It's witch-hunting, isn't it. Amist the hype of fear, you'd better not showing your knowledge on anything, (for the witch, it's knowledge on herb and natural healing).
:) oh come on, every field has the problem of faker and pretentious practitioner. Because studying everything takes serious effort, hence if you're lazy, you get empathy, but if you work hard while people around you don't, you get the hypothesis that you're elitist and fancy. And they have ground for that hypothesis, because It's true that faking wisdom gets some glamour too.
(I know this is a joke, but I have a related real story ...)
One of my friends had a problem a few years ago because she had a compass in the carry on luggage. It has a sharp metal tip, so it's forbidden. She didn't have any problem, and she could put it in the main luggage.
I think he protractors are completely safe, at lest the plastic protractors ...
It's clear from the story that neither the stewardess, the pilot, nor the law enforcement agent thought he was an actual threat.
I'm guessing that there is a rule that if a passenger reports a suspicious person, then the plane must be held and law enforcement must be notified. Fortunately, at that point common sense was allowed to take over, rather than spiraling into multiple agencies mindlessly following bad procedures.
Perhaps you wrote this before American Airlines added more details to the article, but: none of the aircraft crew were aware of what was going on when the plane returned to the gate. The woman in the seat next to the victim lied to the air staff and said she was sick, and only when she had got off the plane did she make her accusation.
The law enforcement agent quickly cleared it up after arriving.
Looks like all the staff here did the best they reasonably could do with the information they were given.
I guess it's possible, but that sounds fishy. Why would they delay the plane for a passenger who feels sick? Either you feel fine and you fly, or you don't and you get off the plane. You would never delay a train or a bus for that reason.
If the plane is still on the ground and a passenger says they are too sick to fly, the plane goes back to the gate to let them get off the plane. That's normal.
A passenger said they were too sick to fly, so the plane went back to the gate. When it reached the gate, the passenger changed their story and things got more complicated.
Also, imagine if you complained that your stomach was hurting and you had to get off the plane. If they didn't turn around on the tarmac and then your appendix bursts or something then you or your next of kin owns an airline when the lawsuit is over.
Sure, but you'd imagine that if security personnel are called in, they are expected to spend at least a few minutes noting down what occurred in the incident. "They looked at the paper he was writing on" is very different from "interrogated him in a back room."
And it wasn't even an algebraic geometer talking about "blowing up points on a plane" this time!
(Closer to home: My father had an interesting experience once at a chemistry conference when a member of the public heard that he was studying "free radials". Language is weird.)
I heard this story about a mathematician that wanted to score points with the establishment during the cold war / hippie period. He annouced that he was studying how to "remove radicals".
Not by today's standards no, but this was the 1500s.
They saw casting the horoscope of the royals in the same way that we would view someone now who had inside knowledge of (say) a major development project in some part of a city and who used that inside knowledge to buy land cheap in order to speculate.
What happens to people who aren't in the social class of Ivy League professors? Do they get off as easily? Do their stories get told? (Is this event any more offensive or ridiculous because the victim is an Ivy League economist?)
What would a U.S. President with fascistic tendencies do with this kind of power over people's liberty?
I agree. He definitely looks like a terrorist. I guarantee you that if we waterboard him enough, he will tell us anything we want to hear about how his cell works. My guess is that he knows people that he'd even be willing to implicate in its operation.
That "I-know-how-a-terrorist"-looks like thing, is what kept the german RAF going strong for nearly twenty years. They just dressed up like buisness man and walked through every controll.
I used to go to anti-Nazi demonstrations in a suit and tie with short hair. Everyone else on my side was scruffy anarchists and socialists. The police got quite confused.
The problem with stereo-types is- that anyone just similar looking goes in the "usual suspects bag". If some hacker would went on a automated killing spree- everyone beeing pale, having glasses and drinking too much coffee suddenly would be suspicious.
Thats really troubling. How to solve this ? I mean, dirty-workaround-solve this, not wishfull thinking reeducate solve this.
