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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I've read a few stories about spies being discovered due to their habits, so this is somewhat related. For example, table manners are different in Europe and the US (the way you hold and use a knife and fork especially). Also, since people in the uk drive on the left the way they look for cars before crossing a road is opposite the norm in countries where they drive on the right. Apparently Americans will rotate a piece of pie or cake so the point faces them before eating it.

It should be possible to specifically train some habit or combination of habits that is within the norm but notable enough to use as an identifier if known (much like baseball signals).

In short: behavioral steganography.

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A few more cultural traits:

Finger Counting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_counting - this is what caught up Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

Cash Counting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g87HVlu55mQ

We should finger count in binary! Which will lead to the question: "Are you thumb-indexed or index-indexed?"

A sort of mixed 5-ary (pentinary?) works well too.

Count to 5 on your dominant hand and then use your other hand twice for the the next highest place digit. Count from the thumb, then when both hands are full, at 30, drop the left hand thumb. This is strong IMO as counting to 5 on one hand is quick and easy. Though I've only used this a couple of times.

I know some BSL too which means I can count to 19 using different hand gestures of one hand (my right) quite readily. Using that with the above method of holding the higher placed digit gives me a count of 200 that I can work with much more easily than using binary. I find binary finger counting very hard.

Practically I tend to just use mental arithmetic and work with images of digits in sums in my head.

Being index-indexed would decrease the size of a number you could count on your hands while maintaining a logical bit ordering by 768 (1024 - 256), so we should all be thumb-indexed.

The proper comparison with endianness would be thumb- or pinky-indexed, but physiological limitations make pinky-indexing pretty useless (try counting to 2 in binary, starting with your pinky), so we should, again, be thumb-indexed.

You might be interested in this interview which came out just yesterday [1] about techniques for detecting people by the way they walk (apparently, throughpressure point patterns in a digital footprint) with (IIRC) 99.6% precision.

Regional identification through manners and/or phonology goes back to the concept of a shibboleth [2]. This is used rather wonderfully as a turning point in many stories (without spoiling too much, I should mention that Tarantino pulled this off nicely in one of his films).

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/10/todd-pataky/

[2] http://duckduckgo.com/shibboleth

Indeed! On the disturbing side, eventually computers will be capable of this sort of thing. If you thought face recognition was scary, imagine if computers could identify you by your walking habits. Imagine how that plays out once you factor in the growing omnipresence of cameras and the longevity of digital data.

P.S. Imagine how hard it would be to break into someplace that had full networked HD video surveillance and was able to track the identity and location of everyone in the building by monitoring their characteristic kinematics.

It's food for thought, isn't it? That the Panopticon [1] has become cheaper and more pervasive over time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

There's a cultural difference in the orientation of eating pie/cake? Is it the same for pizza?

I wouldn't know about pizza orientation, but here in Brazil, (some) folk from São Paulo can be recognized for pouring a little olive oil on their pizza, whereas (some) Rio de Janeiro folk can be recognized for seasoning their pizza with ketchup.

(Folk from Minas Gerais are said to sometimes dip their cheesebread loafs in their coffee; those coming from the West drink their mate cold, from a horn called guampa, and call it tereré, whereas folk from the South drink it hot, from a bowl called cuia, and call it chimarrão.)

Though a bit proverbial, those are all region-specific and common enough that they can be thought of as "reliable enough" as a conversation starter.

Have you ever folded it?

Pizza - yes, once. Cake/pie - never. But this is orthogonal to the eating vector.

Make a sandwich with it as the bread.

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