I don’t think that the uniqueness of fingerprints is in doubt, but their analysis and use might not be up to snuff. I’ve read numerous articles over the last couple of decades that call into question at least the statistical underpinnings of what it means to declare a match.

But law enforcement in general seems to be filled with pseudoscience, from profiling and interview techniques to body language and lie detection.

When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But “rush hour” was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A “traffic jam” was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.

Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.

It’s impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.

Current forecast for my location in southern Saskatchewan is 11°C (52F) for a high. About 6 weeks ago, we got a proper start to winter with a few cm of snow (maybe 1.5 in) and thought was given to plugging in the block heater. That was it.

Since then, temperatures have been a bit below freezing overnight and a bit over freezing during the day, with quite a few days like today, where it’s way above freezing. Any sloughs and dugouts that had started freezing over are now pretty much ice free. The last few days have been nice enough for people to put their boats in to go fishing.

We heat with a pellet stove. So far, our pellet consumption is about 50% of last year’s, about 30% of our worst year, and about 35% of our 15 year average.

And apart from a “cooler” day tomorrow with a small chance of snow, there is no end in sight. Even assuming that we get back to something normal by Xmas, it could be February before it’s safe to go ice fishing.

You’ve had a couple of pretty good responses. I would add that the very fact that you can ask that question demonstrates a failure of the education system and the fundamental problem of depending on business ideals to manage society.

In the first case, a proper education would have included, at all grade levels, examples and discussion of the various purely intellectual pursuits that ultimately proved critical to some technological advance that improved quality of life.

In the second case, the naive “businessification” of society means that any pursuit that doesn’t make clear at the outset what practical (ie profitable) goal is being pursued is dismissed as folly unworthy of funding and support and education. (See my point above.)

I find it interesting that our current definition of the inch is based on an industrial standard that had been in use for decades. And that that standard was, in effect, created by one man.

tldr: Carl Edvard Johansson was a Swedish manufacturer of gauge blocks who built his one-inch blocks by ignoring the differences between the UK standard inch and the US standard inch. Those standards were only a few millionths of an “inch” (pick one!) apart anyway, so throwing away most of the decimal places must have seemed like a good idea.