Body farms

I recently saw a story on CNN.com about body farms, where enterprising young law-enforcement researchers test human cadavers for decomposition to help them date time of death. This is what our tax dollars get spent on? How often do cops actually have to establish time of death?

Here's a little brain tickler from Officer.com

Consider this scenario: a victim is found, shot in the head, inside a car on an off-road trail. The temperature has been in the 80s for some time; however, since the car windows are closed, the temperature inside the car has been well over one hundred degrees. Because the car windows were closed, the insects normally involved in decomposition cannot reach the corpse, so the rate of decay is not what might be expected. How do investigators determine a PMI? The Body Farm's database contains data on experiments performed with corpses in closed cars under a variety of similar situations. Access to this data allows investigators to compare known results to the corpse in their situation, and to more accurately determine a PMI.

This is some important shit, and I feel a lot safer knowing that the various arms of government are working hard to make sure that real-life cops aren't getting outpaced by their specular brethren on the various CSI shows, as once they were put to shame weekly by Night Rider and McGyver.

No but seriously, what's with all the reconstructive frenzy? As if DNA analysis didn't do well enough. It's just like with the fetishism of 9/11 remains.... didn't some construction project get kiboshed recently because they found an ankle or two? Who cares? If they're dead, they're dead, I say. Society as a whole shouldn't be spending a bunch of money to becalm relatives and solve mysteries that aren't really mysteries. They're dead.