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Ahmed Mohamed, His Clock, and the Curious Turn of Events
New submitter poity writes: After the news first broke of the 9th grader getting cuffed for scaring school officials with what turned out to be a digital clock, Ahmed Mohamed has experienced a surge of popular support — hailed as a genius and a hero, with college scholarships, internship offers, and even an invitation to the White House by President Obama himself. Now, amid rumors of possible racial discrimination lawsuits against the school and local police, some people have begun to more deeply scrutinize the details of the case, especially on the tech side with regard to the homemade clock in question. Recently, a writer at the creative site Artvoice posted a remarkable analysis of Ahmed's clock project, which raises new questions about the case and the manner in which people and the media alike have reacted. The linked analysis posits that Ahmed's clock started out as another clock, rather than a box of parts, and Ahmed can be said to have repackaged rather than "invented" a wholly new clock, but acknowledges that "none of us were there and knows what happened."
Child invents Islamophobia detector.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
And ignorant authorities are still ignorant. The kid's curious, which will let him go far, provided he can get out of the vise of The System.
He is being hailed as a symbol against prejudice and suspicion. Whether he is a genius or not makes absolutely no difference in this case.
After years of watching Star Trek, I am a veteran observer of control-consoles exploding and taking the lives of precious, non-player-character crew members.
Clearly the LED display on his suit-case clock is a console, ergo it is an explosive weapon.
The real question is: does it explode faster than the speed of plot? That could make it even MORE dangerous.
He's a 13 year old kid, not an engineer.
This story is about a huge over-reaction by fools that can't tell the difference between "Should be questioned/looked into" and "Should be arrested, suspended, and punished".
We have to start holding government employees to a HIGHER standard than they hold non-employees. We should never punish regular citizens, let alone children for appearing to have committed a crime - just for actually doing it. But at the same time we need to start punishing police, principals, and similar people for APPEARING to have committed crimes. That's the only way to stop government over-reach.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Submitter here. Since partisan accusations were quickly thrown when I mentioned this elsewhere, I'd like to just clarify my own view regarding this case: I think Ahmed didn't deserve to be handcuffed, he very clearly wasn't a danger to anyone. I also think he didn't deserve to be glorified and cast as a heroic genius with all this acclaim in the media, as the new evidence suggests.
My takeaway? Reality is complex (in this case perplexingly so), and the media doesn't do well with complexities.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Nobody got mad because his "invention" was being discredited, or even really cared if a 14 year old claimed he invented something he merely assembled. The reaction to show encouragement and support was to counteract the fact that this young boy might think the whole country would consider him a terrorist suspect for showing interest in electronics. I absolutely don't care if he is a boy wonder or not, lets not treat kids as terrorists because they are brown and like engineering.
Gotta love the passive agressive accusations in the second article - "I don't mean to accuse him of being a terrorist, but wasn't he acting suspicious, isn't all this a little funny, isn't it kinda like he was a terrorist?".
... and go with what happened.
They didn't evacuate the school, or even the room. They didn't call the bomb squad. They did everything *but* treat the purported "possible bomb" as a bomb.
It wasn't about whether it was a bomb or not, it was about humiliating the brown kid.
If it was a bomb, and it did explode and take out the administration office, Uncle Chuck Darwin would have been smiling. But it wasn't, so it's not even close to a Darwin Award, but rather a damn good example of straight-out racism.
--
BMO
I'm gonna be bold, but he didn't invent shit. At best, from the picture, the "clock" seems more to be a commercial product hacked up in a different case. Why would he add 2 source of power (9V battery + main) ? Why do this on 2 different boards linked up by ribbon cables ?
OK if a $color kid brought in a suitcase with wires sticking out, which he plugged in and it making a noise and then refused to answer questions what is was exactly, I suspect he would have received the similar treatment.
As noted elsewhere, the authorities in Irving, Texas, didn't act in a way that was consistent with a potential bomb threat. If they found a mysterious unattended package on the street, they would have cleared the area, brought in the bomb squad, and destroyed the contents of the package. But neither Ahmed's school, nor the cops that they called, did any of those things. Either they didn't act to protect the students and teachers in the school (on the assumption that it might be a bomb) or they knew from the outset that the clock wasn't a bomb, in which case it was Islamophobia in action.
and even that dirty garbage-picked black and white TV my parents dragged home that they knew I’d have a blast playing with
I hope I'm not shattering the illusion of a pleasant childhood but if his either of his parents were at all technically inclined, then there's only one reason to provide a kid with a used TV to take apart... and while there probably won't be a blast, I'd certainly expect a loud spark and possibly the smell of burning flesh... :p
Muslims are currently negotiating for sharia law in Irving TX (Google it)
OK, I googled it. You lose.
http://www.politifact.com/texa...
So... a 14 year old did not actually build electronic integrated circuits with his own 2 hands. He either assembled or repackaged something commercially available. How is that even relevant? That changes this situation how exactly?
And how does this in any way excuse or even mitigate the behavior of the teachers, administrators & police involved in the situation?
