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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."
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
...Osama is high-fiving Satan under a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This has become a trend in American life: the culture of stupid.
Started with Sarah Palin, who couldn't even name a newspaper she read and people readily accepted that, and it carries on today, with Trump spouting platitudes and messages of hate (many self-contradictory) that wouldn't stand a few seconds of rational though. But he says them with the right anger tone and that's all it matters.
Next time it will be us geeks&nerds being detained because we are editing some code on our laptops.
Say no to hate, say no to ignorance.
Haven't you noticed? People today are ignorant and uneducated. But what's new is, they are proud of it.
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
In a world of self-satisfied, militant, openly avowed crassness, writing equations onboard a plane instead of watching the latest episode of Game of Throne on one's tablet is seen as suspicious. That's more than a little sad.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The fact that at least in the US our education system is horribly underfunded and under supported, coupled with social structures that make these things worse doesn't help
The much more realistic and appropriate way to change things is to canoe these root causes rather thank trying to somehow get rid of or shame or do something else punitive to the stupid people in the world. The nice thing about people is that they sometimes can be taught
At a minimum, stupid people should be shamed for being stupid.
That woman needs to be shamed for being stupid, but more importantly, for denouncing someone out of the norm to the authorities.
People used to do that in German occupied countries during WWII: they tipped off the Gestapo that this-or-that person looked or acted Jewish, or didn't seem to like the occupants, etc. That woman is as ugly as the WWII rats - and I might add, the authorities of today are increasingly similar to those of that era as well.
This is what makes me retch, not her stupidity.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Incorrect, US system is overstaffed and overfunded.
While this story might seem funny at first, it quickly becomes sad. Also very inconvenient for a few hundred people who sit on the plane and get delayed beacuse of an idiot. Lots of people would say better safe than sorry, but this is much more than that: usually ignorance won't hurt many people, but it can reach a point where it will make the lives of the rest of the population a living hell.
As a sidenote, such stories made me to really think about what I want to read on to/from-US planes, for many years now. Back in the days I mostly read technical stuff, papers, articles, but slowly I switched to "simple" novels with no math and no images. Might be crazy, but I just don't want to be the cause of some idiot delaying the flight - which, as we can see, happens from time to time.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
She reported someone she thought was suspicious. Fuck her right?
But when the neighbors of the san benradino shooters didn't say anything it was all "why didn't they say anything".
The San Bernardino shooters weren't writing things on paper. You do know it's very hard to make paper explode with a pen, right?
When you report someone because they buy tons of sugar and potassium chlorate, you're doing the right thing.
When you report someone who buys a lot of firearms and talks about attacking the country, you're doing the right thing.
When you report someone for writing strange things on paper, you're both an idiot and a disgusting snitch.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
People today are ignorant and uneducated. But what's new is, they are proud of it.
No, people today are, as always, proud of what they think they are. For instance, you seem to think of yourself an intellectual, and are jumping at the chance to denigrate those you see as different.
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
How, exactly, is that different from the the last century? Come to think of it, when exactly did scientists make more than non-scientist celebrities? There are a lot of professions out there, and very few of them fall into any kind of "science" classification. For most of human history, those pure-science careers have always been academic, having no practical application that would affect most peoples' lives. When your job is to move a load of cargo to a different continent to support a colony, you don't care about the amount of redshift in the starlight by which you're navigating. On the other hand, having a widespread reputation that your city is the best at some particular popular sport provides a conversation for a salesman, opening new opportunities for business.
As I see it, after the atomic bomb brought immediate public attention to scientists, pure science has been getting more celebrated. Today we have more college graduates than ever before, and that number is still rising. We have more STEM careers and more STEM jobs than ever before, and we're even starting to see an increasing number of scientist celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson (Whose Twitter account, I'll note, appears second in a Google search for "Neil", below only Wikipedia.)
In a world of self-satisfied, militant, openly avowed crassness...
...which is so much different from a world where we publicly post such intellectual statements as "Phileros is a eunuch", "Epaphra, you are bald!", or "Lesbianus, you defecate and you write, ‘Hello, everyone!’".
