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There have been a few questions about how palm scanners work, and how this affects reliability. Let’s take a look at the technology, its strengths, and its weaknesses.

If you’ve ever had a pulse ox on your finger, you know that it is a system that allows a machine to determine how much oxygen is in your blood. Have you ever asked yourself how it works?

Hemoglobin in the human body is responsible for transporting oxygen. Deoxidized hemoglobin absorbs infrared light differently than does oxidized hemoglobin. The pulse ox shines two different frequencies of near infrared light through your skin, and measures how much of the different wavelengths gets absorbed, and uses this to calculate the ratio of oxidized to deoxidized hemoglobin in your blood. Palm scanners use the same technology to determine your identity.

Veins transport deoxygenated blood to the heart. Therefore hemoglobin present in vein blood is deoxidized. When the near-infrared light from the palm scanner is directed on a person’s palm, hemoglobin absorbs its rays. The veins’ capacity to reflect the light is reduced, and they appear like a black pattern on the image taken by the system. Then the system processes the image and compares the results with the data from the database.

Since the pattern of veins in the palm is unique to each person, this image is a very accurate way of verifying that the person who was just scanned is the same person who has been scanned in the past. All you have to do is verify a person’s identity at the same time that you scan their palm and place the image in the database. Future scans verify that the person scanned in the future is the same person who was scanned and identified in the past.

Strengths:

• Given the possibilities of modern technology, many biometric identifiers, like face or voice patterns, can easily become subject to forgery. Palm vein patterns are hidden inside the human’s body and are more difficult to capture without a person’s knowledge.
• Unlike the face, which is visible to anyone in a public place, palm vein patterns cannot be scanned from a distance without a person’s consent.
• The palm vein pattern is significantly bigger in size than those of the finger or iris. Consequently, the scan from it contains more data, which increases the accuracy of the identification.
• Unlike many other biometric parameters (face, fingerprints), palm vein patterns are not likely to change due to some unexpected circumstances over the course of a person’s life.
• The technique of identifying a person by their fingerprints has a number of serious disadvantages. Fingerprints are easily affected by external factors, like aging, disease, or the state of the skin on the hands. Palm vein patterns usually remain the same throughout the person’s life.
• The results of the measurement are not affected by the state of the hand’s surface: dirt, grease, and oil don’t affect the image because IR passes through these substances easily.
• Unlike retina scans, the risk of passing infections is lower because the system doesn’t require physical contact.

Weaknesses:

• Some health factors, such as fevers, can affect the quality of the image
• Companies aren’t always great about information security when storing their database, but this is true of all identification technologies

Palm scanners have been in use by the medical field for identification purposes for over a decade. Banks in Japan have been using it for even longer.

I have done a couple of posts on car companies forcing you to pay subscription fees to use features of your car. I have been predicting that a new industry of jailbreaking car software would be coming. A group of researchers has just discovered an unpatchable security hole that will allow owners to unlock all pay to play features on Teslas.

Florida was recently in the news for having sea water temperatures of over 100 degreesF. It turns out, that isn’t exactly true. Read here to find out what really happened.

There are those who won’t believe me when I say that the US is trying to get NATO to enter the war with Russia by provoking a conflict on the borders of Belarus. So let’s just ignore this story.

Home Depot is clearing out Klein tools. They are some of the best electrical tools available.

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele had this to say on Twitter:

Sadly, it’ll be very hard for US Foreign Policy to use arguments such as “democracy” and “free and fair elections”, or try to condemn “political persecution” in other countries, from now on 🤷🏻‍♂️ https://t.co/HQTv0vUuA2

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 31, 2023

The Biden administration is again pushing for free student loan money. This time, they are trying to make it income dependent. Keep in mind that SCOTUS has ruled that the President doesn’t have the power to forgive student loans, so he is trying to dictate payment terms.

Biden’s new Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is setting repayment plans based on a debtholder’s income and family size. Under the income-driven repayment plan, many debtholders would pay $0 per month. Single wage earners would not pay any money until they make $40k or more a year, while a family of three would not repay any money unless they make $60k or more per year.

I have a better idea. We need to stop overeducating people for jobs that don’t require it. If a student:

• attends college using a student loan and fails to earn at least a 2 year degree within 4 years, they are not eligible for ANY public assistance, no refundable tax credits (including EIC), no further student loans, and all of their lottery winnings and tax refunds are forfeited to the loan servicer until their loan is repaid.
• earns a 2 year degree and makes less than an amount equal to $35k a year or twice the annual cost of attending that college (whichever is more), the college must refund all tuition paid, directly to the loan servicer.
• earns a 4 year degree and makes less than $40k a year or three times the annual cost of attending that college (whichever is more), the college has to refund all tuition paid- directly back to the loan servicer.
• 4 year degree and makes less than $50k a year or four times the annual cost of attending that college (whichever is more), the college has to refund half of all tuition paid.

Any tuition not refunded by the college must be repaid by the graduate, and the payment will be equal to 10% of their pretax salary until the loan plus interest is repaid.

My plan will have multiple effects- it will end useless degrees, will keep tuition under control, and will make colleges more selective in who gets admitted to college, unless they make arrangements to pay with funds other than student loans.

I have been a life member of the NRA for about 25 or 30 years now. It cost me $300 back then. Before that, I was a recurring annual member. So I will say that I was surprised to get this email:

I haven’t gotten my magazines in more than a decade. That doesn’t stop them from bombarding me with requests for money from the NRA-ILA. Apparently, they have lost my membership information. Or maybe Wayne LaPierre just needs to add to the $100 million or so that he has stolen already.

No thanks. There are other organizations that are actually doing stuff to protect my rights. I donate my cash to FPC, and they are using it to kick some ATF ass.

Mali and Burkina Faso have officially announced that they will declare war if Western-controlled nations invade Niger. No one has to invade Niger, Mali, or Burkina Faso. Just cut off all aid.

• Mali and Burkina Faso each have a GDP of $19 billion, but nearly ten percent of that is foreign aid.
• Niger is even worse off, with almost 20% of its GDP being foreign aid

In fact, each of those countries has relied upon foreign aid as their number one industry. Niger’s main export is Uranium, but nearly all of the proceeds from that are taken by its government. The remainder of the nation relies on subsistence farming.

Agricultural activities occupy 70% of Mali’s labor force and provide 42% of the GDP. The nation is an exporter of gold, but like Niger, the government takes all of the revenue from that.

Just cut off the financial aid, and they will be back to begging within a few weeks.

I’m not the NRA, but I think that I can help you. I want to start with proving that the people are each and every individual who is a citizen of this country:

The first line of the Constitution says “We the People of the United States” so the collective people are the ones writing the Constitution. The very next paragraph begins with:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People

So the people are the ones electing Representatives. Do they have a collective, or an individual right to elect representatives?

The people also have a right to assemble, as outlined in the First Amendment. Is that a collective, or an individual right? In the Fourth Amendment, we find the protection of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

So now that we have established that the people are the ones who individually elect their representatives, peaceably assemble, and are secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, is there any possibility that the writers of the Constitution and its amendments meant for the Second Amendment to refer to a different meaning of people when they wrote “the right of the people to keep and bear arms?”

I know that it is all fashionable for the left to hang its hat on the prefatory clause about militias being necessary, but this argument has been hashed out tons of times. It’s really getting old, and this argument is nothing more than partisan bullshit.