The women who came forward against Harvey Weinstein reacted with fury after the disgraced media mogul’s rape and sexual assault convictions were overturned by a New York appeals court on Thursday.
Weinstein, 72, was found guilty in 2020 of raping and assaulting two women, and is serving his 23-year sentence at a prison in upstate New York.
In a 4-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court ruled the original judge made “egregious errors” in the trial by allowing prosecutors to call witnesses whose allegations were not related to the charges at hand.
Weinstein was once one of Hollywood’s most well-connected and powerful producers who made a series of Oscar-winning films. But behind the glamourous facade, it was a different story. More than 80 women have accused him of abuse ranging from groping to rape. Even with his conviction overturned in New York, he remains convicted of rape in California.
The Weinstein revelations launched the #MeToo movement in 2017, which saw women from all corners of society come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead. I would say that puts that claim squarely in myth territory until there can be some way to show that it’s true beyond “we haven’t found two matching sets out of the small subset of people we’ve fingerprinted.”
Anyway…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/myth-fingerprints-180971640/
This is true. Similarly, we haven’t tested and have no means to test if two well-shuffled decks have ever matched. But we do understand the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena, and (specific or ballpark) likelihood of an exact match occurring, and from those odds can make a reasonable assertion that a match has (in all likelihood) never occurred.
That being said, the approximate impossibility of an exact match does not make up for the other issues of fingerprinting as you quoted. The chances of finding someone’s fingerprint whole and readable to compare to a control may be far more likely than two distinct people matching exactly, but far more often the prints being used are nowhere near “whole and readable”
Okay, please show these odds since they are known.
From a quora post because IDGAF and I’m not doing any more deliberate research on this than that:
Dunno who Galton is, but there ya go
So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?
That’s so amazingly dishonest that I don’t know what else to say.
But let’s say he’s right. Let’s say it’s 1 in 64 billion. There have been over 100 billion people. That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.
So thanks for proving my point.
Another two second Google search, it was Francis Galton who calculated those odds.
I don’t think 1 or 2 pairs of people having had fingerprints that matched from the dawn of humanity to today is sufficient to say it’s a myth that “no two people have the same fingerprint”. The likelihood that two living people, or even two people who lived at the same time ever, shared fingerprints, is still effectively 0. I’m not trying to say fingerprints are magic, just that they are relatively unique. That’s not a myth.
It’s clear you have strong feelings on this, and I really don’t, so I don’t expect I’ll be engaging further. I’m sorry for any distress.
Oh, Fancis Galton. Then it must be true. Could a 19th century racist who didn’t even understand the concept of genetics possibly be wrong?
That literally makes that statement false. i.e. a myth.
Seriously, dude… you used the work of a 19th century racist, the literal founder of the racist “science” of eugenics, who couldn’t possibly calculate odds accurately, to show, based on that work, the statement about fingerprints was false and you’re now saying, “well just because that statement is false, you can’t really say that it isn’t true.”
But please, do show me what Dr. Mengele thought on the subject next.
Imo, something isn’t a myth just because it’s hard to prove definitely due to a near infinite amount of samples. By the same argument you could pretty much discredit most knowledge. Dna being unique or the speed of light because we haven’t tested all individual photons.
Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way, you kind of go with what you have.
Obviously though, it’s insane we don’t have better standards. It sounds like most times, it boils down to a judgment call from an expert and that is clearly not okay.
You’re assuming the fingerprint is perfect. It might not be. In enough cases they do not have the full fingerprint. Then if there’s a match, was it actually a match or not?
For above, this caused problems though times. Especially with huge fingerprint databases.
Disagree with your statement that there’s loads of evidence pointing that fingerprint are unique. That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.
Yes and it has nothing to do with two people having the same fingerprint. We need to be much more precise on how we measure differences and what samples we allow (like no partials) but there isn’t an inherent fault in fingerprint evidence because there are multiples of the same one floating around.
I’m arguing against the notion that it’s individuals can have the same exact fingerprint and not talking about how we process them.
That’s not how science works at all. You don’t need to test individual photons to know the speed of light. That involves mass and energy. There’s a famous equation that allows you to calculate it if you re-order the variables, E=mc².
You do not present a hypothesis that has no evidence to back it up and pretend it’s true. That is not fact, that is folklore. Mythology.
You don’t ignore all the evidence just because every single bit of possible data hasn’t been parsed.
There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique. This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.
How many fingerprints have been collected versus how many humans have ever lived?
Again, that’s not how science works.
So dna isn’t unique as well? And I mean, we haven’t boiled every drop of water on the planet, how can we know all water boils at 100c at sea level.
There isn’t much things we know that was tested to such an extent.
You really do not understand how science works. You are arguing that the test for uniqueness is the same as the test for uniformity.
If someone were to claim that every drop of water is unique, you would have a point. No one is claiming that. That is the claim about fingerprints and it is a claim which has never been tested to the satisfaction of anyone working in that field of science.
I’m not saying it’s proven beyond a doubt, my point is that something that has turned out true the millions of times we have checked can’t possibly be a myth.
You can say there’s a possibility of it being wrong but shouldn’t lump it in with antiquity gods just for the sake of your argument.
There’s a whole range between fantasy and certain beyond a doubt, you should stop assuming I’m an idiot and ask yourself why you are so adamant about defending the extreme in such an abrasive manner.
Can’t possibly be a myth? So you know for a fact that, based on the supposed millions of times that we have checked (have we checked millions of times? do you know?) no two of the estimated 100 billion people that have lived over the course of the past 200,000 years had the same fingerprints, yes? And you can present empirical evidence to support that claim? Because I’m really not sure how you can claim that with any sort of certainty based on a sample size of what is likely less than 1% of that number over the course of less than two centuries.
Otherwise, I think it could possibly be a myth.