Why don't you come out and admit your reasons... you have too much invested emotionally in the hard right narrative and cannot bear the thought that your side fucked up, and you are now doubling down and rolling around in the mud trying to save face. The though of offering up a simple apology would never occur to your lot.
While I generally support him, the media has been TERRIBLE at reporting this story. The LA Times had a very popular article that kept comparing him to Steve Jobs. JOBS!??! Don't they mean Woz?! The police also release misleading photos making it look like it was the size of a suitcase (it was waaaay smaller than that). I guess once the mass media gets their hands on something their only concern is ad clicks...
Did he refuse to answer what it was? Seems to me he was pretty clear that it was a clock. The only thing he refused is to say was that it was anything other than a clock.
TL;DR: No one ever thought it was an actual bomb.
Long version:
Since no one ever actually thought it was a bomb, the fact that the school and police took no action as if it were a bomb does not somehow "prove" it's racism and/or Islamophobia. That isn't to say one or more of the people involved had something in that vein in their minds, but their lack of treating it as a bomb doesn't demonstrate it, since numerous accounts of this story indicate the school and police never thought it was an actual bomb.
Some people thought it "looked like" a bomb, and wondered why he would bring it to school, because they don't understand why kids who like things like science and electronics do what they do.
And there are laws dealing with what are called "hoax devices". Many people have gotten into trouble for such things before. Hoax device statutes have been around for many, many years, long before 9/11.
Here is the Texas statute:
http://www.statutes.legis.stat...
The only thing that matters in the hoax device statute is intent â" a feature that is not unique. For example, intent matters when someone is killed. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Was it premeditated? That is the difference between someone having done nothing wrong, and murder. And it is interviews and investigations and evidence that determine intent.
Even in the original Dallas Morning News article that broke this story â" before it went viral and Ahmed got invited to the White House, JPL, MIT, got scholarships, and become the hero of Silicon Valley â" the only thing the police officials said was that they knew it wasn't a bomb, that Ahmed never claimed it was anything but a clock, and that they were trying to determine WHY he built and AND brought it to school. Once it was determined there was no intent to alarm, scare, or deceive, it was further determined there was no wrongdoing.
Steve Wozniak got in trouble for using a hoax device (with intent to scare), and was arrested and spent a night in jail. I got in trouble with authority figures â" school, police â" for things similar to what Ahmed did several times, when doing nothing wrong. Maybe a little borderline, maybe a little, "What on earth are you doing?" but not illegal. And frankly, some of those came down only to intent as well.
So this little trope misunderstands what happened. Could racism or Islamophobia been an element in anyone's mind? There is no way to know, as much as people desperately want to come to that conclusion. When people say, "What white kid would have gotten in trouble for doing nothing wrong?"
Plenty. Ignore the title, read the article (for those who haven't already):
https://reason.com/blog/2015/0...
His English teacher overreacted by getting the principal's office involved. The school overreacted by calling the police. The school bears almost all of the responsibility here â" not "post-9/11 America", racism, or police. If the police had not been called, none of this would ever have happened â" and Ahmed wouldn't be a celebrity, either.
When police are called for a situation where any of the parties involved are not in perfect agreement, and there is no controversy, even if nothing illegal occurred, I would submit that there are not many times that results in a more positive outcome. The police are there, in part, to investigate and to determine if there was any wrongdoing, which they did. I wish they would have simply handled it at the school, but what I really wish is that the school would not have called the police in the first place.
It wasn't a suitcase, it was a pencil case. http://www.officedepot.com/a/p.... About 5 by 8 inches.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I would have been more impressed if he'd actually built a digital clock from scratch.
Does he need to gather up beach sand to make silicon chips or is it okay if he uses a pre-made chip?
If he uses a pre-made chip, does it need to be blank or can he use a dedicated clock chip?
maybe he also needs to mine the copper for the wires?
My first computer program was little more than 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD", but young me was damn proud at the time of making a computer do something ... anything ... and would have loved to share that enthusiasm with others.
It doesn't matter whether Ahmed built the clock from scratch after forging his own components from rocks in a furnace or disassembled something else and made a small change. Who cares. We all had to start somewhere and a little encouragement goes a long way.
Don't let the know-nothings get you down Ahmed. Keep at it.
Where's my invitation to the White House and MIT?
Both places have web sites where you can book a reservation for a public tour, have at it.
Yep, you're absolutely right! Had that situation happened, I'm willing to bet the kid would have received similar treatment to what Ahmed received.
Except Ahmed received it for bringing in a pencil case with no wires sticking out, and he then answered all the questions saying it was a clock, repeatedly.
So, the $color kid would have been treated with suspicion (rightly so) for behaving suspicion, while Ahmed was treated with suspicion despite not acting suspicious.
So what are your motives here in the statement that you made?
You're either ignorant of the circumstances and trying to push an agenda/your opinions despite being ignorant, or you know what the circumstances actually were and are lying to try and push an agenda as well as basing your opinions on an intentional disregard for the truth.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Don't pretend this doesn't happen to white kids.
http://boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one-yea.html
I thought you didn't use any IC, yet, you used a 555 ?
If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place?
Yes.
How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!”
