In 1949 Bernard Silver and Norman J.Woodland filed a patent application for the grandfather of the modern barcode, “Classifying Apparatus and Method”, in which they described a linear printing pattern that could be used for tracking objects. However, it wasn’t until early 80’s when utilizing it became common, first in the US army. Nowadays, tracking of movements of e.g. cars, airline luggage, post, and nuclear waste, as well as recognition of patients often happens using a barcode. In a grocery store, the price, expiry date, and other information about products are stored in it.
Barcodes tagged on the containers of some stimulating substances. The product on the left may cause so called purchased fatigue, and the one in the middle may in part augment impotence. Fatigue and impotence are not barcode related.
Verifying the validity of the Zebras’ barcode has to be done daily. Dust easily makes it non-scannable. These zebras pay careful attention to the cleanliness of the barcode stripes.
Tracking the organization of species in biology is a surprising application of barcode use. Bees can be marked with tiny barcodes to track their mating habits. But why to mark them with an artificial barcode, as the nature has already made them wear a striped behind. For millions of years the nature has equipped insects, fish, dry land animals etc. with nature’s own barcode. Someone has been rather farsighted. What is actually the information, saved in these codes, may be difficult to read or scan, however, there always is room for an educated guess.
Small fish often expire in the digestive canal of bigger colleagues. If a fish is doomed to end up on a plate, the expiry date of course will have a completely new meaning. Traditionally, before the worldwide introduction of barcodes, expiry for human consumption was determined by the looks of the gills and the smell of the product. Fishmongers can of course even nowadays provide suggestive estimations that most often refer to an extremely recent fishing act. However, the expiry time starts running the very moment when the fish comes out of water.
In ice fishing, when a fish is lifted up through a hole in ice, usually nothing barcode related happens. At least, nothing similar takes place as in a grocery store when you take the goods to a cash desk. In his clever book Cat’s cradle the great author Kurt Vonnegut introduces the so called ice-nine, invented by an imaginary developer of atom bomb Dr Felix Hoenikker. Ice-nine takes an unnatural crystal configuration when freezing, and is supposed to prevent marines from sinking into mud as it makes all water containing substances crystallize by contact. Perhaps Dr Hoenikker could also have invented a sort of ice that records the beginning of the last phase of expiry when the fish are lifted through a hole in ice. If this Hoenikker-ice left a cookie or something in a fish (do we need a chip in a fish?), a consumer would be at ease when purchasing it. By using a portable barcode scanner, the time of getting the fish out of water would be easy to check at the counter of a fishmonger or a market freezer. The term "fish and chips" would have a completely new meaning.
Sometimes there is no intention to use higher than room temperatures for preparing fish for food. Drying and salting cod is one alternative, although laborious. Cod, which has been preserved by drying after salting is called clipfish. Cod, which has been dried without the addition of salt is called stockfish. Salt cod is traditionally dried by the wind and the sun, hanging on wooden scaffolding or lying on clean cliffs or rocks near the seaside. After this handling the expiry date of the product is more or less obscure. However, dried cod fillets are extremely easy to mark with a non-removable barcode tag. These tags are of importance at so called cod tasting dinners at expensive clubs. There generously paid cod tasting professionals or enthusiasts taste pieces of cod, and almost with no exception are able to tell the region of a sea where the fish was taken up, the wood species of the scaffolding, and the location where the fillet was dried. Finally the data, scanned from the barcode tag, is reflected on the wall for verifying the correctness of the cod taster’s statement.
Of big animals, zebras have perhaps the best known barcodes in their skin. I just wonder if the hides in stores need to have a commercial barcode added, or has the nature equipped zebra hides with enough information for commercial purposes. If the nature had been clever enough, zebra skins would also have data about the date of birth, gender, and the previous generation etc. for scientists to study.
There is no way to avoid considering the applications of this method to humans. Anyway, monitoring working or sleeping time, and the stay in numerous other places, could be done with no visible barcode tag. Neither, a boarding pass, entrance ticket, nor a passport would be necessary. But how could we make everyone wear a coded something? A striped suit or solely pants, or a striped pyjama, would certainly work for recording the arrival and departure to and from almost anyplace. Though, identifying a person wouldn’t be idiot proof; well, perhaps “idiot” proof it would be. Anyway, on voluntary basis, there would probably also be other feasible uses for the trouser/pyjama coding. One occurs to me with no effort. Visiting posh restaurants may occasionally require following a certain dress code; this was the case at least twenty, thirty years ago. If you went to a bar for a drink, dressing up wasn’t as strict. That’s a bar’s dress code, or bar code. If there was a code scanner at the door to a bar or restaurant, your striped trousers could be used for determining your eligibility to enter. Your trousers would in that case have a bar code barcode. The Bar, lawyers and judges, have their own Bar code. When popping in a restaurant, they would have a triple barcode, a Bar code bar code barcode, but I’m not going to look into that. The triple code would already be too complicated for a discussion. It would set the bar too high.
In a George Lucas movie Hitman, agency members have a personal barcode tattooed in the neck. Of course, if we went that far, the expected life time with all other pertaining data could be recorded already at birth in a baby’s skin; whatever use the suggested expiry date would later have, I don’t know, but again I’m only a dentist. Barcode tattooing in the skin would easily bring alongside some new terminology. I can imagine an airport officer resolutely stating: “Sir, would you please step aside, we suspect your neck is a forgery”.
And finally, let’s imagine that in future barcode scanning will be implemented in all fields of human life and existence. If we take Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection absolutely seriously, all of us will eventually look like zebras.
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