How does one pronounce “saboted”?
Well, whatever you do, don’t correct William Shatner’s pronunciation.
In short, the chemical compositions are not like fingerprints. Well, they would be like fingerprints if your fingerprints could change during your lifetime and someone else’s fingerprints could change to match yours.
A lot of forensic “science” is far from scientific. A lot of times a forensic “match” just means “we think this guy did it, well, just because”.
Thanks excavating. That’s a great article and anyone who cares about criminal forensics should read it.
Interestingly, I don’t know that much about whether my fingerprints can change and how likely it is that someone else’s fingerprints (particularly “partial prints”) match mine. The FBI fundamentally assumes that our fingerprints are unique and that they stay fixed. I haven’t seen studies showing these things to be true. It’s exactly those types of assumptions that the FBI lab has been making for years, without being questioned, that has led to some junk science sending people away to jail. We need to ask these questions about all the FBI’s forensic science.
Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the article:
Wouldn’t it have been better for Mr. Tobin to determine the scientific validity of his forensic work when he was still using it to convict people?
It’s a good read for people interested in metallurgy as well. The author does dance around a bit and run a little loose with the data, but that’s understandable since there’s very little scientific data available. It does seem a shame to convict people using LEO guesswork as hard evidence.
Good question. The dictionary doesn’t list a verb form of ‘sabot.’ In French the pronunciation of the terminal ‘t’ changes when you go from ‘sabot’ to ‘sabotage,’ but that’s a French word following French pronunciation rules for the use of a latin-derived suffix.
My personal preference would be ‘say-bowed’ rather than ‘say-boated.’ Although I think it’s weird that the first syllable of ‘sabotage’ is pronounced ‘sah-’, while the first syllable of ‘sabot’ (describing the expended material around a tube-launched projectile) is pronounced ‘say-’.
These ones are pretty much fantasy too.
Just strike your forensic matches on the stock, not the steel. They should light.
Actually, the noun is pronounced “Saa-boat-'tay-jee.”
Cite: https://youtu.be/gMJIRTCK--I (I don’t know which is weirder: that I remembered this Bugs Bunny or that the 5-seconds clip is on YouTube.
This was actually a clue in a Spider-Man comic book I read years ago. He asked a police detective about a murder committed with a shotgun, and the detective talked about finding a forensic match to another murder, or something like that. A few issues later,
Spider-Man figured out the detective was the killer with other clues, and is angry at himself for not remembering that it was impossible to do forensic matches on shotguns. The villain called himself Sin-Eater, by the way.
As a current government employee, I’ll say that performing tasks on the job that aren’t part of your job duties can lead to ethics violations and any number of potential forms of discipline, and also doing things that reflect poorly on your agency is bad for your career.
It’s almost tradition to do stuff that undermines your former employer once you leave government employment, though.