#forensic book

[bottlecapjo-spooky]

Do you know how hard it is to be hyperfixated on ace attorney. I hear one word about THE LAW OF ALL THINGS and I'm hooked because of those gay little lawyers. What is this.

[aroaessidhe]

2025 reads / storygraph

The Undetectables

urban fantasy mystery

follows a young witch who formed a detective agency with her friends as teens, but they never managed to solve their first case (figuring out who killed the ghost who is now her best friend)

when they’re 20, the other witches have moved away and on with their lives, but she’s feeling stuck dealing with pain from her fibromyalgia

when they get a letter with a new case - the suspicious death of a human with seemingly no clues or evidence other than a haunting whistle, and they get back together to see if they can solve it this time

bi, lesbian, and gay MCs

[chthonic-cassandra]

Starting to read Katherine Ramsland's Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampire in America Today, which is certainly one of the oddest books I have read.

It's ostensibly a 1998 work of "investigative journalism" following Ramsland's interviews with members of vampire subcultures (which she is using as a pretty expansive cateogy), but it's paced exactly like a paranormal romance. I'm waiting for her to get caught up in darker things than she was imagining and then get swept off her feet by a dashing vampire.

[kaylas-words]

Old paper has secrets... if only you shine a light through it

I didn't know old books could get so forensic. The last thing I expected was for them to hold details—images—hidden to the naked eye.

The pronounced vertical lines are chain lines, and the horizontal ones are from the screen from the paper-making process.

And then, if you can make it out, the paper has a watermark which tells you who milled it (and thus where and when), and it's called a watermark because the paper was wet when it was imprinted!

Where the watermark is and the direction of the chain lines (vertical/horizontal) tells you how the paper was folded.

Here's another example from the same book I was looking at:

This second image has the book's most repeated watermark, the bull's head. It's in the center of the page with vertical chain lines, so this book is classified as a folio, where each sheet was folded once to make four pages. (Other common folding styles are quarto and octavo.)

We can turn to Charles-Moïse Briquet's Les Filigranes, a multi-volume watermark dictionary. (This is also available on the Internet Archive.)

With a little French, we can find pages that match our watermark. Here we have "Tête de bœuf," which Google Translate says is "Beef head". (It's a bull head.) Then we play a game of spot the difference. The second watermark looks similar to 14183 (of the 4th volume), so for the sake of the exercise, we'll look at that one. The entry contains "Belfort, 1458" or a variation from "Marbourg, 1459".

For the other page, with the crest, I found "Armoiries Bande," or the band version of a coat of arms.

The closest match I found is entry 995 from Vol. 1.

We get dates and locations ranging from 1586-1609 in Strasbourg and the surrounding area. From a quick search of the web, the book specifically has the Strasbourg Bend watermark. Already, we can begin to place where the paper to print the book was sourced from and at about what time, revealing a partial history of the book from just these details hidden in the pages. If I had my own rare books collection, I'd be shining a light through every one, looking at the different watermarks and noting new ones I see in a sort of curator's Pokédex.

[mortalscience]

So I'm thinking, why don't you and I just sit here now, together, quietly.. and you can know that you're okay?

[mossy-paws]

Hi what do u think of spiders

I fucking love spiders

[gregorovitch-adler]

Uh, no, John, you lot do not work with the police, you guys are supposed to work independently.

The police comes asking for your and Holmes' help, not the other way 'round.

[kodasea]

Crew studies (2021)

[doom-dreaming]

okay i'm still very awake so you're all gonna have to deal with me red-stringing about character bullshit until i fall asleep. i Know i'm making a big post about this but i don't care

why. this is the first instance of mark being designated as the one in charge when a higher-up (fred, in this case) isn't present. but why. they were only trapped in the slipspace fuckeryzone for a few days relative to normal space-time and i don't think anything drastic happens (with these guys) in glasslands? at least according to the wiki it doesn't. why did being integrated into blue team suddenly disrupt team saber's former command structure?

did they plan to kill mark off at the very start of this? was this all a long game to give mark enough of a foothold as an Important Character to make his death have more impact? does troy denning just like him more? how much weight did his personal preferences even play in this? why do the gammas suddenly start bantering when they're in danger and alone with a woman they just met? why do mark and ash seem to switch personalities every other chapter? why is this worse than i remember it being when i first read it a few months ago?