Well there are actually not that many school shootings period, as tragic as the ones that do occur are. Furthermore, people generally have a better idea of what a gun looks like than what a bomb looks like.
Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant.
They are also apprently very stupid in that not only do they not know what a bomb looks like, they also don't know that they don't know what a bomb looks like. If we are going to call the cops every time a kid has something that *could* be a bomb, we are going to arrest every kid with a possible cell phone IED detonator, and blow up every backpack with a bomb squad robot. It seems the suspicion and vigilance teachers actually have is very selective and misguided.
Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax.
I didn't realize the police were required to deal with known hoaxes. IT seems pretty obvious that the accusation was switched to that of a hoax after it was discovered that it wasn't a real bomb.
And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb.
There are a bunch of kids we could probably arrest for being hackers because they match the Hollywood-style representation of a hacker. I don't know why adults are not held to the standard of knowing that reality is different than TV.
Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots
Because many of us are pretty sure we (if not muslim looking) could have (and did) bring/make similar looking things to school without issue.
, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case.
I don't think it's reasonable or responsible to assume that a bunch of electronics is a bomb, any more than it is reasonable or responsible to assume that a cell phone is an IED detonator.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say.
I agree
We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that.
You can and should be sensitive to school violence. You should also know your own limitations in discerning the credibility of potential threats. And if your sensitivity to potential bombs is heavily affected by the way the the kid holding the bomb looks or what his name is, then you are probably a bigot. Just like if your sensitivity to gang violence causes you to only suspect blacks and mexicans, you are still a racist even if you hide your racism behind the pretense of violence mitigation.
At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
When non-muslim looking/named kids start being suspected of making bombs simply for being interested in electronics, then maybe the conversation will be different.
Kudos for figuring out that the clock was actually just an existing clock taken out of it's original housing. But to me this illustrates even more how ridiculous it is to overreact to this "bomb". Maybe we need the teachers to be trained on "what the insides of common things look like", so they don't need to freak out that something is a bomb just because it's not in it's original housing.
I don't want to fault people for being cautious in dealing with a potential bomb. I am criticizing people for being incompetent and racist in their method of determining which potential bombs are credible.
Not that it matters, but in the first article that I read on this story when it first happened it said exactly this, that he took apart an old clock and reassembled it.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I honestly cannot see a downside to this hoax. Plan A, set yourself up for a future in engineering. Plan B, if the hoax is discovered, set yourself up for a future in business school.
More seriously though, a lot of people were sympathetic to the headlines because it mirrors our own fears. At least, that was the case for me. I'm the type of person who mails my neatly packed and disconnected electronic components ahead of me whenever I have to fly somewhere. Why? Because the risk of having some ill informed airport security agent misinterpreting my hobby is too risky. Heck, I've been questioned about not-so-common (but equally not-so-uncommon) consumer electronics, such as graphics tablets. Now I wouldn't go so far as being afraid about bringing my electronics projects to school, but: (a) I'm an adult who has had background checks to work within public schools, and (b) my skin is the perfect shade to be unsuspicious (i.e. not brown, nor pasty).
and made a small change
That's the point. He didn't even make a small change. Unless you count stuffing it into another box as a "change". That's literally all he did. And people are acting like he's some kind of super genius whiz kid for doing that.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Like this? That's some semi serious hacking/electronics.
He put an existing clock into a different case.
I need to be on the FBI's watchlist. I can (gasp) assemble a computer from parts. I can also (don't tell anyone!) install the OS, and use it. I better now share any other skillz I has. :-P
AMMalena (www.Malena.net) "The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." (Kosh, B5)
Yes.
The wonderful thing about microcontroller project boards is the reduced barrier of entry to electronics. The downside is that everything is a programming and physical interfacing project. The end result is that very few people are equipped to think about the electronics behind digital logic and analog design. Indeed, the only reason why I (as a younger person) even have a clue about what you're talking about is because I took a very-much-outdated-by-the-time course on developing instrumentation in university. Even though I could recreate a clock without microcontrollers from basic principles and data sheets, it would be a far-from-optimal design simply because that level of design has limited application in the modern world. (Obviously people still need that level of knowledge to design microconollers and such, but that is a very limited segment of engineers and scientists -- nevermind the general population.)
The fine article contains some speculation as to whether it was really intended to be a clock, because it's a poor design for a clock:
Well, that makes me wonder if the kid who made the clock mounted the display to be viewed with the case open, or if he cut a hole in the side of the pencil box and mounted the display to be viewed the other way.
Someone familiar with how LED clock displays look from the front and from the back: can you tell which way the clock display was mounted? Was it in fact mounted such that you can't read the time without opening the case?
If you really can't read the clock without opening the case, then it really is an odd design for a clock. If form follows function, then what indeed was the intended function?
I'm wondering how often the kid brought other projects to school, and what the other projects were. I can well imagine a kid that age making a fake bomb to troll everyone, but I can also imagine someone who is just a hobbyist, so I am not going to draw any conclusions here at all.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
OK if a $color kid brought in a suitcase with wires sticking out, which he plugged in and it making a noise and then refused to answer questions what is was exactly, I suspect he would have received the similar treatment.
Yes, that's right.
But reason and perspective don't feel nearly as good as finally finding them some "backlash".
... realized yet that his father is an activist? Ran twice for president of Sudan (from the US!)? Debated that FL pastor who burned a koran?
I knew this was too "perfect" the first whiff of it I got, and the more details come out, the more right I was.
Thank you. I was certain that such a court would have no legal basis, but given what the government has been doing to "legal basis" I wasn't sure that mattered.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I had expected a bit more of an example of technical ability, Its pretty obvious he just took a retail alarm clock and pulled it out of its case. But he is just a kid, I know that's basically how I started out. A clock or some other electronic device would stop working or its backup battery wouldn't function so I would pull it apart, I usually just put it back in its original case after (attempting) to fix it instead of wasting a perfectly good storage case. That said I don't see why this is an issue, the kids technical abilities aren't all that important, the knowledge and competence of school and police officials is. The second you open the case its obvious to anyone above a 4th grade comprehension level that its not a bomb, why they would pursue the matter with apparently no evidence of malicious intent is very troubling.
Facts ruin good conspiracy theories.
What I find amusing is that they want judges to ignore all foreign laws. But American law and the laws of the individual states are built upon the back of foreign laws. British, French, German, even Spanish.
But to the cop, this visit to the school was the most interesting part of his week so far. So maybe he wanted to spend a few more hours browbeating this kid and seeing if he could get a confession.
I stand corrected...
And the Danish cartoons and the cartoons drawn in Garland.
You can call me Islamaphobic, but that doesn't mean there aren't muslims willing to kill me over a cartoon.
Obama can't use you as a token of tolerance and forward thinking so you're fucked.
The kid's not brilliant, not by a long shot. He shouldn't have gotten arrested but anyone who's legitimately involved in STEM who looks at his device knows it's garbage from an alarm clock.
Obama just took advantage of the kid but it gets the kid out of any real trouble he probably shouldn't have gotten into in the first place so I guess it's almost a break even.
Personally, I'd tell Obama to go fuck himself. He, just like Bush, has signed off on shit that makes the pursuit of science from anyone without a government badge on their chest a bit tougher.
Get ready for a wall of text. All of this happened in a small town in Washington state, for reference.
I've had similar things happen to me for dicking about with electronics and I'm as white as you can get.
I had my desk and backpack searched in grade school because "some kids" reported me to the principal talking about fireworks (It was July) and told him I was looking up bombs on the computers (Electromagnets are apparently bombs). Of course I had random PCBs from shit I took apart in my backpack and that was damning enough evidence to call my parents and suspend me for a week (For "Disrupting the learning environment, a copout term when you piss off school administration but technically didn't break any rules). Cops were threatened but weren't called.
I was also (Without my parents knowledge) placed into a "special" class, consisting mostly of the "slow" kids where we got to talk about our feelings (By pointing to an expression on a plush cube). This was run by the school counselor.
According to her it was wrong to enjoy the things I enjoyed at the time (Average kid stuff for the most part. Drawing guns, playing video games, playing with soldering irons). I learned a few years ago after talking with my parents that she literally told them that I would be the next "Columbine kid" if they didn't put me on drugs to "fix" me (They didn't).
Same thing in middle school, again was looking up AVR tutorials in the library and a number of kids would come up behind me and yell out "IS THAT A BOMB!?" and variations of that. Again, all of my stuff searched, escorted by security, etc. Suspended for a few days for "abusing school computer privileges" because "School computers are not for learning whatever you want, your activities must relate to classwork".
In highschool I finally got a break, amazing teacher who had a back room lined with soldering irons and breadboards. We even started a F.I.R.S.T. robotics team before I graduated.
So please, don't give me bullshit about this only happening because of the color of his skin. Blame the school's lack of understanding and zero tolerance policies. Blame the culture of fear in this country, don't buy into this stereotypical "LOOK! LOOK! AMERICANS ARE RACIST" crap.
If anything, I would bet the only reason this story has taken off is because he was brown and race politics are all the rage these days.
There are a lot more victims of "Zero tolerance" policies than what you see in the news, stories like this and the poptart gun kid are more common than most people think.
So are we just ignoring the fact that the father is a Muslim activist and blames Republicans? He also shows up at churches with the Koran and disrupts. This was a clear provocation. Just like Charlie Hebdo and the Texas cartoon contest, a reaction was not only expected but inevitable. At least nobody died this time.
And my father is a Christian preacher. Seriously? Sins of the father? That's what you think is the most important issue to discuss right now? And not that the kind of people who judge based on the sins of the father are the actual real problem that caused this mess in the first place.
does that include shaking hands with the "president" ?
If the teachers/cops thought the box was a credible threat, the school would have been evacuated and the bomb squad called in, they do the evacuation part even if they think it is a prank call. Neither action was taken here, yet they had physical 'evidence' of the bomb. To me this indicates they thought the kid was being a smart-arse and gave him the "scare the naughty boy" routine. The only thing different about the millions of other kids around the world who have received a traditional "official scare," is that this time it backfired on the officials. Which IMO is a good thing, since the practice does nothing but stamp the "might is right" message on its hapless victims.
