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Hardware Projects (and Pranks) That Have Scared Observers
In the wake of the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed in Irving, Texas, for carrying to school an electronics project believed by a teacher to look like a bomb, Make Magazine has a timely reminder that Ahmed's project is one of many home-brew efforts that sparked (or could have sparked) extreme reactions. Make's list includes a few from tinkerers -- and pranksters -- that not only looked like bombs, but were fully intended to look that way. ("Back in 1967, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was arrested for building a metronome and storing it in a friend’s locker. He rigged a tin-foil contract sensor to the metronome in the locker, and set up the device to tick faster when his buddy opened the locker.") The article doesn't note the 2007 incident in Boston in which a guerilla advertising campaign for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" raised fears of a terrorism and led to two arrests. Gawker has a slightly more pointed article about other students who have specifically brought home-assembled clocks to school, without being arrested.
but nobody invited that kid to the whitehouse. Ahmed's race has gotten media outrage on his side, but what happened to him was not remotely unique. Everything from pointing at someone and going "pow" to chewing poptarts into the wrong shape has gotten kids anything from arrested to expelled. The only commonality is it seems to be universally boys treated this way, likely due to society's compulsive need to pathologize everything about them and ascribe nefarious motivations to their every action.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
No, it's really not. In the US, you're more likely to die from toenail fungus than from terrorist attacks.
It just serves the purposes of the plutocrats to have every scared.
The best things you can do for your family's safety is check the wiring in your house and not own a gun.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Young Mr Mohammed seems to have
a) not "built" anything, merely taken the case off a clock, and put it in a box....
b)...which looked astonishingly suspicious with lots of bare wires all kludged in there...
c) which was then closed with a cord (why? Why not just latch the case closed with its latches?)
http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech...
Personally, I don't see this as a binary issue where one has to pick one "side" or the other. ...and the media ate that narrative shit right up.
I believe that:
- Young Mr Mohammed was either deliberately trolling his school authorities, or he was used to do so.
AND
- the authorities overreacted as did the cops who absurdly put a non-threatening willowy boy in cuffs why again?
-Styopa
Friend.. read the original news story: http://www.dallasnews.com/news...
The kid never claimed to have 'invented' anything, or that he'd even built the clock from scratch, he came right out and said that he'd thrown it together in 20 minutes out of junk parts, to take to school with him, to show his teachers what he was capable of; but of course once the media (not to mention the public) got hold of the whole thing, the story started getting distorted very quickly. What we have here is a 14-year-old boy who did something as ill-advised and devoid of forethought for possible consequences as any other 14-year-old boy might have done; he never considered that some dumb adults at his school would freak out because they have no understanding of what they were actually looking at. I'll bet that if he had told his folks he was going to take that to school with him, and showed it to them, they might have told him it wasn't a great idea simply because something like this would happen.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
His accomplishment was repackaging a clock using a box of his own design. To me, this is more creative than simply soldering a kit off eBay. It's also an accidental flavour of what made Jobs great: he identified someone else's decent electronics and repackaged it in a way that caught the attention of the world!
Since clocks were invented thousands of years ago, and digital clocks decades ago, it is up to you to not deliberately misinterpret the word "invent" just to start a pathetic Internet argument with a 14 year old boy who can't even answer back. He "invented" it in the simple sense that he designed and built a style of clock packaging that did not exist before. Similarly, the original creator of the innards did not "invent" the digital clock - merely lay out a familiar design. His invention was that design.
Now, this previously non-celebrity non-English-professor child could have chosen words that were harder to deliberately misinterpret, to deal with people like yourself who would surely come out with the perfect choice of language. The availability of pictures demonstrates that he did not want to mislead, though, so who cares?
You seem salty about the fact that he got (I wouldn't say "earned") a visit to the WH and MIT. You do realise that he wasn't invited because of his accomplishment, but as a message to encourage people to carry on tinkering even in the face of authoritarian dullards? Sometimes people enter the limelight, even if only for a few days, not because of what they did, but because of what was done to them. Unless you're an eternally bitter sort, there's no need for this to bother you so.
Her claim of 'absent-mindedly' putting it on before going to the airport to pick up a friend (as I recall) was about as dubious as Ahmed's 'I invented this clock and wanted to show it off' claim.
You have never met real nerds. They do these things all the time, completely oblivious to the real world.
It's the kind of people that if you ask them how to make a bomb, the answer is: "Let me show you right now".
And I know from experience that they will have a working bomb, or at least an explosion within a few minutes, just from the stuff lying around.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I was with you until you threw that not own a gun thing in there. I'm not sure how you can see right through the terrorism smoke screen but buy the gun lie hook line and sinker.
GP is supported by evidence. I didn't even have to look hard - it was the first result of my first google search. tl;dr; you and/or your family members are more likely to die if you have a gun in the house.
Now, if you are a person who respects the lethality of a gun, are responsible enough to keep it in a safe place when not in use, and are mindful enough to teach the rest of your family how to properly handle and respect the weapon, your experience might be quite different. But let's be honest - the average person likely does none of those things. And even if you do everything right most of the time - it still takes only one lapse for things to go bad, hence the emphasis on responsibility.