**Written in Chicago, Midway airport on Feb. 4, 2005**<\/p>\n
As my favorite comedian, Lewis Black, once said – and here I paraphrase – “for
\nonly the second time in history, Sodom and Gomorrah have been
\nrebuilt”. He was referring to Las Vegas, and for a long time I think I
\nwas almost convinced that Las Vegas might be someplace fun I’d visit
\nsomeday. Well, two things have happened today – two seemingly
\ndichotomous things. The first is that I’ve decided that, in fact, Las
\nVegas is where stupid people go to throw away their money. The second
\nis that I got my wish.<\/p>\n
\nToday is the day I return from Boston to home, in California. After a
\nlong and arduous couple of weeks, I am finally heading home. Don’t
\nmisunderstand me; it was productive and rewarding on about a dozen
\nlevels, and I am excited to have another chance to come back to MIT very
\nsoon and focus. However, as these things often are, the reward
\nis draining. To add to this, when I arrived at Chicago’s Midway
\nAirport (where I am writing this), I discovered that the second leg of
\nmy return journey will add an extra stop: Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\nSo that explains the second thing that happened. What about the
\nfirst, you wonder? I’m getting to it. On the first leg of my flight,
\nthe people sitting behind me were going to Vegas. They weren’t just
\ngoing there, they were **excited** about going there. You could smell
\nlast night’s bender on their skin. It was a reek that I can only liken
\nto the soliloquy by Agent Smith from “The Matrix”. “I can taste your
\nstink,” he said, wiping his hands across Morpheus’ glistening head. <\/p>\n
\nThe first thing that convinced me that stupid people go to Las Vegas
\nwas the modern irony that their journey presented. They are, in many
\nways, the quintessential American that I as a scientist abhor (but
\nalso so deeply wish to educate). Our founding fathers spoke of the
\nneed for an educated voting populace – ergo, public education. My fellow travellers, however,
\nwere excited about getting to Vegas, excited about having every
\npicture be a picture of them drunk. One guy was excited about staying
\nat the Las Vegas airport the whole time, gambling on one machine, and
\nasking the others about Vegas when they got back for their return
\nflight. To be fair, some of this was said in jest. But its essence was
\nrepeated so many times clothed in jest that I suspect the kernel was
\n100% accurate.<\/p>\n
\nThat said, they expressed repeatedly fear about being on the
\nplane. I’m not talking about post-9\/11 fear; I’m talking about good
\nold fashioned human ignorance. We live now in a society powered by
\nelectricity whose origin is a mystery; we cook food in microwaves
\nwhich we think are “nuking” our food; we take unproven dietary
\nsupplements because of an advertising-fed belief system with no basis
\nin medical research; and we fly, though we fear flying because we
\ndon’t understand how those little engines can get that big plane off
\nthe ground.<\/p>\n
\nYes – that’s right: it’s the little engines that do the lifting (but
\nthey only point sideways…).<\/p>\n
\nThe fear alone expresses the ignorance. What I find ironic is that
\nthey had to look **past** the wing to comment on the engine, and so I
\nbelieve it utterly disturbing that they entirely missed the point of
\nthe wing. Michael Crichton wrote in “Airframe” that the wing is
\nthe heart of the plane, the technological miracle that makes the whole
\nthing possible. And yet we worry about those little engines.<\/p>\n
\nBut it wasn’t just the complete ignorance of flight that bothered
\nme. As with most things, I need more evidence to really start to trust
\nan observation. The clincher, the one that really bugged me, was the
\nlast discussion they had as we landed.<\/p>\n
\nOur wheels hit the tarmac 10 minutes before our scheduled arrival
\ntime. As we started to roll to the gate, the woman behind me said,
\n“You know, I was sitting behind a stewardess on a Southwest flight
\nwhen she was announcing that seat belts had to be kept on. She remarked
\nto the person next to her that ‘seat belts are important because we’re
\nmore likely to be hit on the ground than fall out of the sky’.” The
\ngentleman with her then remarked that he didn’t want to know that, and
\nhe was even more unsettled now. <\/p>\n
\nWhat boggled me was the following: here were two people, TERRIFIED of
\nsomething which has a specific probability of happening. However, they
\nwere unable to contain themselves when talking (at length) about how
\nthey were going to win a million dollars, then buy their workplace and
\nfire their friends. Here’s the scary part: **the probability of
\nhitting it big in Las Vegas is VANISHINGLY small, almost ZERO, by
\ndesign**. If they were scared of being hit on the ground in an
\nairplane under controlled and structured conditions, they ought to be
\nshivering and shitless with fear about the prospect of spending money
\non gambling in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\nSo here’s my final thought: it’s a good thing that we have an educated
\npopulace that can debate about the value of taxation, that can make
\nthe occasional sacrifice in the name of a balanced budget and the
\nsocial programs critical to supporting the hard-working lower class
\nof our nation. As for these people on my flight, they forgot to check
\nthe box on their 1040EZ that says, “If you don’t understand simple
\nmath, check this box and reduce your deductions by a multiple of 5.”
\nThat’s okay. They’re gonna pay the man in Vegas, and come back poor
\nand still scared of planes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
**Written in Chicago, Midway airport on Feb. 4, 2005** As my favorite comedian, Lewis Black, once said – and here I paraphrase – “for only the second time in history, Sodom and Gomorrah have been rebuilt”. He was referring to Las Vegas, and for a long time I think I was almost convinced that Las […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-889","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-random","7":"category-rant","8":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}