You’ve probably already seen this story, but I’m linking to it in case you haven’t. On 9/11, fighter planes were dispatched to shadow a passenger flight from Denver to Detroit because several passengers exhibited, in the eyes of the crew, suspicious activity. When the flight landed, the SWAT team showed up and handcuffed and detained the “suspicous” passengers.
I was at the gym yesterday and saw a chyron on CNN about this story, and I immediately assumed that this was yet another case of unfounded panic and probably racial profiling. Without hearing any of the details, I was immediately frustrated by this latest example of the security state gone insane.
Of course the three passengers in question were released after a few hours with no charges against them, because they were not in any way terrorists. Yesterday one of the detained passengers, Shoshana Hebshi, posted a first-hand account of what happened.
The three “suspicious” passengers happened to be brown people who were coincidentally seated on the same row. What happened to them when the plane landed?
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”
This is America in 2011 and what bothers me most is that my initial leap to conclusions at the gym was borne out completely.
Responsive design is the near future of Web page layout
Where is Web design headed? For a preview, check out the Boston Globe. It looks like a perfectly normal newspaper Web site, until you start resizing the browser window. The page layout is dynamically altered so that it properly size whatever window is being used to view it. There’s no more “click here for our mobile site” button or a link beseeching you to download the site’s app in somebody’s app store. This technique is called responsive design, and its creator, Ethan Marcotte, consulted on the Boston Globe’s implementation. He’s written about his role in the project on his blog.
I suspect that responsive design is going to be adopted widely. The Boston Globe provides a compelling blueprint. The next step will be approachable frameworks that enable people to create responsive designs without having to build them from scratch on their own. As soon as I saw the new site, other sites that redirect you to a special site just for mobile devices or offer links to a mobile version of the site seemed completely out of date.
I want to build everything in this fashion from here on out.