This incident was reported in the Washington Post yesterday...
. . . . . .
That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man laughed.
He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.
. . . . . . . .
“He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.”
Actually partial differential equations have a lot of scary Greek symbols in them.
Even if it had been Arabic, how would writing on a piece of paper like that be terrorism? I’m not inventive enough to figure out a scenario. But there probably is one, I guess.