His reaction IS great though

https://i.imgur.com/PMgDR7m.jpg

I love that, Ppen. If I wore t-shirts, I'd put that on one.

Bombs have explosives in them. Clocks do not. If all it has is a digital time display, it's a clock. If there are bundles of dynamite or barrels of fertilizer attached to it, it's a bomb.

I had an educational electronics kit when I was a kid. I used it to make a solar-powered light, a radio transmitter, and even a clock/timer. Good thing I never tried to show it to anyone.

I guess this kid won't be going into a STEM field in college. 'cause we don't need no more engineers or scientists.

Kid got arrested with a NASA shirt on. How nerdtastic can you get ?

The best bit is his engineering teacher advised him not to show other teachers the clock.

It looks like a movie bomb.

So, they are now using what they see in movies as their training?

Ppen, I noticed that about the shirt (thanks again for linking to that) -- just fucked with the photo a little and added it to post.

This is a kid we should be encouraging the hell out of, not arresting.

And these are the people that are being entrusted with your children.

The tendency for police officers to default to 'worst-first' thinking and movie-plot scenarios is really becoming rather alarming. Back in the day, I was taught to actively question the 'obvious' and to never accept the first explanation that was offered to me - but also to realize that almost-all confusing or unclear situations are far-more-likely-than-not to have a perfectly benign explanation, if you're just prepared to look for it.

Putting the kid in handcuffs and hauling him off to jail because it 'looks like a movie bomb to me?' That's your probable cause? So anything that looks like something bad you saw in a movie now becomes probable cause for arrest? It's mind-boggling.

Before reaching for the handcuffs - why not call his science teacher to come and take a look? You already called 4 cops and who-knows how many 'administrators' and 'counsellors' - why not call someone who might be able to judge whether or not you have the slightest grounds for hauling away a 14-year-old honor student in handcuffs?

Kid would have done better to clam up and refuse to answer any questions without a lawyer or parent present.

But he seems like a really smart kid, so let's hope that he's absorbed the more-important lesson, which is that agents of the government (teachers, police officers) are generally none too smart, but all too willing to use their powers and physical force, regardless or right or wrong. And that it's better, if possible, to avoid their attentions, the same way you would with a poisonous snake. And that expressions of intelligence, creativity or imaginative thinking will generally create more trouble for you with people of this sort - not less. What they want is a mixture of equal-parts fear and conformity. So don't show them that nifty thing you dreamed up, or express yourself in any way originally, or question 'authority' - it's likely to end up just like this.

Now, of course, his folks will sue and obtain a giant settlement, which will be paid by the taxpayers of Irving, TX, and the dumb-ass schoolteachers and SFB 'school resource officers' who did this will suffer no negative consequences whatsoever. Lather, rinse, repeat.

llater,

llamas

This cuts it. If you send your kid to public school, it's a state-sanctioned form of child abuse, pure and simple.

The bluster continues:

At a press conference this morning, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing "a hoax bomb" to school -- and not a clock, as Mohamed said he repeatedly told his teachers. But, Boyd said, "we are confident it's not an explosive device" intended to cause "alarm." Rather, he said, officers determined it was "a hoax bomb" and a "naive accident." As a result, he said, no charges will be filed against Ahmed, and "the case is considered closed."

How good of them not to file charges against a kid who didn't do anything.

This cuts it. If you send your kid to public school, it's a state-sanctioned form of child abuse, pure and simple.

Your theories are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing "a hoax bomb" to school -- and not a clock, as Mohamed said he repeatedly told his teachers.

So, he told everyone it was a clock and made no reference to it being a bomb, but was arrested for a "hoax" bomb anyway.

How do you have a "hoax" bomb when you don't tell anyone it's a bomb?

How is it a "hoax" when you don't tell anyone "Look, a bomb!"

Idiots!
______________________________

He should have just carried a watch. Or would that have gotten him the chair?

a hoax, that keeps remarkable time... which could also be called a clock.

now wonder the frakking idiots react so poorly to a poptart eaten into the shape of a mountain range. Or pointing your index finger threateningly.

