Categories
19th Century

Your Local Phrenologist

Have a drink with: Your Local Phrenologist

Lumps & bumps.
Ask him about: The 10-Year Challenge

Facial recognition technology is fun: particularly when you can log into your phone as an Animoji lion. But is it reliable, particularly when entrusted with decisions about security – and when profiling is a likely outcome? Suggestions that facial recognition technology can identify bad actors echoes the 19th century belief that phrenology could help identify criminals, and is woven through with the same social anxieties and pseudoscience. I’m over at the Washington Post’s Made by History site today digging into biometrics, phrenology and the problems with using biology to make decisions about criminal guilt, innocence or predisposition.

Categories
17th Century 18th Century

Captain Kidd

Have a drink with: Captain William Kidd
Privateer, man of song and legend, unwitting pirate?

Ask him about: the tabloid trial of the (18th) century!

Captain_Kidd_08_14

William Kidd, a merchant captain and commissioned privateer, was tried and executed in 1701 for throwing away the king’s commission to turn pirate in the Indian Ocean. Not 25 years later, Captain Kidd was renowned in England as the man “whose publick Tryal and Execution here, rendered him the Subject of all Conversation, so that his Actions have been chanted about in Ballads.”*

To the end Kidd denied he’d been a pirate, and lamented a perfect storm of mutiny, betrayal and scapegoating.

So: birth of a pirate king, or a complete bus-chuck?