this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
620 points (99.1% liked)

Not The Onion

17177 readers
1575 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 76 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Cops and pseudoscience go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

For more examples, see "bite mark analysis," "911 call analysis," "blood spatter analysis," roadside drug testing with known false-positives, and even fingerprints (once the gold standard) have up to a 20% error rate.

And that's not even getting into how their methodology is exactly backwards: they have a claim that they set out to prove, but do no work to disprove what they already believe.

[–] FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 22 hours ago

but do no work to disprove what they already believe.

But that's the LAWYERS job /s

[–] chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 22 hours ago

I think it's only been used to convict 1 person but, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optography

[–] pticrix@lemmy.ca 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I don't know if it's true (let me know if I've been taken for a ride), but I've been told that you can make it look like you lie on a polygraph simply by contacting your anus and slowly unclenching while answering, throwing their analysis out the window.

[–] Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago

Really puts the "anal" in analysis, if true.