Posted on 09/22/2007 8:55:30 AM PDT by RogerFGay
"I have no idea what a real bomb looks like," writes a blogger at machinist.salon.com, "but I don't think it’s a plastic board with a 9-volt battery on it."
19 year old M.I.T. student, Star Simpson showed up at Logan International Airport Friday to pick up a friend. Such an event would not normally kick up an international news storm, but Simpson had not taken the general stupidity index into account; something we're apparently required to do now.
She was wearing a black sweat shirt with a white plastic board attached. The board itself, known as a socket or bread-board, is a familiar site to decades of engineering and science students and hobbyists. On college campuses throughout the country fall delivers chillier weather, colored leaves, and students with socket-boards, 9-volt batteries, and little flashing lights. But – as if we needed further proof – not everyone gets the joke: "Socket to me" writen on a sweat shirt with a socket-board attached; not even when you add the title of the school course you’re in.
Even if you have never taken a logic course in engineering, in our abundantly technological society, there isn’t much of an excuse for over-reacting. What’s next – grandpa gets tasered for the flashing Rudolf nose on his Christmas tie? Walk in the park, grandpa! Star was taken at gun-point, an exercise that included troopers with submachine guns. Good thing she cooperated, it has been observed, or she would probably be dead.
The woman at the information desk who started things off really cannot be blamed. I can certainly believe that everyone who works in airports has been trained to be on the lookout for suspicious articles. If she couldn’t identify the device, it’s not terribly difficult to understand that she would report it. State troopers, hearing of a suspected bomb in an airport, would quite naturally show up prepared. But now, in the calm light of day, when it is clear that it was just a misunderstanding, the idiots among us can’t let it go. Thank something – at least they’ve let her out on bail.
Star; you don’t get it yet. You’ve done well enough academically to have made it into the second year of M.I.T.'s electrical engineering and computer science program. If you were called a nerd in high school, it was nothing. In this big adult world, you will be surrounded by idiots for the rest of your life, and they will be in powerful positions. If you need more perspective on that, just think; "Dan Rather." It's not just Dan. Somebody hired him. Millions of people watched and listened to him every night. It goes on and on. It'll drive you crazy if you let it.
It’s unfair, I know. Back when I was a kid, it was compassionate to look out for those less fortunate. But, when they screwed up, it was clearly their fault and they had to take the consequences. Today however – idiots control everything (thanks Dan). The world is a very different place.
You have an obligation to care for them, to protect them, and whatever you do – try not to confuse them. They can become quite dangerous. The worst thing is if you show "insensitivity" to them. This is when you assume that they'll understand something that’s really really obvious to you, and then it turns out that they don't. They'll blame it on you, of course. That’s what every little smirk and joke is about. There are many people who are not able to comprehend things that seem really really obvious to you; including the humor – Socket to me! Star – honey – they really don’t get it and they’re not going to; and – for lack of a better alternative – they’re going to continue to give you a hard time until they feel better about themselves.
I think the only idiot here is Star Simpson.
Roger F. Gay
yes, he sounds gay...
anyone this stupid should be held in custody for their own protection.
does he really think in the day and age it is OK to walk around with a printed circuit board and battery- because it is obviously not a bomb? how dumb can you get?
Maybe the right shirt, but wrong place to wear it. Too many itchy fingers in the airport, she is lucky she is not worm bait.
This kind of crap adds more aggravation to an already long as^ lines we travelers experience going through security.
Someone explain to that idiot bombs can be brought in pieces and then assembled.
Duh.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Like, I don't get people who do stupid things in airports and then say it was just a joke....
susie
I recall standing in line at a TWA check in back in 1985 while the man in front of me argued with the agent because they wouldn’t let the man’s 10 year old son carry on, as hand baggage, a replica arab rifle that he was carrying. Their argument was that it was too fragile (it was plastic) to check as baggage so they want to put it in the overhead.
While this argument was going on, the TV behind the agent was showing the TWA Beirut hi-jacking in progress...
Some people have no sense.
radio shack breadboard with a dozen LEDs, probably a 555 timer, and some play-dough.
nonetheless, this alleged whiz-kid knows perfectly well what this stunt signifies, as well as her disdain for security, and her warped and cynical sense of humor....which may all combine to produce an adult with real or imagined grievances. As such, she must be placed on every terror and travel watchlist that exists. She has victimized everything necessary for safe air-travel in (perhaps, perhaps not) a cynical act, so let her live with the consequences.
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Even our liberal local news talking-head said “She’s normally very bright, but yesterday did something very stupid”...
Hey gang. She didn’t say it was a joke. She just went to the airport to pick up a friend. She’s a girl - the sweat shirt was probably for her friend’s benefit.
