If I were not very cynical, I might say that body scanners represent a misguided attempt by a desperate, well-terrorized government to do something—anything—to keep 9/11 from happening again, despite the fact that locking the cockpit door pretty much solved that and besides, the next attack won’t look like the last one, so they must not have thought this through.
If I were a little bit cynical, I might say that our government favors body scanners even though they violate Islamic law because after all, potential terrorists don’t deserve to have their religious views respected.
If I were somewhat more cynical, I might say that our government favors body scanners even though they violate Islamic law because after all, potential terrorists don’t deserve freedom to travel about the country conducting business and visiting their families and contributing to the economy and doing all the other things white people law-abiding citizens do.
But if I were really, really cynical—we’re talking total Cynicky McCynicpants here—I might say that our government favors body scanners because they violate Islamic law, so practicing Muslims will be forced to request alternative and often more thorough and invasive screening procedures and that’s just fine, because then we won’t have to do any of that unseemly racial profiling.
Years ago…
My sister’s friend: Oh my god I have had the worst day. You will not believe what happened. I just got home from fucking Duane Reade—
Her mom: Whoa, slow down, sweetie. Just a minute. Duane who?
Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?
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Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?
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whileyouweresleeping:
Steven Strogatz, in Opinionator:
… suppose we add all the consecutive odd numbers, starting from 1:
1 + 3 = 4
1 + 3 + 5 = 9
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 25
The sums above, remarkably, always turn out to be perfect squares. (We saw 4 and 9 in the square patterns discussed earlier, and 16 = 4 × 4, and 25 = 5 × 5.) A quick check shows that this rule keeps working for larger and larger odd numbers; it apparently holds all the way out to infinity.
Did that just blow your mind, too?
— From London.
Neat, huh? But there’s a pretty intuitive explanation: suppose you have a bunch of pennies arranged in a square, and you want to increase the dimensions of the square by one. To do so, you have to add an L-shaped collection of pennies, and the L-shape always has an odd number of pennies in it.
The Wikipedia page on square numbers illustrates this perfectly:
Count the pink diamonds in each figure: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9…
