A soldier, the "witness", accompanied him and told him what characteristics to note down in the first column: approximate age, height, skin and hair colour, presence of tattoos or bullet holes... and the cause of death, invariably "heart attack" or "respiratory problems".
He portrayed them as being not only inflexible, but also "naïve and irresponsible," the characteristics they ascribe to him.
This encouraged him to develop a program that uses genetic and epigenetic characteristics to improve in silico imprinted gene prediction.
Malta added sex characteristics to this.
Match those characteristics to animal characteristics.
What I found striking was that a gay man, and a white one at that, would be so uncomfortable with having this defining characteristic being pointed out to him when he, too, had spent his life being a minority.
His love of intimate scale and pop culture ephemera (no one did more with matchbooks); his penchant for captions and punch lines; his forthright joy in being gay; his inability to adhere to a single style or medium (to make "Brainards" as he put it) -- these characteristics link him to a host of contemporary artists, among them Jim Hodges, Robert Mele, Raymond Pettibon and Karen Kilimnik.
The faces of Mike and John and Jacqueline soon disappear into the amorphous monstrous mass existing only in his mind known as The Jew, which – intriguingly – suffers from many of the characteristics Irving's critics ascribe to him: it is attention-seeking and greedy and brings about its own destruction.
But he saw it as the best way to take advantage of the characteristics of the players available to him.