Some karma system, involving how much a person is socially connected, how much it contributed to society, how much it got planned, how much is at stake in its life?
But however you refine that algorithm- you catch a lot of unwanted fish, and someone like mohamed atta slips right through. This is really tough.
I guess the best indicator is how mono-thematic your life is. If all your searches, all your interests and all your communication partners are "themed" - you desserve some suspicion. He is a math-expert, get him.
Focus towards recovery rather than preemptive prevention; once medical immortality and mind-backups become available and routine, anyone who dies from "terrorism" and other violence or accident could just be resurrected.
Data, financial and whatnot, can already be restored. Architecture can already be rebuilt. Once nobody is able to inflict any lasting damage on society, everyone can just chill and maybe no one would want to try any terrorism, knowing how futile it would be.
Yeah, I think I agree. It has to be multilayered; you have intelligence sifting behavior & communications. You have security personnel experienced at noticing strange behavior. You maybe have a layer which puts people in a situation that asks a question/encourages behaviours that might identify those with ill intent. And at all levels, there's a. a huge chance it'll fail or get false positives, and b. the chance of abuse/corruption on the security side. And the more levels there are, the more complex it becomes, and the higher the chance of miscommunication between levels causing more issues.
Simple stereotyping works to an extent, but it's an incredibly dumb system. But at the other end of the scale, exerting increasing control over the environment means corrosion of personal freedoms. Infiltration of organizations by security services works really well for established groups, but that's also fraught, and does nothing to stop tiny groups or loners, or identify people on the fly. Least worst is always going to be a balance, but that balance point will change depending on the context of every case.
I'm worried that a flight crew responsible for moving a million-lb plane safely through the air isn't allowed (or is unwilling) to perform basic triage on accusations made by terrified passengers.
Has there been a single useful observation of an actual incident by passengers, since Richard Reid (who was blatantly attempting to light something on fire)? Any arrests, charges?
I struggle to understand why vague accusations of "suspicious behavior" are treated this way, over and over again.
I think the attempted underwear bomber was after Reid. Here's the thing though: if you're trying to set something on fire or storm the cockpit or some other actually undesired behavior, it's not going to be some routine in an airline manual that stops you. It's going to be all your seat neighbors who are going to physically stop you because you're obviously a threat.
The real problem is these wildly unqualified citizen-Paul(ine)-Blarts who saw on an episode of Criminal Minds that looking up and left while writing non-ASCII characters is an indicator of terrorist intent. She essentially pulled the fire alarm on a bunch of people because she's an idiot. What she did is functionally no different than calling in a false report about some random passenger on a plane that's about to take off. She should have to pay a fine for all the time and resources she wasted with her little ruse (I'm sure she felt very clever when she conceived it).
Imagine a Richard Reid scenario where some guy beats the piss out of his seat neighbor because he thinks he's trying to bomb the flight. If he's right, he's a hero (and he should be applauded for stopping a bombing). If he's wrong and the guy was just tying his shoes, he gets charged with assault. This is a good thing, because we don't want people seeing physical violence as a cost free option.
Being too dumb to tell the difference between an episode of 24 and your boring ass day is not a tolerated excuse to physically assault people. It shouldn't be tolerated as a reason to call in false alarms either. I'm sick of stupid people being able to inflict massive amounts of inconvenience and even degrees of suffering with no consequences for being wrong.
* I realize that stupid is perhaps an imprecise and mean choice of words, but I can't come up with a better explanation for adults who cannot appropriately assess the threat posed by a nerdy Italian guy writing in a notebook who doesn't want to talk to them. I get that calling people stupid isn't a way to make them smarter, and that it can have a negative developmental impact for younger kids to view things in a smart/stupid fixed-talent paradigm, but we need to somehow bring back some of the cultural rejection for acting like a goddamn idiot. I don't really care if she gets smarter (though that would be nice), I have lower aims. I want her to be afraid to be wrong because actions should have consequences. If there's no cost incurred to this person (actually, she'll probably be praised for her "vigilance" by people she respects) where do we draw the line?
>Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is.
