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As most people know, when you touch something, you leave fingerprints behind. Those fingerprints are composed of sweat found in pores on the ridges of the surface of your finger. For a long time people have examined the shape of those fingerprints. But what about examining the chemical composition of that sweat?

Apparently researchers can now use gold nanoparticles to analyze the components of fingerprint sweat (http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn11887).

So basically forensic science can figure out what substances you have been consuming from your fingerprints. Police may use this to narrow their list of suspects to the smoker, coffee drinker or drug addict. Or competitive athletes may find themselves barred from a sporting event after their fingerprint is analyzed.

The true power of this technology would be for the lid of your talking cookie jar. “No Mr. Anderson, you may not open me, because you have already eaten enough.”

Of course this can all be foiled with gloves.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte.

This book sounds kind of boring, but it’s actually the bible of how to represent data visually.

Okay, that may still sound boring.

However, if you consider that it’s hard to actually know something well without looking at the data, and that we are often far better at seeing data visually then we are at digesting it in tables, you’ll understand it may be helpful to understand when a visual display of data is actually deceiving you, and how to make your own displays of data better.

The core ideas I got from reading this book are: Think about what visual elements can be removed while still representing the data truthfully and in full. Think of how multiple sets of data relate to each other and think through the different types of visual displays to see what fits that best. Make sure to look for causes of exceptions in data patterns because that’s often what matters most.

Next, by Michael Crichton.

This book is about the very strange biotechnology future that is approaching much faster than most people suspect. It is also about how this future may be governed by our current laws, which make little sense. For example, because the law doesn’t recognize your right to own your body parts, major medical institutions have more rights and incentives in your body parts than you do. I couldn’t agree with Mr. Crichton more on either his observations about the technology or the law. Unfortunately, I’m not sure a novel was the proper format for this book, as the story and characters seemed to have been forgotten in favor of the ideas being communicated.

The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris.

This book’s subtitle notwithstanding, it is actually an examination of how campaign masterminds like Bill Clinton and Karl Rove operate. To its credit the book does delve deeply into explaining the operational techniques and why some seemingly foolhardy policy positions are actually effective at moving a candidate closer to victory. It shows how better insights and superior execution of a campaign can catapult little known candidates over their rivals, to the heights of power.

It also shows in some detail what I’ve long suspected: that although their followers are often motivated by their hate for the leaders of the opposing political party, the leaders of successful campaigns often admire each other and copy liberally from each other whatever works.

The book fails to adequately address the most interesting question about the 2008 campaign: how the Internet effects fund raising, getting the message out, and turning out the vote on election day. The subject matter of the subtitle wasn’t quite addressed.

Rembrandt: the Painter at Work by Ernst van Wetering
Velazquez: the Technique of Genius by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido

How exactly did Rembrandt and Velazquez create their paintings? What choices did they make in how to make their brush strokes, how to mix their paints, how to layer their paints, how to compose their creations?

Sadly, if these books touched on such matters, they did so in a rather oblique way only. What was very helpful in these books was their inclusion of pictures of both entire paintings and of closeups of portions of such paintings. From the pictures I learned alot.