"Then, just when the whole wretched stew was thickening, he’d invented craniometrics. Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days—hah, now—these included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn’t need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows. He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space between the eyes. And on such figures he could, infallibly, tell that you were devious, untrustworthy, and congenitally criminal. After you spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools of inquiry, he would, amazingly, be proven right. (p. 136)"
Discworld

January 1, 1970

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

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