The odd thing here is that one teacher knew he had the clock and it knew was harmless, that teacher "saw something", why did he not speak up when the others thought it was a "credible threat"?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I gotta say, after sampling the noxious comments on this story, I feel really sad. Even the geeks, who should be siding with this poor kid, are jumping all over each other to paste him with partisan talking points.
He's a kid who was excited about technology and wanted to show his teacher. Now look.
I'm surprised by comments that Ahmed "just" took things apart and put them together. Do you remember getting your first chemistry set, or bicycle, or learning how switches work? I'll bet that you tried things out, many times.
If you played basketball, I bet you went out to shoot baskets, just because you could.
If you took shop class, did you invent wood, or drills, or nails? I bet you did things that somebody showed you.
If you played a musical instrument, I bet you played the same practice pieces over and over.
Those activities are "play" and most mammals do that. They practice their skills, even if they are not immediately needed to survive. That is a developmentally appropriate thing to do! There are parts of your brain that are not wired up to the rational, language using parts, and those parts need to develop.
I don't care if all Ahmed did was take something apart and put it together again. That was encouraged in me, and I hope it will be encouraged in others.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Ahmed never said it was a bomb, never joked about it being a bomb. So all this hoax talk is a non-sequitur. "But but but it could have been a bomb" - what did the Boston Marathon Bombers drop off their pressure cookers in, again? Yet schools didn't ban backpacks.
'The linked analysis posits that Ahmed's clock started out as another clock, rather than a box of parts, and Ahmed can be said to have repackaged rather than "invented" a wholly new clock, but acknowledges that "none of us were there and knows what happened."'
..
What really happened was in this politicly correct day-and-age the teachers were desperate to not really get fired
Sorry - but the worst label you could put on him is a designer - and having seen the Apple 1 I think he did a better job than Jobs and 'Woz when they were much older so get a grip.
If I cam across someone of his age doing what he did - i'd stop and happily give him some time and encouragement. There's every possibility that he could turn out something fantastic in his future - as long as the US education system does not beat his desire to tinker out of him. You really have to question the intellect and ability of the teachers who escalated this, and the police who thought handcuffs were justified.
Or has the USA reached such a low point that a balloon with the word 'bomb' written on it would spook everyone?
America - the rest of the world is ROTFLMAO over this
Something else to consider is this kid's history. Is he a prankster? Or, has he shown anti-social behavior, written long rambling notes about how he'd like to kill the teachers and other students? Is he on anti-psychotic drugs? The schools keep records on that kind of stuff, they should know.
If he had no troubled history, there was no reason to think he'd suddenly turned into an angry, dangerous teen, and was about to enact a murder-suicide revenge fantasy. The school's reaction was way over the top, and cowardly.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"Appeal to extreme" fallacy.
When there is a bomb scare, you don't evacuate the school. Since as early as the 50's we've known that you should Duck... and Cover!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The article makes some good points and some not so good points. Here's the TL;DR version of this whole affair as best anyone can tell from the evidence so far:
- Ahmed brought disassembled clock to school for show and tell
- Ahmed never claimed it was a bomb
- Neither the school nor police actually thought it was a bomb (if they had, the entire event would have gone down much more dramatically)
- Given that, it's entirely possible the whole affair was racially motivated (or some idiotic zero-tolerance thing where they thought scaring him would teach him a lesson)
- Ahmed did not build the clock in question, he merely disassembled a store bought clock
- Ahmed is a fledgling tinkerer and may have a productive career in engineering when he grows up...if he doesn't crack from the pressure of being a world-renowned boy genius and shining jewel of Muslim-Americans
- Disassembling a clock at 13 does not a boy genius make. Even building a clock from a microcontroller at 13, while nothing to sneeze at, would fall short of the title of "genius".
- Obama's presidency will be ending soon, but the memories (and pictures/videos) of him inviting a kid that disassembled a clock to the White House are forever
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Really I think the reason people are putting him down is because a lot of the maker community immediately jumped to his defense, then felt deceived when they learned he hadn't even made the thing himself. Of course this response is directed at the wrong party - the ones who were deceptive was not Ahmed but the media that blew the whole story enormously out of proportion and made him look like a boy genius. Nevertheless, feelz.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Wow - a master manipulator at such a young age! If your fantasy is true he really did deserve a trip to the White House.
Ever noticed that kids like to show off in front of other kids?
I don't get any of this. Any school I ever was in got evacuated if there was even slightest suspicion that there is anything explosive inside and a bomb squad got called in. This school just carried on with the classes while the boy was locked in a room with his clock. So these "erring on the side of the cation" arguments must be wrong too.
It's amazing how people here seem to look at a 14 year old through adult eyes without even realising it. I mean sure I started hacking at a young age, and I've been through an undergrad degree with plenty of electronic engineering, then done a bunch more and now sometimes design circuits for a living, so OBVIOUSLY making an alarm clock out of transistors and relays is pretty easy and why couldn't the kid do it. Now, if he was a REAL genius...
Back to the real world, no at 14 I wasn't up to much. Yes, I was smart by the standards of such things and I was certainly much better at electronics than anyone else in the school but that's really not saying much at all. I really just don't think a lot of people here realise what it's like being 14.
It's not like you have 14 years of experience. You have more like 2 to 3 years at most from the point where your brain has developed enough to actually think about this kind of stuff in any remotely reasonable way, but in those 3 years you have to also figure out even how to go about learning. Especially as it sounds like he doesn't have a surfeit of super awesome mentors in his life.
14 is almost unimaginably far back---too far back to remember properly. Thankfully, I remember, not so much what it was like but the projects I was able to make work and those I wasn't. That allows me to deduce what my level was, and I'm sure I was at the level where the slashdot peanut gallery would happily have crapped all over any project I could have managed.
I have also had a small chance to interact with some kids of various levels in an educational capacity, which gives me at lease some idea of how a smart 14 year old thinks.
Oh yes, and none of the organisational/neatness things which allows one to actually develop a bigger project have really been learned or developed at that age. Going forwards you're just as likely to break something and wind up at square 1. Even getting something with a couple of 741s working is right on the upper end of what even the best kids in a school might achieve.
End result: clock in a new box is not the most impressive project ever especially for an adult. But 14 is much, much further back than almost everyone here realises.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He knew his repackaged clock would get a reaction. Did I tear stuff apart as a kid? Yeah when I was in elementary school. by high school I was tearing apart different broken things to make a working thing... Obviously he was seeking attention.
I see kids do this all the time... manipulate people, they do it to adults and other kids. One kid will start doing something annoying to piss off another, then will act innocent "I was just doing xxxxx" full well knowing it would piss the other one off. You would have to be pretty stupid to being a crappy clock to school, it's not going to impress anyone, so he can claim "it's just a clock", he's either stupid or trolling.
Exactly, as a kid some of my "inventions" were quite similar. But it gave me experience and encouragement and the *desire* to do something bigger and better. I was just learning how things worked. Taking something apart and transplanting it, without breaking it in the process, lets you observe all the parts inside that you need to make it work. Then you start learning about those parts, maybe replacing them with others to see what happens, taking the parts off and making them work individually, putting them together to make something else... This is all part of the learning process and some people learn more visually and more hands-on than with theory. Your first project ever as a kid won't be the most amazing thing that's for sure.
Twinstiq, game news
It's not the child who masterminded the hoax, the same as it was with balloon boy.
Most reasonable people agree that some adult authority figures made serious mistakes. These mistakes suggest a combination of islamophobia, teenagemalephobia, plain old racism and technophobia. For Ahmed, our binary political rhetoric collapsed into two states and since Ahmed's accusers were wrong, then Ahmed must be right.
I can't think of any of my science or engineering friends who would have made it through school in the 70s and 80s under such a zero tolerance system. But I do have a number of questions: Does Ahmed deserve the praise he is getting or is he merely being used as a political campaign? Put another way, if you had done something like this and Obama stood up and declared you brilliant and innocent, would you feel worthy or would you feel a tiny bit of guilt over the fact that you lie somewhere on the spectrum between guilty and genius?
With all that has been written on Ahmed and his clock, I have a number of unanswered technical questoins:
Nobody said anything about the Pop Tart gun kid.
What does it matter. The kid is a little geek, all of us have been. Even if he just took apart a clock and put it back in a box, that's a good attempt to build confidence. He didn't choose to have police come to school and he didn't choose to get invited to the White House. He was just playing and making a project.
This is it, this is the moment this whole security theatre turned from ridiculous to ridiculously stupid, again.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This whole thing is a testament to a failure of the so-called adults involved rather than the genius of a 14-year-old.
They should have immediately seen that this wasn't a bomb, or even a decent hoax. The display doesn't have enough power-hungry LED digits for a scary-looking hh:mm:ss countdown to detonation, and there isn't a block of something that looks like C-4 with blasting caps that could easily be pulled out or wire-clipped. I bet the kid didn't even have a schematic hidden somewhere that could be remotely interpreted over the phone to a sweaty colorblind guy with wire cutters who could somehow manage to disarm it anyway - but only at the last possible second.
The kid isn't a genius; he's just an average 14-year-old trying to be creative in a Toy Story-Sid way, but for electronics instead of toys and without the nasty. The proper thing to do here wasn't to call the cops, but instead to tell him "Hey, this is pretty cool but let's make it better. Your wiring needs to be cleaned up so it's not a fire hazard, and the display needs an opening so you can see it from the outside. Ever used a Dremel?"
But no: instead of becoming fondly-remembered teachers who helped him become an artist or electrical engineer, they called the cops and got him dragged down to the police station. Now he'll probably end up on a long slide towards a law degree.
Doing an internet search only returns those low quality news stories.
If misbehaving means doing something that not related to listening to the teacher, I misbehaved a lot, but that doesn't mean that it was disruptive.
Did you read the article you posted?
"Moujahed Bakhach, described as one of the tribunal judges, said generally that state and federal laws would always take precedent."
Generally?
Apparently some people don't understand how things get started.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
you put the word president in quotes?
are you afraid that if you shake hands with him, some black may come off?
