On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, David Schupner wrote:
> It appears that the numbers of people affected by this > tradegy were quite small. > wow. that's quite the, uh, exercise in creative thinking, there. aside from the fact that it has been reported that the hijackers researched and probably even flew on the routes they later commandeered - specifically to find flights that weren't loaded with people to prevent what in fact seems to have happened on the flight that went down in pennsylvania anyway, and that probably would have been avoided if they'd taken everyone's cell phones away - the whole "usage" of math is pretty breathtaking, especially the "90% is an A" thing. That bit should win some kind of award. they flew into those targets because of the symbolism, the dramatic effect of destroying two landmarks that are synonymous worldwide with "the american way of life", with our military might and our economic might. if they had just wanted to maximize the body counts they could have waited until later in the day and flown those jets into almost any sporting arena in the country and killed thousands and thousands more people, maybe increasing the deaths by an order of magnitude. any basketball arena holds around 20000 people all right on top of each other; football/baseball stadia hold 30000 to 50000 or so, all tightly packed in, all a big glowing beacon that you can't miss. if they'd waited until that evening and flown a plane into the bowl of shea stadium during the mets game, the stampede of those not immediately killed trying to flee might have killed more people than the wtc collapse. especially in shea stadium, which is sort of famous (or infamous) for the amount of noise from low flying jets taking off and landing at the local airports. no one would have even noticed that one jet was too low until it had taken out half the stadium; two jets would likely have killed tens of thousands of people. of course, i think it was easier to fly into the wtc (which didn't really involve a forced crash landing) than to divebomb the pentagon, but still. it could have been much, much worse. the fact that it wasn't doesn't seem to be because of any particular "incompetence" involved in pulling off an obviously fairly sophisticated and well planned attack. and hey, guess what? 6000 or so dead people means something like, oh, say 60000 or so? immediate relatives and friends *very* directly "affected" by this attack, not even counting coworkers and the like. math is hard. -_== There are a lot of things you can eat that aren't food.
