Word: hand-printed
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...them somehow, palm prints or no. Students entering the dining halls will have to slip their bursar cards into the slot and push down on the machine, just as though their palm prints had been encoded, while the checkers check them off the old way. The whole business is worse than pointless--it's easier than ever to lend your card to someone else, and the dining hall personnel have the extra burden of supervising machines that are just there for show. People practicing on the new machines in Memorial Hall last week, after the hand-print plan had been...
...more carefully at people's bursar card photographs, the Identimat plan begins to make a certain amount of sense. It's possible that Hall did his thinking on a purely financial basis and failed to consider anything else, but it's also possible that he decided rationally that the hand-print machines were ideologically innocent...
...there is still something to be said for the gut reaction. The technology involved in the new machines is forbidding in itself--electronic gadgetry scanning your fingers, read and green lights rendering judgement. If a simple, Thurberian mistrust of machinery were not sufficient reason to fear and detest and hand-print machine, there would still be the cool efficiency that would replace the myopic checkers. At Harvard, as elsewhere, we've come to treasure inefficiency as a substitute for less capricious guarantees of benevolence. If the tangled mess of Rules Relating is not oppressive, it's because...
...reason speaks for the Identimat, unreason has to have its say, too. It may be unjustified, it may be silly to look at the hand-print machines in their Harvard context and automatically think of thumb-screws and firing squads, but the connotations of the machine are no less real for being illogical, identimats in the food lines make Harvard that much more faceless and mechanical, and worse: No amount of ratiocination can cover up the first could smell of the thing when you put your hand...
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