Passenger Delays Flight After Mistaking Math Equations for Terrorist Code

I wish I could say that this came from The Onion, but sadly this really happened:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/05/07/passenger_delays_flight_after_mistaking_professor_s_math_equations_for_terrorist.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_em_ru

A flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse, New York, was delayed for two hours on Thursday after a woman expressed fears to the cabin crew that the man sitting next to her was a terrorist scribbling some sort of terrorist code into a notepad. In reality, he was a 40-year-old tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was working on a differential equation…

Menzio insists he was “treated respectfully throughout” but says the whole incident served to illustrate a “broken system that does not collect information efficiently” and that anyone can end up causing a flight to be delayed for hours, no matter how ridiculous the suspicion.