. Of course, having had my gripe, my attention turned to the source of the word "algorithm".

 

One would think that it is a word created in conjunction with the rise of computer operations. We are quite used to combinations of the words of Ancient Greek and Latin being used to make words to describe modern inventions, so is algorithm one of these?

 

No. It started life as a a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi, surname of the mathematician whose works, "al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala" ("the compendium on calculation by restoring and balancing"). Al-Khwarizmi's book (translated into Latin in 12c.) also introduced Arabic numerals to the West. Around 1690, the French had refashioned it to algorithme  from Old French algorisme "the Arabic numeral system". The earlier form in Middle English was algorism (early 13c.), which is clearly from the Old French spoken at the time.

 

Included in the title to the works of Al-Khwarizmi, you can see al-jabr, source of that area of mathematics we call "algebra". al-jabr translates as "reunion of broken parts", or "restoring", reducing fractions to integers in computation was one of the two preparatory steps to solving algebraic equations.

 

An interesting alternate usage in English 15c.-16c. was "bone-setting", a usage picked up probably from Arab medical men in Spain.

[facthunter]

French or LATIN ? Hard to tell which as there's a lot of Latin in French.   Nev

[onetrack]

I've heard that the FBI are still hunting for that dangerous Arab terrorist, Al-Gebra.