Assuming you are the same person that wrote the article, are you aware of something that happened about six years and 11 days ago, that originated from the same Logan airport in Boston? Two planes, destined for Los Angeles (my home city), that took a permanent and fatal detour into two very tall buildings that no longer exist (nor do the people inside them)?
I ask, because nowhere in your article is Logan Airport’s connection with 9/11 even mentioned.
Is it possible - since we’re talking about education and possibilities - that a place with such a history, whose calendar date has just been remembered worldwide, just MIGHT be justifiably edgy about someone doing what stated rules explicitly forbid - making a joke? Or, worse yet, “wearing” a joke?
To paraphrase a certain senator from New York, to expect the officials at the airport to do otherwise would require “the willing suspension of disbelief”.
Star Simpson (No relation to Bart)
This all happened at Logan International in Boston?
Is this the same Logan International that 9-11 flights originated from?
Is this the same Logan International that allowed the terrorist muslims to
commandeer flights that were used as missiles to launch an attack on the USA?
I would have to say, if the answer to any or all of the above questions is "YES" then:
Maybe shes a freakin' idiot that needs
to be locked up for her own good.
They didn’t overreact, because she’s still alive. And lucky in that.
In the instant that an officer notices her “artwork” on her hoodie there is but a mere flash of a moment to decide what to do. He doesn’t have *time* to carefully inspect the circuit board, wiring and battery and assess whether it is really a bomb, or just looks like it might be one.
That he didn’t instantly opt for a head shot is really lucky for her, but it was a huge risk taken by the cop on the chance that ~maybe~ it wasn’t an immediate threat. So he was lucky too.
The next cop in a similar situation may not be so lucky.
“some play-dough.”
And why the play-dough? I spent two years in electronics classes. I don’t recall us ever using play-dough.
The play-dough blows her story apart, no pun intended.
She’s described as a supersmart student, athlete and inventor, but even her mother said Star Anna Simpson’s circuit-board stunt at Logan International Airport yesterday was as dim as it gets.
It was “a stupid kid’s prank,” Stephanie Simpson told the Herald by phone from Hawaii. While the maneuver almost landed her daughter in a body bag, Simpson insisted Star had “no ill intent whatsoever,” but declined to comment further.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology classmates described the 19-year-old brainiac as a strange, kindhearted “character” who walks city streets barefoot and shaved her head last year so she could donate her hair to charity.
After being nabbed at gunpoint, Simpson told authorities she created the “piece of art” so she’d “stand out” at MIT’s career fair, and she’d been wearing it for days.
“She marches to the beat of her own drum,” said Caine Jette, 19, an MIT sophomore and member of the school’s Hawaii Club. “I don’t think this was intentional.”
Simpson told authorities she had gone to Logan to meet her boyfriend, Tim Anderson, 42, a retired 3-D printer inventor who lives in California. His father, James Anderson, said he spoke to his son, who told him Simpson was “transporting an art project.”
“I suspect she’s frightened to death,” James Anderson told the Herald. “She seemed like a very timid, quiet kind of person.”
James Anderson said his son met Simpson while she was interning at Squid Labs in Alameda, Calif. Tim Anderson invented a 3-D printer with a partner at MIT, formed a company to market it and later sold the company, his father said.
(snip)
http://multimedia.heraldinteractive.com/images/5af98d8426_prof09222007.jpg
Once again - she didn’t say it was a joke. The phrase “Socket to me” was supposed to be a play on words, but that’s the only humor associated with the known facts. What about a radio? A radio could be a bomb. The wrapping around a McD’s hamburger could be used as an insulator on a sophisticated device that’s being moved in piece by piece to assemble a bomb. There are batteries in iPods, cell phones, digital cameras ..... Why get upset over her piece of plastic? Is it just because news reports told you it was a “fake bomb” - Star Simpson never described it that way.
Never assume goobermint employees are smart enough to get a joke.
You have to admit it is a staggering display of ignorance. This is somebody that is so self-centered that she has no idea that there are things happening out in the real world that actually matter to some people. The world is her personal plaything. She thinks her cynicism is a license to pretend superiority. It’s arrogance. Simple as that.
“Is it just because news reports told you it was a “fake bomb” - Star Simpson never described it that way.”
Is that the point to you? She didn’t say it was a fake bomb so it isn’t? Gotcha.
“Socket to me”? Yeah, she thought long and hard on that one, I’ll bet. Comedic genius.
Didn’t they shoot and kill a fella a couple years ago claiming to have a bomb? IIRC, they shot him on the plane at the airport. This girl is lucky.
And the guy who wrote this article.
I guess then I can have a real bomb. Just as long as I don't describe it that way.
And Star is one of them. So is the author of this piece, who also needs a dictionary. There is nothing "Courageous" about this article.
Is he going to be fired? Thrown in jail? Refused service at the local bar?
No.
