They have stripes so they can't be spotted

Back in the day, "bar code" meant not stealing someone's stool when they got up for a second to "shake hands with the governor."

Then someone invented the bar code for products! It saves a lot of time, since products don't all have to have a price stamped on them.  With this 

array of bars on your pack of razor blades, pork sausage, or dish detergent, one pass over the magic eye at the register, and the right prices is rung up.

And the bar codes do more than keep prices straight! They can be used for ordering, or for people with vast collections of stuff to keep their stuff all straight, for e-coupons, and in hospitals, so the right person has their duodenum worked on.

But these are all bar codes that people create and add to stuff. How about the natural sort?

Someone far smarter than I has come up with a way to scan pictures of zebras just like bar codes, making it easy to distinguish Zelda Zebra from Zane Zebra.

 

They call it “StripeSpotter,” and it's the gift to zebraology (I made it up) from the University of Illinois-Chicago and Princeton University. Researchers tracking databases of herds of zebras are using this hi-tech in Kenya right now.

It's a simple app to add to a computer, this StripeSpotter, and then you wave a digital picture of a member of the zeal in front of your screen, and StripeCode extracts image features that an algorithm checks for a match. If no match is found, ecologists open a new file for the new animal, and log in field notes, GPS coordinates of where it was found, and other pertinent information.

Coming soon: spotters for tigers and giraffes!

We sure try to get one step ahead of nature, don't we?