(channeling don rickles, here, are you?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The linked analysis posits that Ahmed's clock started out as another clock, rather than a box of parts, and Ahmed can be said to have repackaged rather than "invented" a wholly new clock, but acknowledges that "none of us were there and knows what happened." Yes, because the issue here is who invented the clock... Idiots.
The problem is that there is a significant minority of Muslims who are willing to kill to spread or defend (including against the slightest of insults) their interpretation of Islam. Historically moderates who were quite happy to interact and trade with non-Muslims would keep these guys in check. Moderates who in fact considered these fanatics Islamic heretics. This is not my interpretation. This is how members of the Saudi royal family explained things to TE Lawrence during the first world war. According to these Muslim royals once or twice a century these heretics would rise and have to be put down by the moderates who correctly understood Islam. Lawrence was then advised to travel in Bedouin clothing with a Muslim guard because if spotted by one of these fanatics he would be killed for nothing more than being a Christian in Muslim lands, even though he was under the protection of the Saudi King in Mecca.
Now if the billions of moderate Muslims would do something about the hundreds of thousands of fanatical heretical Muslims causing trouble, then the narrative about Muslims would change very quickly. Right now these fanatics are allowed to thrive and expand and dominate the news, to create the misperception of Islam. Its not Fox news creating this misperception, its these fanatics doing so. It would also be beneficial to moderate Muslims to do so not only to correct the public misperception but due to the fact that Muslims are far more often the victims of these fanatics than anyone else.
A modern twist on things, some of the modern heretics in Saudi Arabia have access to oil profits and being a bit smarter than some of their peers have taken a more low key and long term approach. They have taken a path of evangelism rather than direct action. For many decades now they have used these oil profits to build mosques and madrasas and support like minded imams to promote their heretical interpretation of Islam. While these "educational" efforts are not necessarily producing fanatics who take terroristic actions they have been increasing the percentage of Muslims who while not fanatical themselves are somewhat more tolerant of fanatical interpretations of Islam, considering such interpretation old fashioned but valid rather than heretical. Tolerance for the heretics has been increasing over the decades. Admittedly still a minority opinion but a disturbing trend. A trend that should disturb and motivate moderate Muslims to actions as well.
A person with a middle-eastern name tries to bring a ticking electronic thingy on board a plane. Does anyone actually think he wouldn't have been wrestled to the ground, possibly injured, and put on the do-not-fly list before they even figured out what the thing was? Are school administrators any smarter or less wary? The kid showed extremely poor judgment. Period. He's lucky he's still alive.
.."that doesn't mean it was disruptive ".... Said every disruptive kid who just doesn't get it...
Only boring people are ever bored.
is to distract from the overt racism at that school, and the fact that everyone that works there, from the teachers to the administration, are bigoted, racist, religious fanatical pieces of shit.
Well, in my case, I was never sent to the principal's office, so there's evidence that it wasn't disruptive.
In the situation of small child versus Mark Cuban you think the small child should not be allowed help? Of course he was coached in that situation. If you had a kid that age would you leave them to fend for themselves against a journalist?
So was this for a science fair, science club, class project or did he take it upon himself to just show up one day with a suitcase clock?! And I think the authenticity of this clock project is relevant and should be objectively reviewed. And if it turns out to be dishonest then there should be further questions about the motivations behind the incident and what responsibility the parents should be held accountable for. Or do we want our children's schools to become more tolerant about suitcase clocks just showing up unannounced?
No, people are acting like he deserves encouragement more than handcuffs.
If I had a small kid I wouldn't parade him on national TV multiple times. Think a little bit deeper about this one.
Did he refuse to answer what it was? Seems to me he was pretty clear that it was a clock. The only thing he refused is to say was that it was anything other than a clock.
I can see it now "What is it? Well, it's a flat panel LED numerical display, hooked up to an IC driver, which is being run from a clock IC which is fed from a power supply which runs either off the mains via a transformer and bridge rectifier with a pi filter, or a battery powered backup which will drive the clock chip but not the display, and..."
"???? KNOCK OFF THE GOBBLEDEGOOK KID, WHAT IS THIS THING???"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I would have been more impressed..
{emphasis mine}
..not 'I am unimpressed.
Also, know what I was doing at 14 years old? Taking the original COSMAC Elf microcomputer trainer from the 1976 Popular Electronics article, designing and building a RAM expansion, adding an integer BASIC-in-ROM to it, designing and building a serial interface and RS232-to-20ma current-loop interface, and repairing a Teletype model 33ASR I got for free from one of the local highschools that was throwing it out, and writing software on the whole monstrosity. In this day and age a 14 year old freshman in highschool can spend $20 for an Arduino, add some 7-segment displays to it, and write alarm clock software to run on it -- assuming they aren't a little bit ahead of the curve, and are designing alarm clocks in FPGAs or some other programmable logic. Taking apart an existing alarm clock without destroying it isn't bad, but it's a little behind the curve. Kid's got potential, though, many of his contemporaries wouldn't even get that far without wrecking the thing, so hopefully this sad incident won't deter him from his interests in electronics.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Nonsense. His engineering is worthless unless he picked up all the atoms individually and assembled them into molecules.
