Geek woman news story of possible interest...

[Tyler Aviss]

LCD's are one thing, but lots of wires and a breadboard seem to lack a
certain amount of ashetic appeal, even to a geek like me. It certainly
doesn't appear to have a great cosmetic value in this case.

As mentioned in slashdot as well, the woman in question was asked
about the shirt and simply walked about without explanation. In many
cases this would just be antisocial, but when you're talking about an
airport employee and the context of your unusual clothing this is a
really bad idea.

So they called the cops in, and she was arrested. Nobody shot at her,
or tazered her, or any number of other terrible things that might have
happened and indeed have in other headline-grabbing situations.

Maybe wearable LCD's should be overlooked in airports. When you've got
a breadboard with wires (and keep in mind, most non-geeks aren't much
going to understand these), at the very least you could explain what
the thing is. A simple "oh, it makes some flashy lights go off on my
shirt, it's a student art project" probably would have avoided this
situation.

There *ARE* some situations where, if you are for various reasons
suspicious, you do have to explain yourself or face the consequences.
Keep in mind that this is a place where leaving your bag alone while
you hit the washroom can cause a big issue. I'd say that the reaction,
at least as far as arresting the woman, is justified. Charging her,
maybe not, but I wasn't there to see how she further reacted to the
arrest. If she was foolish enough to ignore the airline employee's
question, perhaps she was causing issues with the police as well. At
the very least, there is unreasonable behavior on both ends of the
fence here.

So, if somebody is arrested for wearing one of these, then maybe we
can consider it a big deal:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/8a5b/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/97f7/

But it's a fair bit different from a breadboard and LED's, at least to
the non-geek crowd.

Just my 2c


TJA

Oh, and p.s. does anyone have one of the above shirts, they look pretty cool :-)

On 9/22/07, Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On September 21, 2007 09:35:50 pm Glen Strom wrote:
> > On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:57:56 -0400 (EDT)
> >
> > Colin McGregor <colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > >Ran across the following bit about Star Simpson, a
> > >student at MIT arrested in essence for acting like a
> > >geek:
> >
> > I saw the article at the Toronto Star website. The first thing I
> > thought was, how can smart people be so damn stupid. And it sounds
> > like she really doesn't see the problem.
> >
> > It reminds me of an expression I heard years ago: book-smart and
> > life-dumb.
>
> I wonder about that. Seems like there's some contextual information missing
> from the whole story.
>
> That, and I'll pose the question: what is wrong with what she did? Were it the
> street, why would the cops have been more or less justified in their reaction
> since the law is the law regardless of location?
>
> Besides, someone's already patented and is working on clothes with integrated
> lcd/leds, so in a year or two once we're all walking advertisements it'll be
> like she was a pioneer and everyone will be walking around airports with lite
> brite clothes.
>
> But clap your hands, let's have a big round of stupids to all involved.
>
> Jamon
>
>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists