BLDGBLOG points to the interesting status bestowed upon a newly born baby girl. While flying from Amsterdam to Boston, a Ugandan women went into labor and gave birth to a child, which was subsequently deemed to be Canadian by US Customs officials. It was determined that the birth occurred over eastern Canada.
Extrapolating from this situation, BLDGBLOG speculates further:
Of course, one wonders what citizenship this baby would have been given if they had been flying over the middle of the ocean, for instance, or across the tangled borders of an enclave or exclave. A complicated mathematics of trajectory, speed, and height is unleashed by terrestrial scholars below in order to find the exact location of the plane at the moment of childbirth.
Like something out of Borges, imperial trigonometricians are called in for consultation. Their calculations take days and arguments break out.
Perhaps the child goes on to be famous – a political leader, a poet, a revolutionary, the next pope – and his or her exact aerial origin becomes increasingly important to find out. Weather data and wind speed, the weight of fellow passengers, tiny aerodynamic imperfections in the wings, and even gravitational anomalies in the earth’s crust are brought to bear: how fast was the airplane traveling?
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