5 ms·
They seem to like dense things to be in their own bin. Books are pretty dense.
by ferentchak 9y ago
They seem to like dense things to be in their own bin. Books are pretty dense.
- exabrial 9y agoMaybe someone got caught with a lead-lined hollow book concealing a weapon?
- UnoriginalGuy 9y agoGoing a little off topic now... I'm surprised nobody has combined 3D X-Ray Scanning with computer vision technology. At the moment we're depending on the human eye flicking between three dimensions and spotting bad things, with very basic shape detection to "hint" at objects of interest. This system kind of works, but has human error weaknesses. If you fed 3D X-Rayed objects into a computer vision engine, eventually you'd have a big enough catalogue so the computer could list off every object inside and flag things which may be odd or problematic, for example a book with seemingly no internal dimensions. Now this is an imperfect system, for example when a new form factor of laptop started getting sold it might flag it as unusual, but isn't that somewhat working as intended? Then they can scan it, clear it, and send back the scan as a reference image. Eventually it could speed up and improve the reliability of bag checks.
- exabrial 9y agoThat already exists, but are commonly used on baggage, not at checkpoints. I can't remember what airport I was at, but they were scanning bags in the terminal area before loading them on a belt.I saw a TSA employee stick a bag through the machine, and the machine found a bottle of wine wrapped and taped in bubblewrap and outlined the wine bottle with a red outline. The guy they set the bag off to the side (presumably for 'enhanced interrogation'). Envision, or invision was the brand name of the scanner?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoThey could also profile the contents, there's got to be a normal distribution of items in baggage for particular types of journeys?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dunham 9y agoI always presumed that they wanted the laptops in a separate bin because they were comparing them to a set of known images (of commercially sold laptops), but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit.
- goodcanadian 9y agoI doubt it. There are too many makes and models out there to make this a reasonable thing to do. I imagine that it is just to see things more clearly. A laptop is many layers of densely packed electronics. It would be very easy to hide explosives (in place of the battery, for example) and triggering mechanism in there.
- fvold 9y ago"In place of"? It's trivial to cause a lithium-ion battery battery to explode if you know how. Don't tell TSA, though, or you're going to have a very boring flight.
- sandworm101 9y agoBurn yes. Pop yes, but not the sort of explosion necessary to damage an aircraft. That guy on youtube making "grenades" from batteries ... they are more firecracker than weapon. You could do more damage with a bottle of vodka and a match.
- fvold 9y agoTrue, but it's enough to make a rather spectacular show to frighten people, and in the end, that's what terrorism is about.
- jmcdiesel 9y agoAnyone who's flown RC aircraft in the past decade knows all too well about this.. Spectacular light show, a good burn... yeah. Thats about it though... It wouldn't be worth a terrorists time... it would just be a light show and a smoke show, could start a fire, which would be bad, but honestly fires get suppressed pretty quick on modern airliners as long as they aren't started in the cargo area and ember for a while... in the end, any attack carried out with a LiPo/LiIon would just be an inconvenience...
- nathancahill 9y agoI recently flew with 20 lb of cheese. Definitely got re-scanned. Cheese is dense.