Nobody can do forensic analysis as fast as the chick on NCIS. Nobody can do so many different things, and nobody can do it so quickly. The underlying concepts and methods are correct, though. Sometimes, TV gets them right.
This evening, my wife was watching a recorded episode of Numbers, a series whose schtick is that crimes are solved through the use of some kind of mathematical analysis. There's a fair amount of Then a Miracle Occurs, but its not the linchpin of the show. Since we haven't been able to hang out together much, I went downstairs to watch with her. The show revolved around a police technique that I'd heard about a few years ago -- the idea being that someone who commits a series of crimes (by which I think they specifically mean physical, hands-on crimes, not Bernie Madoff or the banking-industry type crimes) has a tendency to commit the crimes in a broad area which, roughly speaking, has his home, or home base, at the center. Find the approximate center, and you find where the person is likely to reside, or at least likely to hang out frequently. Apparently, the technique was originally developed in star evaluation, when people were looking for things that, by their very nature, were not directly detectable at the time, such as black holes.
It ran a lot more smoothly on the show than it likely does in reality, but it was still pretty cool. Even if it wasn't the chick from NCIS.
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