"but it looked like a gun..."

The teacher kept the clock.

I mean I know we're talking about complete morons with zero common sense here, but if I had a device I truly believed to be a bomb, I don't think I'd stash it in my desk for a bit and send the bomb-builder on his merry way.

I hope NASA invites him to visit.

"but it looked like a gun..." ~ Posted by: SwissArmyD at September 16, 2015 11:05 AM

A movie gun.

Sigh...I support the police, and I sure love Texas, but then every so often something so stupid happens....

If I were rich, I'd have thousands of clocks mailed to each one of these idiots. I'd bury them in clocks.

I hope his parents sue.

It's Texas and he's brown-skinned with a Muslim name.

Honestly, if this was blonde-haired blue-eyed football captain Billy-Bob McBibleverse, do you think the cops would have done anything besides pat him on the back?

My favorite quote from the police chief: “The student showed the device to a teacher, who was concerned that it was possibly the infrastructure for a bomb,” Boyd said.

Get it, folks? A bomb requires a timing device (some might call a clock), therefore all clocks are bomb infrastructure. This is exactly the type of critical thinking I want children to be learning in school.

It also reminds me of an undergrad friend who used to joke that we were both EE majors. I would think, "yes, one of us is carrying a 4.0 in electrical engineering and the other is struggling to get C's in elementary ed."

She was a nice lady and I'm sure is a good teacher but not the type who would have any real understanding of creative nerds in her classroom.

It's Texas and he's brown-skinned with a Muslim name.

Honestly, if this was blonde-haired blue-eyed football captain Billy-Bob McBibleverse, do you think the cops would have done anything besides pat him on the back?

Texas is not the only place where you'll find racial profiling, zero-tolerance (aka zero common sense) policies in schools, and over-reaction by officials/police officers.

*The second paragraph in my comment above was meant to be italicized, as it is a quote from someone else. I wouldn't ever write something like that. The third paragraph is mine.

I hope NASA invites him to visit. ~ Posted by: sofar at September 16, 2015 11:15 AM

Obama did. So did Zuckerberg.

http://recode.net/2015/09/16/zuckerberg-obama-invite-texas-clock-kid-to-facebook-and-white-house/

Good job on being a racist Gog. Cause I'm Whitey McBlue eyes and I got the alphabet soup to pay me a visit back in 2013 for the exact same thing. I had the fire marshal, police, ATF, bomb squad, and a few other people. I never saw him but an FBI agent stood with his gun drawn outside of our office waiting to shoot me if I ran. Good thing no one had to get anywhere fast. Who knows who would have been shot just for running to hand in a timesheet. If my boss hadn't been protective I would have taken that same trip down town. My offense, a coil of wire on a PBC tube in my locked apartment. At the time I was working with magnetics so a crude electromagnet was a basic tool.

Unlike this kid I knew bringing any of that to high school was an easy path to expulsion.

And good point Sofar. How brain dead do you have to be to think, 'Hey, here is a bomb. I'm going to sit next to it and see what happens.'

"Texas is not the only place where you'll find racial profiling, zero-tolerance (aka zero common sense) policies in schools, and over-reaction by officials/police officers. "

Amen to that. See Ben's flip-the-script response, above.

Gog: "Honestly, if this was blonde-haired blue-eyed football captain Billy-Bob McBibleverse, do you think the cops would have done anything besides pat him on the back?"

I'll agree that the white, college indoctrinated, politically correct, liberal progressives who dominate the public education system are racist to the core, but if Mohamed had been a white male things wouldn't have gone any better for him, and he definitely wouldn't have been invited to visit the White House or Google.

