It is an interesting idea and writing. I"m sure many who travel by airport, or other means feel much the same at times.

Yeah, the scan is too small, but I think I see what you were doing. Great analogy with the airport and a dirty, overcrowded fish tank. That's just perfect. Did that actually happen with the stranger looking over your shoulder?

Actually that happened at the con, where I was hanging out in the lobby of the hotel trying to work on a question that a friend of mine told me about. He was applying at Google, and part of applying there is you have to solve some of their challenge puzzles; do that cleverly and they'll bother to look at your resume.

It was something like "Add up all the numbers between one and one hundred thousand that are divisible by seven when written forward or backward (such as 343, which is divisible by seven written forward or backward because it is a palindrome; or 8001 and 1008, a slightly more obscure pair). If I could code at all, I probably would have tried to do more to solve it.

That actually sounds like fun. And it's a pretty interesting way to hire people too.

I have yet to have an experience of that much boredom at an airport. I'm usually only an hour early which is just the right amount of time to look at the shops for overpriced nicnaks.

Nice one. I laughed out loud in the end. Short and sweet, even if the tale is really short, it is entertaining. At least to me. Good work, I enjoyed reading this.

*laughs and gives him a hug... then mutters something about mathematicians being too wrapped in reality to find their way into a different world - which mostly happens to her when waiting for an airplane.

V.

Going to the forecasted future and the "should-have-done" past isn't going into another world? And most people looking through my math notebook would think it was written in a foreign language.

I'm just curious ... if you look at an aeroplane, for instance ... er ... well, you know?

You +fav the weirdest things. :>

I guess it depends on which version of the myth you go by; probably nothing would happen to a plane. But if I caught the eye of the pilot, maybe...

Oh for the love of pineapple butter can’t you just once write a story that doesn’t devolve into a calculus lecture?

Sometimes I just can't help it!

As someone was often not just excessively but obsessively early when traveling, I feel the pain of waiting. Luckily, I have married someone who is chronically tardy, so things even out. Or something. At any rate, I spend less time in airport bars.