The exact position of the Arctic circle varies from year to year slightly, oscilating across a lattitude difference of about 2 degrees in a cycle that is roughly 40,000 years long. So... how do you figure it wasn't above the arctic circle?

No, they would still be obligated to refund his ticket purchase, since the decision would have been theirs to refuse service.

The other issue is whether the passenger did anything wrong by tweeting.

No, he did not. The flight agent was being a dick by asking him to leave... if the passenger really doubted that the agent had the authority to do ask that question, then he should have immediately asked to speak to that agent's manager or supervisor instead of complying with the request.

Falcon brain.

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Who the hell would have seen this tweet other than Southwest Airlines and whatever motley crew actually follows the perp / victim's account? Is there any chance at all this would have impacted SWA if they hadn't decided to take this into meatspace? Like "man criticizes SWA on twitter, picked up by wire services and Daily Show, stock price in freefall (no pun intended)."?

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It very easily could have been a huge PR problem if they had called the police... but in all likelihood, he still wouldn't be allowed on the plane before they arrived, and by then the plane could have already left. Oh, and his luggage would be flying off without him.

Sounds like a good recipe for a migraine from bowels of hell.

...once he's allowed past the gate, he's allowed.

And once he's been asked to leave, he is trespassing if he does not peacefully comply. Companies can refuse service to anyone for practically any reason they want... presumably,. however, if the reason is not actually a good one, the bad publicity that could easily follow will tend to keep companies from being entirely *too* arbitrary about such reasons.

And while one is busy trying to exercise their so-called "rights", wronged or not, their plane will take off without them... If one has to be somewhere, I guess it just depends on how much your time is worth..

Sounds like my case. Increasing couldn't get wear contacts any more without problems, hated all of the problems of glasses, was scared of the surgery... and it was just nothing. Seriously, how can instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to-do list?

How do you get at the notion that no singularities necessarily means that there are no black holes?

Can't a volume of space be sufficiently bent by gravity so as to not allow light to escape from it, without there being a singularity at the center?

This. Even the best extended medical plans that I have ever had at any job I've ever held would barely cover a fifth of the cost of such surgery.

Can you explain to me, therefore, why information should collapse to a single state inside of a black hole? Because I can't think of one unless you assume that a singularity is at the center of every black hole.

The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state.

Or... maybe it doesn't devolve into a single state at all. We can't actually see what goes on inside of black hole... but if our assumptions about what actually happens appear to create a paradox, then maybe it's our assumptions aren't valid, rather than the original basic concept of what a black hole supposedly is. I believe that the concept that black holes are necessarily singularities may be flawed. Space is so distorted by gravity in their vicinity that straight lines which intersect their event horizon never exit it, but I do not think that means that all of a black hole's mass is necessarily at its center, or even necessarily collapsing inexorably towards its center. Its center is just its center of mass.

And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.

Then you have little to lose by giving it a try.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)