This, combined with most people's statistical illiteracy about which risks actually affect them, is the root cause for a lot of problems I think.
When I clicked the Facebook link provided by this page, I got "Sorry, this content isn't available right now. The link you followed may have expired, or the page may only be visible to an audience you're not in."
It is likely that he deleted his Facebook post because he mentions wearing a keffiyeh, or 'Yasser Arafat scarf' as he calls it. It is far more plausible that this is what drew suspicion than his scribbling algebraic symbols on a page.
The keffiyeh is versatile. It can also be worn around the neck, tucked into the jacket. This way of wearing it became a fashion in the West in the mid to late '80s.
"Houndstooth, hounds tooth check or hound's tooth (and similar spellings), also known as dogstooth, dogtooth, dog's tooth, or pied-de-poule, is a duotone textile pattern characterized by broken checks or abstract four-pointed shapes, often in black and white, although other colours are used."
"Its distinctive standard woven checkered pattern may have originated in an ancient Mesopotamian representation of either fishing nets or ears of grain,[2] but the true origin of the pattern remains unknown."
Though similar incidents have happened in other airlines as well - when I read this took place on an American Airlines flight, I recalled my experience with them.
My flight was cancelled and everyone was standing in line to get rescheduled. When my turn in the line came the American Airlines official gave me a number and asked me to call on it to get help instead, he said it would be quicker. I obliged and stepped aside. I thought he'd say the same to the rest of the people in the line. But, that didn't happen. Instead, he continued helping people before me in the line. I called the number, the wait was too long and I came back to him and asked for help. He (I think pretended to) look at his computer and told me nothing is available. Later I called the number again and got a seat. I was puzzled with the behavior of the airlines staff. I thought may be earlier seat wasn't available. But, I was certainly not happy with there service.
I'd like to see this story picked up and verified by a mainstream news organization. But assuming it's factual, why would a flight crew take seriously such a bizarre accusation? Surely they are trained to deal with this type of situation. The person who raised the alarm should be held to account, much as someone who pulls the fire alarm or calls the police for frivolous reasons can be fined.
If you think about this on personal level it makes sense (IMO). Taking this kind of stuff seriously is always easier to explain later on that trying to justify why you did not take any action.
To be fair, I recall students who were legitimately terrorized by differential equations.
The woman was undoubtedly unnerved by the terse response to her attempt to be sociable, having never encountered someone in the midst of mathing hard. Or perhaps she just feared the equation had a singular solution.
not sure why all the downvotes. The stewardess asked her if she was too "sick" to continue the flight, so that might actually have been the cause: She noticed she is getting paranoid about the neighbour scribbling strange things, and leaves the flight. Now, the "officials" investigate the guy, just to be on the safe side.
I don't think this scenario is less likely than assuming that the woman was really that "stupid" to behave that way.
On a cross-country flight a couple of weeks ago, I decided to calculate the distance to the horizon using a pen, notepad, and the SatStat GPS app on my phone (to get the current altitude). That must have looked really suspicious.
Actually, no: zero was developed in India on the 5th century. Arab / Islamic scholars merely learned it from them.
And algebra was developed by Greeks on 3rd century, although al-Khwārizmī developed it further (note btw that he was not an Arab but Persian, although he worked in Baghdad).
The article glosses over an important detail. It is far more likely that he raised suspicion by wearing a keffiyeh, or 'Yasser Arafat scarf', as he calls it on his Facebook thread concerning the issue. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is still on the proscribed terrorist list.
Edit: See tuna-piano's comment below where he links a picture of Guido Menzio wearing a scraggly beard and keffiyeh combo.
The identity of the passenger has been kept secret for privacy reasons. For that reason, she could not be contacted to confirm or deny Menzio's claim. All we have so far are Menzio's own words, possibly further distorted by the Washington Post, and his characterization of what others told him.
If she did come forward, I suspect that we would get a more nuanced and complete explanation for why she became suspicious of Menzio. There are already clues in Menzio's own account where he notes that he maintained a dismissive and non-committal attitude to her attempts at conversation, and remained locked with 'laser like' focus on his writing. In short, he was behaving in a strange and hostile manner.
