Airport security... Bah!

I was flying home a few days ago and ran into an interesting "issue". While going through security, one of my bags got flagged for having "organic materials" on top of "wires". Well, put that way, it sounds kinda scary. On the other hand, a few bags of ground coffee and some ear buds sounds a lot less threatening.

The up shot is don't pack food and wires together.

Bayesian statistics in the general media.

This page needs more visibility. The take away is that, way to often, peoples first guess is wrong when it comes to statistical problems.

Looks like the bad guys are winning....

I wish we would see more people thinking like this fellow with regards to fear over terrorist using services like Google Earth to plot attacks rather than the people he is quoting.

If it weren't for the fear that I'd see it done, I'd write a satire about a terrorist cell that attacks systems they want shut down by using those same system to attack other targets they don't even care about.

Finally, some rational thought in mainstream media!

This guy, who seem to known what he's talking about most of the time, got quoted by CNN about post 9/11 airport security.

As he puts it, the mentality seems to be "cover your ass". Nobody in a position to do anything is willing to say "no" for fear that something will happen and they won't be able to say they did everything they could.

This sort of reminds me (by contrast) of the time I was talking to a Philosophy masters student and after a bit of back and forth I asked him the question "Would you rather have security measures that make you feel safe, that you know are utterly useless or ones that don't make you feel safe and actually make you safer?" To my utter shock, he asked for the first.

Pilotless airplanes and securety implications.

This article brings up some thoughts from Israel about making airlines without a cockpit. The tone is a bit condescending (I don't think the author likes the idea, and I'd be hesitant to fly on one my self) but down at the bottom is a comment that is down right caustic, starting with:

I hope those science engineers had figured out the motives of Al Queda for taking control of one of these unmanned planes.

and continuing with concerns about someone getting remote access to the airplane and using it for mischief. Now that is one thing I'm not to concerned about. For one, the flight program on an unmanned airliner would be one of the most carefully designed programs ever written. If you can count on anything, ti would be that it can't be overridden remotely. As for other attacks, in this day and age, if you can access the avionics software of a plain, I'll bet you can lockout all the cockpit controls and fly it into whatever you want so I don't think there is any more risk cropping up here than we have right now. Frankly, I suspect physical takeover of a maned plane is more likely.