The stupid has been strong this week.
First I have to talk about Guido Menzio, the economics professor who was just trying to write out some equations and enjoy a flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse. Menzio and I have something in common. We are both apt to do mathematics. Like Menzio, I‘ve flown on commercial airlines. It could happen again. If Trump wins in November, I might fancy an extended vacation in Guadalajara. Like Menzio, I relax on planes by hunkering down at a notepad and scribbling math research ideas.
I’m into chaotic dynamics these days. There are way less cool partial derivatives than what Menzio was doing, but I do get to have lots of aggressive arrows pointing in all directions and exciting keywords like “target,” “orbit,” “collapse” and “destination.”
So the fact that another passenger pointed out Menzio and his intense note-taking to flight attendants, labeling him a likely terrorist, is just hilarious to me. It fills me with hope that in the remainder of my life I may experience more fun adventures in farce, in spite of my advanced age.
What I especially love is how everyone thinks that the other passenger is simply ignorant for not understanding that Menzio was doing math. The way people talk about it, you’d think the fear would be justified if it wasn’t math scribbles, but, say, Arabic notes.
You can’t hijack a plane by writing a letter to your mother in Arabic.
I’ll admit that mathematics assistance has been integral to the design of most modern weapons, but not one, ever, was created by writing equations on a notepad. That is not how the first A-bomb was made. They didn’t put all the mathematicians together into a secret room at Alamogordo with a thousand notepads and ten thousand pencils and wait two miles back.
What we have here illustrates a kind of stupid. The stupid in this case isn’t, “I’m so uneducated I didn’t know it was math.” This stupid is, “Man with dark complexion writing anything at all I don’t understand on a notepad scares me.”
Don’t do anything that might not be understandable to a random ignoramus. You could be interrogated for two hours.
In other news, the Seattle City Council voted 5 to 4 not to vacate a section of city street to a developer for the purpose of facilitating the construction of a sports stadium that 30 percent of the population wants. It happens the vote was split along gender lines, so the stupid was “I don’t understand their opposition to the deal, but they were all women.”
Even some people backing the decision contributed to the same stupidity, by saying, “Yeah, we’re entering a new era now that women have a majority in the City Council.” No, we’re not. We’ve returned to the ’90s, when women held six of the nine seats for most of the decade.
Last week, we had the federal Department of Justice and North Carolina facing off about bathrooms. This story has more stupid in it than I ever imagined possible.
So you’ll need a birth certificate on you to prove that you’re the right gender at birth to use whatever public restroom you select?
Meanwhile, a few states away, similar morons are pushing for birth certificates to be denied altogether to the children of unwed mothers. So down the road, if this keeps up, women will have to fake marriages or enter into marriages of convenience to get birth certificates for their babies. That’s real good for the social fabric. Let’s force people to misrepresent themselves or put their own rights at risk to guarantee the future rights of their children, because the state won’t do its job.
OK, that wasn’t fair. That hasn’t happened yet, and it may not come to North Carolina.
Here’s the real stupid in North Carolina: The lawmakers and everyone else know that, except in institutions like schools where identities are tracked over time, there won’t be any significant enforcement of this law. There will not be an army of birth-certificate checkers throughout the state, demanding papers of all who enter restrooms.
The law exists primarily to enable the lawmakers to look like they’re defending North Carolina from a threat.
It’s the legislative equivalent of, “Everyone, look out! There’s a man sitting in there with a pencil!”