It turns out my younger siblings had always given me more credit than I deserved for taking things apart and putting them back together - they apparently hadn't realized how few of the things I took apart were the same things that got put together (though I did reuse parts), and the things that I did successfully put back together were mostly ones I didn't aggressively disassemble. (So the vacuum-tube amp from the old record player - this was back when those were current or a bit old, as opposed to retro - did get a bunch of different things attached to it, but the dead TV mostly had parts unsoldered, back when parts were still big enough to recognize and reuse.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yup. It's clearly an attempt to deflect from the obvious demonstration that there's too much racism* and Islamophobia around, as well as too much of the "Zero Tolerance - Panic About Everything" movement. Probably the most vilely opportunistic part of it I've seen was the "#HalfABomb" crowd - well, duh, a "movie set bomb" or "hoax bomb" has something that looks like a timer, and something that looks like an explosive, and maybe also some wires of different colors so Our Hero can create extra dramatic tension about which wire to cut.
* It's probably more Islamophobia than racism, though both of those were part of it, but for instance one of the cops who shows up in the "Ahmed in NASA T-Shirt" picture is black, and the mayor of the town is a well-known Islamophobe. ( And ok, I partly emphasized racism in the Subject line because there weren't enough characters to fit Islamophobia.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He's doing pretty well for a 14-year-old who also hacks go-kart engines. Sure, if you're trying to build a production thing, custom circuit-boards are the way to go, but if you're doing a quick learning project, bread-boards are the way to go. From my perspective, if he'd used a project-specific circuit board, it would have looked more like one of those beginner education projects you could get from Radio Shack until they went bust (and I'm not criticizing that; I've used some of those in the past couple of years), but if he'd done that, the same crowd would also be dissing his work, because the objective is to draw attention away from how badly he was treated.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sounds more like he discovered the art of re-branding electronics... His future is bright it seems.
It kills me to say this, but if the steel briefcase in the picture is the "clock," Sarah Palin was right, he was asking for it. He should consider himself lucky the cops didn't shoot him on the spot, no matter where his parents were from. Considering every major school shooting I can remember was perpetrated by white people, I'd doubt skin color is what makes school cops trigger-happy.
So, allow me to untangle this web of shit, and call a spade a spade. The teacher is a racist bafoon, and the cops were A-typical Robo-Pigs incapable of offering any intelligent advice, diplomacy, or helpful mitigation tactics, and instead do what dummy cops always do when they don't know what to do.... Hauled an innocent man off to jail, because apparently the public and the innocent must are required to pay for the under-training and lack of intelligence and social skills of cops with our freedom!!! But lets take a step back and look at who failed this briliant young man, and where?
So, as I was saying Mohammed and justice were failed, long before the arrest ever took place. Justice had been failed long before any of the actors whom had parts in this Greek Tragedy even got up for work or school that day. Let's start with the racist and ever-so-enlightened supposed educator, whom was too stupid to realize was not a bomb, and was such a horrible coward and educator that he could not control his classroom or students well enough to conduct the simple investigation into whether a student of his had a bomb on his person or not!!! It gets no more pathetic than this loser, want-to-be educator whom felt a need to call the police and have an innocent boy arrested. And why? Because the teacher is ignorant and a coward, and so a young genius must suffer for this cowards lack of gonads or intelligence!!! What's worse is this idiot is supposedly an educator! Granted, the true bad guy here is the media, and how they portrey young Arab men... Among many other groups, which due to a clear lack of intelligence was consumed, believed, and adopted as being realistic and a possibility inside the tiny brain of this "teacher." It was these images and ideas which the media constantly broadcasts, both settley and not so settley, all the time that installed the irrational fear in the mind of some one so seseptable to irrational fears. Granted, one hopes our educators would be more intelligent and enlightended. At least enough to know better than to allow their racist fantacies of discovering a secret Alcadia sleeper cell in the 9th grade room full of barely pubecent young teenagers! If the media had not been pumpig this idiot teahers head so full of bullshit, this could had and should had been easily avoided!!!
Next, the under trained Robo-pigs, whose relationship with the community, youngsters, and inability to defuse the situation by way of interjecting an authoritative voice of reason, is so freaking A-typical that this could had happened any where. Had the cops had any of the training that all modern cops seem to be lacking (Along with the social skills to enact that training), the cops could had arrived on scene, made a judgement and educated call (THAT THERE WAS NO FREAKING BOMB!), calmed the teacher and school administration down, and we would never had heard of Mohamed or his clock. But instead we get these Robo-pigs, who going off either the orders or suggestion of the school administration haul an innocent young man into jail for having a genius science project, because they themselves are idiots!!!! This is what they mean when they say "Community Policing." Had these cops had brain one in their heads, they could had defused the situation by they investigating as to whether the was a bomb or not, but they were incapable of this, and the proof is the arrest of Mohammed. Moreover, you can obviously tell that the rapore and communication between the cops and piblic is abismal to outright non-existant. The fact that the cops arrested a kid, this time for literally just being smarter than them (LITERALLY), is proof of how this kid and justice were both failed by the ignorance and lack of training of these robo-pigs!!!