If he keeps patting himself on the back like this for nothing then he is going to throw his shoulder out.
So all a terrorist has to do now is disguise their bomb with a socket board or a Litebright, and wear a sweatshirt with a cool, but nerdy slogan on it.
Dec 9, 2005
Man Shot Near Plane Did Not Yell About a Bomb, Witnesses Say
Subscribe To Our Syndicated News
US Federal Air Marshals shot to death Rigoberto Alpizar, 44, a Florida resident and employee of a local Home Depot on a runway at Miami-Dade Airport this past Wednesday, December 7, 2005. Alpizar had no criminal record and may have been suffering a panic attack or other symptom of his bipolar disorder when he ran off of his plane and onto the runway.
Miami-Dade police were quick to make official statements saying that many people heard the man yelling that he had a bomb. Alpizar ran off the plane clutching his bag. The police agency’s chief of investigations also made an official statement and insisted that Alpizar was yelling that he had a bomb. No police officers besides the two Marshals were on the plane, however.
Good points. And not just a "post-9/11" airport, but the origin of two of the planes hijacked on 9/11.
the play-dough clearly represented “plastiqe”......had she known the green stuff packs more of a wallop than the white stuff does, she’d have used green play dough, I am sure.
(I’m sure there other colors of it today, so freely admit that white/green dates me, LOL)
This girl may have had the book smarts to get into MIT, but she’s DUMB when it comes to anything resembling common sense!
You’d think that somebody who is going to MIT would have learned the scientific fact that the world revolves around the sun, not around students at MIT and their cloistered lifestyle. If she is clever enough, she won’t have to learn this lesson twice.
If that's the case it could be totally innocent, but the girl lacks common sense. The police did the right thing to arrest and investigate.
If this person had been a student at Bunker Hill Community College instead of MIT, no one would be defending her.
But the Bunker Hill students are smart enough not to do anything that stupid.
Wonder what a homemade suicide bomb would look like... wires, circuit board, battery...
After all, it was only box cutters.
“I have no idea what a real bomb looks like,” writes a blogger at machinist.salon.com, “but I don’t think it’s a plastic board with a 9-volt battery on it.”
Um... Why not? Star is lucky she didn’t get shot in the head.
This sort of display could easily be used by a real terrorist as a distraction from the activities of an accomplice who’s about to set off a real bomb, or from the fact that the same terrorist also has a real bomb or real bomb components in addition to the fake. Zero tolerance for this sort of thing is appropriate. There’s no need to wait for a bunch of other people in the terminal to notice it and get scared, and say to a friend “That isn’t a bomb, is it?”, only to have someone overhear that and start panickingand repeating “Theres’ a bomb!”.
Same for the crazy guy who ran screaming down the aisle of a plane that was about to take off (according to a couple of passengers, including something about a “bomb” in the course of his screamings), and got shot dead by an air marshal. It was appropriate to shoot him first and find out what he was really up to later. His wife knew he was mentally unstable and falling apart at the prospect of the flight, and pressured him to get on anyway — all without bothering to alert the gate or flight personnel of his mental condition. Imagine if we just let people do this. How long would it take real terrorists to stage something similar to set up a distraction, to enable them to do something that will result in disaster?
Carrying something that looks like a bomb into an airport is beyond stupid. The girl soes to MIT so she is not intellectually retarded. IMO this was an act designed to be intentionally provocative and show contempt for authority and airport security. The defense that it wasn’t really a bomb, that it is art, is absurd, as is the argument that anyone who knows bombs wouldn’t mistake it for one. People who do and defend s*** like this want anarchy and should be locked up.
She IS an idiot. If you cannot even make a bomb JOKE for fear of being taken seriously, or use a fake gun because police will ASSUME it is a gun, how about making the assumption that Security WILL respond to a (maybe) fake bomb? Sheesh, what DO they teach them at the U these days? Money well spent, Mom and Dad.
Let’s see... A battery, a circuit board, a couple of capacitors and some C4...
You have a bomb.
Strap it to your chest and head into an airport...
I think Star gets the Darwin award for the week.
dry run?
She never suggested to anyone that it was a fake bomb. It was just a socket board.
She is a 19 year old with a 42 year old boyfriend?
Sounds like her parents shouldn’t have let her out of their sight...she may have brains, but not a lick of common sense.
Lighten up! It was performance art, everybody! It was a brilliant illustration of the gestapo tactics of the Bush Administration to any law-abiding citizen strolling through an airport with something that looks like a bomb. It shows the fascism of the Right that they can’t handle an innocent college student walking around with wires and Play Doh under her jacket. It was a stunning performance and I hope she gets an “A”. < /sarc>
“That doesn’t look like a bomb. It’s just a pair of shoes with a fuse sticking out”.
Only deadbeat dads should be issued faux bomb shirts.
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