...writing equations onboard a plane instead of watching the latest episode of Game of Throne on one's tablet is seen as suspicious. That's more than a little sad.
What's sad is the pervasive suspicion that caused it. This time, it was math equations. Next time, it could be a poet writing in Arabic. Recognizing it as Arabic would be less "ignorant and uneducated", but it'd be just as bad, and would probably result in even more delay. It's the paranoia that's the problem, not stupidity.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The woman's name is Gladys Pugh and she is from Wales.
I'm conflicted about that.
On one hand... Yay! The person acting like a jackass isn't an American this time!
On the other hand... It seems the whole world is full of jackasses.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I went to MIT so I've known a lot of smart people. And oddly enough they seem to be nearly as prone to stupid behavior as stupid people.
Literally the smartest person I know is a woman who had an affair with a married man because he assured her is wife would be OK with it -- and she believed him.
So when there's something that only a idiot will do, there will be a fair share of smart people doing it. I come to think of this as a distinction between "constitutional" stupidity and "functional" stupidity. Constitutionally smart people can be functionally stupid because they're so used to be right when everyone else around them are wrong, they start to think they're infallible. In my experience there is no dumb like smart person dumb.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It sounds to me like they said, "Ok, we'd better check this out." Then they spent a few minutes, confirmed that everything was fine, and were on their way. Not a problem.
Yup, and if you RTFA a bit more carefully, you'll see that the flight was actually delayed because it had to return to the gate to let off the woman who had complained, because she was feeling ill. At the end of the day, the professor writing math got to stay on the plane, the woman who complained about it didn't. Damn, that doesn't make such a good headline, does it?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
We constantly blare over the PA systems, "If you see something, say something ..." and scare the population to no end with "all suspicious packages will be removed". We install jersey barriers in airport drop offs. So she saw something and said something. After training the population to be afraid of every passing shadow why expect them to exercise common sense or expect them to be reasonable?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There may be good reasons to have authority to (de)escalate outside the hands of the flight crew.
Perhaps in some circumstances, but the flight crew should serve as a first-level "sanity check." The chances of having a paranoid or delusional person with an unjustified belief that terrorists are common on planes is orders of magnitude higher than the chances of seeing an actual terrorist on a plane.
And even if the person isn't mentally ill and imagining evil people everywhere, the flight crews on airplanes at least tend to have some actual training in spotting suspicious activity and handling terrorist situations. Random passengers generally do not.
Again, if the woman insisted on escalating beyond flight crew, fine -- they could have radioed/telephoned into security and cleared it up in a matter of minutes (in a rational world, that is).
Borderline autistic here (who also happened to go to MIT, though that's not really relevant).
Seems to me that was the logical thing for her to do. Normally in a case like this, the guy lies and claims he's going to leave/divorce his wife in order to get the woman to sleep with him. By making her think they were going to be together eventually in a long-term relationship, he can trick her into doing something she might not want to do until she's in that long-term relationship (sleep with him). However, the guy's lie in this case makes no such promise. No carrot of a long-term relationship dangled to entice her into doing something she was reluctant to do. So clearly this isn't a case of the woman pining for the guy, and being gullible enough to believe his attempt to trick her into sleeping with him in exchange for some promise.
The only possibility that leaves is that the woman wanted to sleep with the guy (and vice versa), but was refusing to do so out of respect for his relationship with his wife. The fact that he told her this particular lie instead of the divorce lie suggests that he was aware this was her reason too. When he told her his wife would be OK with them sleeping together, that reason evaporated regardless of whether or not he was lying.
Crucially, if it is a lie, responsibility for any negative consequences from the event falls entirely upon the guy. At least to the autistic mind, which doesn't understand the social rule that you're "not supposed to" sleep with someone else's spouse. For such a rule to exist, both partners in the relationship have to adhere to it. And in this case clearly one partner was not adhering to it, and he claimed the other partner was not as well. So if I turn off my "social awkwardness detector" I've built up over 40+ years of trying to make sense of seemingly random social rules and customs, her behavior makes perfect sense. If she was autistic or borderline autistic like me, she probably didn't foresee that she would be criticized for her behavior because she "should have known" you aren't supposed to sleep with someone else's spouse, period.