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Airline Delays Flight Over Passenger's Suspicious Math Equations (usnews.com)
Earthquake Retrofit shares this article from the Associated Press: "An Ivy League professor said his flight was delayed because a fellow passenger thought the math equations he was writing might be a sign he was a terrorist... He said the woman sitting next to him passed a note to a flight attendant and the plane headed back to the gate. Guido Menzio, who is Italian and has curly, dark hair, said the pilot then asked for a word and he was questioned by an official... "They tell me that the woman was concerned that I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper..." He was treated respectfully throughout, he added. But, he said, he was concerned about a delay that a brief conversation or an Internet search could have resolved. "Not seeking additional information after reports of 'suspicious activity'... is going to create a lot of problems, especially as xenophobic attitudes may be emerging."
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
While people are (perhaps rightly) ganging up on this passenger and blaming her for being ignorant, she was only a small part of the problem here. The Washington Post story on this incident notes a comment from Menzio that isn't in the summary here, where Menzio expressed concern about...
"A security protocol that is too rigid--in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks--and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless. "
Contrast this incident with what would happen in a sane world.
What happened here:
- Woman feigns illness to deplane. Reports suspicious person to authorities. Pilot escorts "terrorist" off plane. Delays follow for hours as suspect is questioned until "threat" is cleared.
What would happen in a sane world:
- Woman says to flight attendant, "Can I talk to you for a second?" and gets up from seat. Attendant knows terrorists are much rarer than lightning strikes, so is skeptical. After short conversation, flight attendant walks past, glances at man's paper, sees he's just doing math, and tells woman everything is fine -- return to seat.
What would happen in a relatively sane world with some greater level of caution:
- Woman has conversation with flight attendant. Flight attendant walks up to man, sees math. Attendant casually asks, "Hey, sir, what are you working on there?" Guy replies, "Oh, well... economics actually. I'm a prof at Penn." Situation resolved.
If still suspicious, we could even go a step further -- Attendant: "Oh, can I just check your ticket? We had a question from a passenger about seat numbers?" Attendant checks name of passenger, excuses herself, sends message to security -- they do a Google search and verify guy actually is Ivy League prof in economics, and situation is resolved in 3 minutes instead of hours.
Bottom line: while we can laugh that this woman's ignorance, the greater problem here is the general paranoia and bureaucratic structure around security theatre that requires disproportionate responses to things that don't deserve them.
It still does. The actual name of the book is Al-kitab al-mukhtasar f hisab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala, which translates to The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. The putting together (al-jabr) can also be translated to completing. The author is a guy named Muammad ibn Musa, born in the persian region of Chorasmia. So he was mostly called al-Khwarizmi, the Chorasmian, latinized to Algoritmi. He does not only gave us the Algebra (al-jabr), also the Algorithmus: if you do it following the sequential solution descriptions put down by al-Khwarizmi, you are following the Algorithmus. And he even gave us the x we see in all the algebraic equations. When he was posing a question for the thing to solve an equation, he used the arabic term "chai" (thing), which in the first editions of his book in latin letters was written as xai, shortened to x.
Since 2011 the air marshal program has killed more people on flights than terrorists have. Sure, the number is pretty low, but it's larger than 0. Those deaths were 100% avoidable.
On top of this, and I don't have any hard data I'm afraid, but we know that X-Ray exposure can lead to cancer. Since the back-scatter X-Ray scanners were not assessed or approved by the FDA we do not know their power output. But since the power output is more than 0W/cm2 we can conclude that these scanners, used on millions of people daily, over ten years, will have killed a good number of people. How many? I'd be guessing if I suggested anything, it depends on the power output.
The "new" terahertz/mm wave scanners are also questionable. They have also not been approved by the FDA. Some studies suggest interesting interactions between DNA molecules and THz signals. Obviously more study is required before these devices can be certified as safe. Until then, I refuse to voluntarily let myself be scanned by one. However you may not know that flying in/out of Australia the scan is compulsory (though not always enforced, depending on the chaos of the security queue) and refusal to take the scan when asked will result in a refusal to fly.