Are you serious? If I notice someone focused and scribbling equations onto a piece of paper, I leave them the fuck alone so they can concentrate.
Also, since when has practicing mathematics on a plane become a "strange and hostile" activity? Would she have reported him if he was focused on a Sudoku puzzle?
Either way, the woman sounds like a genuinely disturbed and extremely paranoid person.
Most people have never experienced a desire to do a bunch of math. They don't get it. They don't understand the need to concentrate or why one might voluntarily subject oneself to math. It's strange behavior. For some people it is also intellectually threatening; people don't react well to things that could make them feel stupid.
She may also be used to having men nearly always willing to chat with her. The fact that he is unwilling is strange and possibly insulting.
She is likely an extrovert, and expects it of others. Social interaction is expected. She expects others to enjoy what she herself enjoys; why would you not? Of course people want to chat!
So now being an introvert, or just having to get work done is anti American activity? Simply because you are sitting next to me is not a valid reason to demand my attention and conversation, much less is my refusal to grant it a reason to accuse me of terrorism.
It is not a valid reason, but it is an effective reason. It may not be right, but it is real, and one ought to have strategies in place to ameliorate this phenomenon. Extroverts cannot understand why you don't want to talk.
As an extreme introvert myself, I have become used to being accused of rudeness, snobbery, hostility and general weirdness. Strangers and acquaintances become appreciably tense if I dare to produce a book, or abstract myself in thought.
The trick is to set such people at ease. Show goodwill, talk about the weather for fifteen seconds max, and then switch off. The irony is that if Guido Menzo had taken the trouble to explain what he was writing, with the appropriate nerdish enthusiasm, he would have been guaranteed to be left alone for the rest of the flight.
The irony is that if Guido Menzo had taken the trouble to explain what he was writing, with the appropriate nerdish enthusiasm, he would have been guaranteed to be left alone for the rest of the flight.
While I think this borders on victim-blaming, I can't help but smile broadly when I try to imagine the scene: woman with flight anxiety tries to connect with in-row neighbour, and unwittingly opens a can of algebraic worms, symbols and Greek letters.
he maintained a dismissive [..] attitude to her attempts at conversation [..] he was behaving in a strange and hostile manner.
I'm sorry, but if I'm trying to achieve something (whether reading, writing, or trying to get some sleep), I would definitely consider it hostile for a random stranger to keep trying to start a conversation with me.
Extroverts generally cannot understand why someone would not wish to talk. They feel insulted and threatened, and it makes them very anxious.
As an introvert myself, I find extroverts attempts to start a conversation to be intrusive and very tiring, so I have developed techniques to set them at ease. As I noted in another reply, Guido Menzio could have achieved perfect peace for the rest of the journey simply by attempting to explain, in minute technical detail, exactly what he was doing.
You also comment else where about Menzio's picture, where he wears a "Yasser Arafat" scarf. Another commenter has remarks on his hair and beard as well, claiming that the combination of Menzio's dress and hair tripped the alarms of the passenger that reported him. Based on Menzio's portrait, he looks like a bit of a hipster or one of the several colleagues I have that are too lazy to shave on a daily basis. His behaviour was probably best categorised as being rude.
The Washington Post article also says:
"Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something. That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize."
And
"Menzio showed the authorities his calculations and was allowed to return to his seat, he told me by email."
Clearly these events may not have been reported perfectly accurately, but there is nothing to suggest that any of the actions were reasonable. Also serious question: I also don't understand how one mistakes calculus for the script of a foreign language. In my mind they do not look anything alike.
I suspect his fellow passenger's account would bear little resemblance to either the Washington Post's spin on events, or how Menzio himself chose to interpret the matter on his Facebook page.
Reading between the lines, it would appear that Guido Menzio was pointedly and gratuitously rude to his neighbor when she attempted to initiate friendly conversation. He responded to her questions with curt non-answers, and remained pointedly focused on his work. Overly talkative people can be severely annoying, but that did not justify Guido Menzio's overt rudeness to his neighbor. He could have saved a lot of trouble with a little diplomacy.
