weston deboer

Comment Threads

• kmoser commented on TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
  I wonder what would happen if a male requested to be patted down by a female agent, or if a female requested to be patted down by a male agent. Are they reasonable requests and, more important, would the TSA comply with the request? Next time I'm being patted down I'll ask them to go a little more...slowly...oh, yeah......
• Antinous / Moderator commented on TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
  I wonder what would happen if a male requested to be patted down by a female agent The local beauty parlor has a big sign that says, "We Don't Do Brazilians On Male Customers." Extrapolate from that....
• george57l commented on TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
  Well that link really helped. (Not) "In mathematics and physics, the adjective ergodic is used to imply that a system satisfies the ergodic hypothesis of thermodynamics or that it is a system studied in ergodic theory." Seems a bit self-referential to this non-mathematician. Any mathemamticians here who speak English?...
• WalterBillington commented on TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
  All this flows back to the notion that terrorists really want to blow up a plane - hearkening back to the 70's when (I can't remember who) blew up planes in the desert - very spectacular. Or the Lockerbie tragedy, which PanAm flight dusted itself televisually into a little village. I think they want to kill and scare people, and I put the fact that they don't manage it down to incompetence, idiocy and ludicrous distance from reality. Frankly, I can conceive of hundreds of better, easier ways of doing a few people spectacularly in than attempting to damage an...
• fastspinecho commented on TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
  A random process is unpredictable. That doesn't mean that it is fair. For example, rolling two dice and adding them will give a random number, but the result is most likely to be 7 and will never be a 13. So unless they were predictably stopping every single woman at the airport, TSA was indeed behaving randomly. The only surprise is that women were being randomly sampled but not men....