This reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story Dreaming is a Private Thing where dreams are manufactured and sold as one of the ultimate forms of entertainment. Instead of looking at some of the obvious implications that might spring to mind, Asimov (as he often did) looks instead at the lives of the people who produce the dreams that are then recorded for others to view, and what life might be like for such a person.

What the article talks about is, of course, very different then the story, but with advances in brain imaging and research it may one day be a possibility.

As the legal definition of a wiretap seems to hinge on covertly recording communications, I wonder how a silent video would fare. As the law seems to permit taking pictures in public places, and taking video without sound is essentially just taking a bunch of pictures very rapidly, it would be reasonable to assume that such a device doesn't fall under the definition of a wiretap.

This would, of course, side step the real issue, but it could be an interesting case nonetheless for bringing about a ruling one way or another.

I can understand the desire to have metaphors for Iranian Farsi and Russian, to help keep a better watch on the governments in those two countries, but why Mexican Spanish? The only thing that comes to mind is the massive amount of drug trafficking in that country. It seems like Chinese would be a better language to focus on, given the worries that many people have about that country.

The Old Spice guy agrees with this article.

This is one of those problems, that while it sounds deceptively simple to solve, and is, given a perfect world, becomes horribly unmanageable to solve once you factor in real life. Having done a significant amount of research on this problem for the Mathematical Contest in Modeling last year, there are many more things that need to be considered then would first appear.

Some of the things that need to be considered with this problem:

To board in any sort of weird order, you have to spend time beforehand ordering people into the groups that you want them to be in. I'll let you think about this for a second. You're trying to get about 100-300 people, who are tired, irritated, with scawling babies, and rather disinterested to organize into some sort of coherent and well planned out structure... WITHOUT using a loudspeaker. Those of you that have been in marching band can contest to how difficult this is.

Most airplanes only have a single aisle, and generally, it is narrow enough that only one person can stand in it at a time. If you try to board one row at a time, maybe, if you're lucky, two people will be taking their seat at a time, while everyone else in the plane queues up behind them. Add in the fact that if the window seat arrives after the aisle and middle seats, they both generally have to get out of their seats to let the window sit down, creating even more delays.

Luggage. If you've ever flown, you've probably seen people trying to cram all of their bags into the overhead bins. If your bin is full, the most natural thing to do is to go and look for one that isn't. Once again though, due to the narrowness of the aisles, this means that you will be holding up many more people while you stuff your things above everyone's heads.

Families, especially those with multiple small children, really don't want to be broken into individual members just to be seated. They all have seats together, generally, so they want to get to those seats together, the boarding order of the airline be damned. And really, can you blame them? What 7 year old wants to have to wait in line, alone, with a bunch of really tall adults, and then have to find a chair in an unfamiliar environment?

First class can generally be ignored in the problem. Because the number of first class fliers compared to the number of coach fliers is very small, they have minimal issues boarding and the time it takes to board them is likewise minimal.

The end results that we came up with is that on average, letting people board randomly, in whatever order they please, beat out every other model that we simulated. On average. Although we didn't have the time and/or resources to come up and run a model, it would be very interesting to model the way Southwest boards their flights, where they have no preassigned seating. But because that factors in the decision making capabilities of people, it would be a far more difficult task to model then simply what order they line up in. That being said though, Southwest does generally have boarding times that are better then other major airlines.

Anyways, stuff to think about.