> I also don't understand how one mistakes calculus for the script of a foreign language.
From the Washington Post article, it appears that the woman complained to security that Guido Menzio was intensely doing math, so clearly she did not mistake a differential equation for 'terrorist writing'. It was not the math that unnerved her, but his behavior.
>You also comment else where about Menzio's picture, where he wears a "Yasser Arafat" scarf.
I was wrong about the "Yasser Arafat" scarf. The article doesn't suggest that he was wearing one at the time. Again, there is no indication that Menzio's appearance was the cause of the incident, but rather his behavior.
If every time an airplane returned to the gate when someone behaved rudely to a neighbor, it would never take off.
Have you considered the possibility he has a fear of flying and was using mathematics to take his mind off it, and he was desperately trying to fend off her disrupting his productively distracting train of thought? There's all sorts of very good reasons not to talk to strangers.
Nothing justifies Menzio's behavior, either on the plane or later on Facebook where he made outlandish claims and invoked Trump. He is completely obnoxious, and the author of his own misfortunes.
There is a narrative here, which appears at first very compelling, especially to readers of HN: gentle intellectual persecuted by hysterical ignoramus...
But the narrative gradually reveals holes and inconsistencies which makes it at best inconclusive, and in my considered opinion, strongly supports a radically different interpretation: Menzio behaved like a demented nut-job, terrified his fellow passenger, published a self-serving narrative on facebook which was picked up by the Washington Post and spun even further.
> It is far more likely that he raised suspicion by wearing a keffiyeh
> a picture of Guido Menzio wearing a scraggly beard and keffiyeh combo.
He is not wearing a keffiyeh in that picture. A keffiyeh is a square scarf that is worn on the head.
In that picture he is wearing a non-square (fringed) scarf, and around his neck.
Only a nut would look at that scarf and make the leap "Yasser Arafat" -> "Palestinian Liberation Organization" -> "terrorist" as you do.
TV cook Rachel Ray made an ad for Dunkin Donuts a few years ago, in which she wore a scarf around her neck. The Trump-supporting type nutcases came out of the woodwork and said she was wearing the scarf to support the terrorists. You can see a sample of it if you Google "Dunkin Donuts" "Rachel Ray" and "keffiyeh". Most of the articles are by people who appear on Fox News regularly.
Only a wack job makes the leap from a math professor who is presumably an American of Italian descent that wears a scarf to the scarf being a keffiyeh! That Yasser Arafat wore! Who was in the PLO! Which is proscribed as terrorist! By make the leap I mean make the leap like you did.
>He is not wearing a keffiyeh in that picture. A keffiyeh is a square scarf that is worn on the head.
A keffiyeh can also be worn around the neck (the favored way for Westerners, though also found in the M.E.) covering the face, or even wound into a turban. Wikipedia:
"The Palestinian keffiyeh is a gender-neutral chequered black and white scarf that is usually worn around the neck or head."
>Only a nut would look at that scarf and make the leap "Yasser Arafat" -> "Palestinian Liberation Organization" -> "terrorist" as you do.
Here, we are in total agreement. Menzio himself made a point of calling it his "Arafat scarf" and posted an image of himself wearing it to the Facebook discussion in order support his delusion that he was 'racially profiled' by a racist Trump supporter who was unable to distinguish mathematical notation from 'terrorist writing'.
If you are looking for a nutter, you need look no further than Menzio himself.
Yes, but it's still true. Even from Trump supporters I've yet to hear a good reason to support him. The standard reasons are that he can't be bought (because he is one of those rich people you're talking about having too much influence), that he speaks his mind (is that why his positions are wildly inconsistent?) or that he represents a break from the status quo (true, but by being far worse!).
I'm not saying Trump supporters are idiots, but I have yet took figure out how one would support him otherwise.
He says things that people agree with, that other candidates wouldn't say. And he comes across as a strong leader who would actually implement change. It's as simple as that.
