A Simple Remedy for Fear of Flying
By ELEANOR RANDOLPH
Published: September 7, 2006
British Airways missed a major opportunity last year when the company sent out a notice to its 13,000 flight attendants, forbidding them to play sudoku during takeoff and landing. The number puzzles are too distracting, management explained, and anyone who has ever been sucked into sudoku would certainly agree.
But what the flight attendants and the airlines should have done at that point was to pass out their forbidden puzzles to the one group desperate for distraction: the airplanes’ passengers.
Sudoku involves putting the numbers one to nine in nine squares and nine lines, but the explanations of how it works always sound a lot harder than it really is. Mainly, it is a little rascal of a game that can take your mind off almost anything. And sometimes the best thing you can do for your brain is to aim it elsewhere, in this case enclosing it within a finite patch of numbers.
If British Airways didn’t think of a sudoku flying kit for passengers — who are, by the way, required to turn off all electronic games and computers during takeoff and landing — somehow word is still getting around.
On a recent flight to the South, I counted six people doing sudoku in my general area of the plane, two in my row, including me.
Like the Rubik’s Cube in the 1980’s or the “word-cross” and later crosswords introduced almost a century ago, sudoku is the puzzle of the day — a global pandemic, as one British newspaper described the spreading addiction.
It’s not hard to understand why. You do not need an electronic gizmo, since most of these puzzles are still on paper. No batteries are required, no easy-to-lose stylus. There are no beeps or gurgles to announce your feeble mistakes, and there are no swords, explosions or dungeons, so there’s no chance you will lose it to a neighboring teenager.
Sudoku, the adaptation of a Japanese word for a puzzle similar to one created in the 1700’s called Latin squares, actually demands some logic but no knowledge of language or math. Mathematicians, of course, are nonetheless fascinated, as Scientific American reported this summer. They want to know such things as how many different sudoku puzzles are possible. (The estimate is that there are almost as many sudoku possibilities as there are humans on the planet, another comfort to many of us.)
Finally, the only tool necessary for this paper opiate is an old-fashioned lead pencil with an excellent eraser. And so far, that’s cheap and easy. Best of all, security will still allow you take it on the airplane.
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Originally Posted by mirrodie
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