Al gebra? Must be one of those derivative organizations.
Yes, al-Gebra, run by Osama bin Adden.
and @M_Dub
Well - to be fair, those are Arabic numbers. 
“See something, say something.” The motto of nosy neighbors and busy bodies since the dawn of civilization.
Also, what’s a “plana”?
Who are these people who keep showing up in news stories like this, trembling and wetting their pants at literally every single thing that happens to cross their vision? And if they’re going to be ruining everyone’s day, can we go ahead and justify their fear of us?
Also, one and a half hours. Why? How long does it take to look at the note, see that it’s clearly harmless, tell the passenger she’s a fucking imbecile and she’d better not cause any more trouble, and get back to business?
“Algebra?” Sounds kinda muslim to me. Better ban it.
In fairness, he was using derivatives and she is an idiot.
Trump’s base.
I have this image of this woman watching the media coverage of this, and her friends and family saying, “Now, now, you weren’t to know” as if that justifies it.
There are so many ways this could have been resolved less disruptively, starting with her realising that writing things down in a notebook couldn’t possibly cause immediate harm to the aircraft.
He was caught with weapons of math instruction.
In my best attempt at fairness to the complete idiot in this situation; I’d strongly suspect that, if you count indirect mortality from economic factors, an American is more likely to be killed by an economist than by a terrorist.
Now, that aside, what a moron.
It’s integral to their plans.
I don’t see how her story adds up.
Ugh. Among other foolish things, I study dead languages for a living. I’m often in a public place reading something written in a strange alphabet (or, trying to read it, while swearing at the inadequate dictionaries on my phone).
I just hope that whoever does the cavity search is gentle.
Certainly it’s a bit hyperbolic, but the flight attendant had no choice but to divide the suspicious “economist” from the other passengers, so the panic wouldn’t multiply until she could get to the root of the problem and differentiate fact from fiction.
Her roots are showing. The whole thing just seems like a slippery slope.
I remember when that was a joke.
Kind of the reverse of:
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - Wikipedia…_first_as_tragedy.2C_then_as_farce.22
Now the first time is farce, the second is tragedy.
Arabic actually doesn’t use those our glyphs. We call it Arabic, but the modern glyphs were largely developed in Spain and North Africa and descend from Brahmi numerals in India. The number system itself is also Indian of course.
The word algebra itself is descended from the Arabic al-jabr. It came from a Latin translation of the great Persian Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion (al-jabar) and Balancing.
Fun fact: the latinization of al-Khwarizmi’s name is where we got the word algorithm from.
