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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
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
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.
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.