I would never vote for him. But it's hard to not have sympathy for someone you see getting attacked and slandered for saying something you agree with. Political rhetoric like "supporters are X are idiots" creates polarization. People who were on the fence before become stronger supporters of X, because they feel they are under attack and need to stand up for what they believe.
Trump is a master of this tactic. He says things he knows lots of people believe, but that are very controversial. This gets him tons more media attention than other candidates.
From what I gather some of the appeal is that what we've been doing doesn't seem to be working, so why not shake it up? I don't agree with that statement, but I can see why people fall into it.
Written text does not convey sarcasm and irony well. Observing the up and downvotes I get whenever I mention Trump - his support here is robust. Whether people like him, or there are people that are more annoyed from Trump's bashers than from Trump himself - I don't know.
I don't care about Trump, but the intrusion of partisan politics in the form of Trump (or Sanders or Clinton) bashing into a thread is toxic. In fact this whole thread has become toxic for this reason. This incident has been spun into an indictment of Trump and his 'xenophobic' supporters.
You can't really escape it. For the last 8 years it was economic stagnation for the vast majority. For a small minority - they were intermediaries in giving corporate money to landlords - talked with a london based friend today - no matter how much you make the rent increases absorb any rise in income and you always have 500 GBP at the end of the month as disposable. And we have a select few that won big.
Right now every demographic is afraid and insecure for variety of reasons and they wrongly see the November election as crucial. So partisanship is all they have left to express their frustration and anger. So it becomes omnipresent.
Understood, but I wish it wasn't present on HN which is generally above such mud slinging.
The story has absolutely nothing to do with the election, and there is no reason to believe that the woman who reported Menzio was a Trump supporter, and yet the Washington Times, taking its cue from Menzio's Facebook comments, chose to spin it as an indictment of Trump.
In short, it is effectively a partisan political article, and shouldn't be posted to HN for that reason.
He deserved it for using a random incident to blame the candidate he doesn't like. He is the kind of the guy who would say "Anyone who disagrees with me is only doing it to piss me off! Differences of opinion are proof of evil!"
It appears he did not make a public statement groundlessly tying Trump to this incident, but rather did so in a Facebook post (private communication to friends). I find that far less objectionable.
Also, no statement about a politician rises to the level of "deserving" to be removed from a plane.
On a more reflective / somber note. I am a huge fan of the idea of empowering all classes of people. So the fact that this lady was able to disrupt the flight is I think (big picture) a good thing.
Instead of simply dismissing this person as ignorant, I hope folks on this forum will take a moment to reflect on the tragic state of the entire system. If we're going to enable / empower all classes of people we (those in a position to make a difference) need to do a better job of raising the bar, and helping all those in need to raise their own bar too.
On a less somber note, you are praising the empowerment of ignorant people to become secret informants on behalf of a security state with the power to disrupt the lives of others. This is a tried and proven path that many countries have followed and we all know where it leads.
Your post amounts to "I'm glad these idiots found a voice, now that they finally affect us all, we can do something about it". But your assumption that they affect us all equally is not supported by this story, otherwise all passengers on that plane would have been taken off and screened by police.
I think you fail to realize that these idiots affect mainly minorities, as that is how uneducated minds work: they can't see past their own identity (and by the power of numbers, most idiots are white). So what you're effectively saying is "I'm okay with idiots harrassing minorities".
(edit to add an unwarranted disclaimer: by "idiot", I'm not referring to the lady in the original story, but to the OP's description of the "tragically ignorant, in need of raising their bar")
When I read responses like this (that have no connection with the comments they're in response to) I have to just assume that Hacker News has switched out my comments and replaced them with something completely different.
Please let me know if you manage to catch the witches you appear to be hunting.
Rather than confront the people who are describing the (negative) consequences of your way of thinking, you instead disregard their shared commentary as being off-topic. A class act. You hope your logic will live on, yet you choose to ignore its contradictions.
These sort of events really highlight how dangerous the combination of stupidity and fear is.