Posted on 05/08/2016 7:27:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
An Ivy League professor says his flight was delayed when a fellow passenger mistook his scribbling on a math problem as a sign he might be a terrorist.
American Airlines confirms that a woman expressed suspicions about University of Pennsylvania economics professor Guido Menzio.
He was flying from Philadelphia to Syracuse on Thursday to give a talk at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. He was working on a differential equation, but said he was told the woman thought he might be a terrorist because of what he was writing.
Casey Norton, a spokesman for the air carrier, said the women’s allegations about Menzio were deemed not credible.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Gee, Guido, don’t write down scribbles of your economic equations which might be seen by others. They will get the wrong idea................
How embarrassing for the woman.
Was he carrying weapons of math instruction?
Being an Ivy League professor is enough to identify him as a terrorist, isn’t it?
Get back or I’ll divide by zero. I swear I’ll do it!
I've been terrified by many a differential equation.
They don't even have to be whole differential equations.
I've found the partial ones particularly terrifying.
For the first time I now wonder if the 20 years I spent fighting the Cold War, and seeing two men die horrible deaths while doing their duty, was worth it.
Sign her up as a Supervisor at the TSA.
We’ve become so stupid that math isn’t what we can’t do, it now scares us.
I find math pretty scary but I don’t think I would suspect terrorism.
Good one.
Math is a microagression.
Please, this is a bogus story. He doesn’t know who questioned him?? Yet any FBI S/A or TSA/TSI would have shown creds before questioning him. Dollars to doughnuts here’s the real story. The guy was hitting on some young blond in the seat next to him and he creeped her out. She complained to a flight attendant and some airline people talked with him. Standard protocol requires them to ask perfunctory security questions, in addition, when temporarily removing a disruptive passenger.
Good God this scene sounds like it’s right out of the movie Idiocracy.
“What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia? It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base,” he wrote.
Professor Guido had my sympathy until he used this this incident to blame Trump.
That ignorant woman definitely got the wrong idea.
He must have been.
This incident was reported in the Washington Post yesterday...
. . . . . .
That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man laughed.
He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.
. . . . . . . .
Depending on the math category, I’ll be glad to call it terrorism too, because taking some of them in school sure felt like it.
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