[coquelicoq]

Quelques semaines après la publication de son enquête, alors qu'elle regardait avec une émotion dont elle était la première surprise la tombe de sa confidente, Brigitte Bollème me dit qu'elle s'était demandé, exactement, dans le cimetière de ce petit village, sous un ciel sale de fin d'automne, si la défunte lui avait révélé la vérité. (La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, 2, 2e, II, p 212)

this sentence is a nightmare (which i think is probably on purpose, as it is the first sentence of the chapter and we at this point have not heard anything about any enquête or confidente or tombe and don't know what vérité this is referring to...i think he means for us to be confused right now on multiple levels) and i thought i finally got it but then realized i still can't account for the dont clause. "la tombe de sa confidente" is the direct object of "regardait" (took me forever to figure that out 😭), so if you move the sentence around, it becomes "elle regardait la tombe de sa confidente avec une émotion dont elle était la première surprise". okay first of all what is elle referring to in "dont elle était la première surprise". brigitte? émotion? surprise? is surprise a noun or an adjective? ohhh wait is it saying she is the first to be surprised by the emotion? yeah i think surpris(e) takes de (rather than, e.g., par) as preposition so that would account for the dont if so...brigitte était la première [d'être] surprise de l'émotion [qu'elle retentissait] alors qu'elle regardait la tombe de sa confidente? is that what we're cooking with here?

[ravhelle]

My favorite reads while I was studying for my forensic science degree 📚

[whimzikuhl]

Oooooooo a fellow anthropology fan!!!!!

What’s your favorite field of anthropology?

Definitely, sociocultural! I am just so fascinated by people, the way they think, how their culture influences them, their actions, and how they perceive the world around them. Subjecrive vs. Objective realities. Cyclical vs. Linear time. How ones perceived reality can actually have real-world consequences.

One book that I really enjoyed that explores how culture influences people to act or speak a certain way is Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes," which is about his time with the Piraha. It's primarily a linguistic book, however the Piraha's culture very much influences their language, so he does delve into the culture of the Piraha as well. I will say if you are a Chomsky fan, you probably won't like this book. However, I still recommend reading it anyway. The Piraha are sort of an anomaly because their language lacks recurrence. According to Chomsky, and everything we once thought we knew about languages, it is not possible.

I personally find the Mayans to be very interesting to study as well. The way they see the world and how they perceive time is so fascinating! I don't have any specific book recommendations for that topic, though, unfortunately.

I'd say forensic anthropology is awesome, too, though! I don't think I'd be very good at it, unfortunately, despite my interest in the field. I enjoy reading about it, though, and one of my favorite books is "Dead Men Do Tell Tales" by Dr. William Maples. He had quite a prolific career, and some of the stories he tells in his book are so fascinating and unbelievable. I highly recommend it if you'd enjoy a more realistic view on forensic anthropology.

Linguistics is interesting, but I'm very poor at it, and I really struggle to understand it. Which is unfortunate considering it is so closely linked to cultural. Guess that just means I need to work harder at it to further my understanding of it.

I'm gonna provide the links to the Goodreads pages for the books I mentioned, I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't read them yet!

I'd like to add to this as well that I have an Associates in History, and I'll be pursuing a Bachelors in the Social Sciences with a focus on Anthropology. I have taken two full 16-week courses while getting my history degree, one in General Anthropology, and the other was Archaeology.

Edit: Thanks for asking BTW! I think I forgot I was responding to someone. I just got excited to be asked about my special interest. Please share what yours is too!!!

[somerunner]

I feel like Lindon in this scene whenever I get an Activity notification that I decide to follow up on, trawling through an entire page because someone liked a specific post of mine

[a-dux]

I love seeing everyone's gorgeous ROTE books because I've got like the worst covers and also my copy of Fool's Quest is actually blood-stained. I bought it that way. This is not me complaining I find it incredibly funny

[un-antropologo-nel-mondo]

Il percorso perfetto è quello in cui alla fine non hai più nulla da lasciare e in cui ti sei già disfatto di ogni cosa. Senza nessuno a cui dare, nessuno a provare dolore per la tua fine. Soltanto così puoi davvero andartene in pace come se ne va un alito di vento: c'era, è passato e non c'è bisogno di voltarsi a salutare.

[hootybal-lecter]

It is important to me that fans who didn't read the book know that in this scene what he actually said was "I'm horny"