- The little 5-year-old girl who was suspended for offering to shoot her friend with her pink Hello Kitty bubble gun...
- The 5th grade girl who was searched and reprimanded after throwing away a piece of paper she found in her coat pocket that vaguely resembled the shape of a gun...
- The 7-year-old boy who was suspended for biting his Pop Tart into the shape of a mountain, which school officials mistook for the shape of a gun...
- The 6-year-old boy who was suspended for pointing his finger and saying, "Pow"...
- The third-grade girl who was expelled for a year because her grandmother sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it; and the teacher, after using the knife to cut and serve the cake, then reported the girl for having a weapon...
- The 12-year-old girl who was suspended, and then she and her mother arrested, because she took ibuprofen to school to take for menstrual cramps...
- The 13-year-old girl who was strip searched at school after another girl falsely reported that she had two ibuprofen possibly hidden in her underwear...

They were all white.

Just because the kid who was abused has a brown face, it doesn't mean it's racism or bigotry. This isn't racism, it's just more of the same colossal stupidity and that seems to be characteristic of the neurotic halfwits who teach and administrate at public schools.

Just because the kid who was abused has a brown face, it doesn't mean it's racism or bigotry. This isn't racism, it's just more of the same colossal stupidity and that seems to be characteristic of the neurotic halfwits who teach and administrate at public schools. ~ Posted by: Ken R at September 16, 2015 6:55 PM

Agreed.

A wise man resists the urge to assign a nefarious motive to something that can be explained by simple incompetence.

It isn't a script Gog. That really happened to me. Funny thing is there were people at that company that the government should have been watching. I just wasn't one of them.

One fellow quit after the IRS garnished his wages 100%. He was one of those crazy Texas separatists. He refused to pay income tax because it was 'unconstitutional'. Mentioning the amendment that made it legal didn't have any effect. He is still in hiding from the IRS.

Two others liked to make 'fire works'. One had about 5 gallons of home made jet fuel in a drum on his front porch. The secret service followed him around for a few weeks back in the Clinton days. They used an early drone for some of it. He thought about hijacking the drone, but thankfully his better judgement prevailed.

Of course there were the physically safer but still weird types there too. The lesbian stockroom lady is still sleeping her way through the female employees. Since she is also a manager I don't know how they've avoided a lawsuit over that. She is not discreet and there is paperwork a mile long of her work favoritism in relation to sexual favors. I'm still waiting to read in the newspaper about the owner getting shot. He's screwed a lot of people out of a lot of money. And he loves harassing his victims after the fact. All it takes is one deciding it's worth it.

I don't even blame the alphabet soup for sending someone to check up on me. But most of the people were along just for fun. An officer and the bomb squad guy would have been more than sufficient. The rest were just a waste of man power.

It's time for everybody at that school to bring a clock to class…

In part, this is the wages of the leftist anti-technology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A generation has been taught, from an early age, that technology in general is evil and that the people who create technology are out to kill everyone else, somehow. Now they're conflicted because they really believe that, but gosh darn it, they so love watching Game of Thrones on their iPhones. Solution: As long as everything is neat and buttoned up in the case, they can pretend it's not really electronics. But seeing circuit boards and components makes them freak out. I've been amazed over the years at the visceral reaction some people have to the sight of electronic components.

There's is a good chance that this was a publicity stunt.

wait a few days for things to come to light

There's is a good chance that this was a publicity stunt.

wait a few days for things to come to light

Posted by: Ken at September 17, 2015 9:00 AM

I think so too. Attention seeking behavior to see if school officials would go bananas over something that looks like a bomb timer.

Which they did, of course. Meanwhile the White House went into lock down over a suspicious coffee cup.

"There's is a good chance that this was a publicity stunt."

May be, but in a rational world, it wouldn't have worked.

There's is a good chance that this was a publicity stunt.

Really? Given the documented insanity of zero tolerance laws, this is your conclusion on the most likely scenario?

The doubling down on the punishment and refusal to admit the mistake on the part of the officials bothers me far more than the initial reaction to the clock. "We were scared, and now we look foolish; we MUST punish the child. He should have known how paranoid and stupid we are!"

I was a senior in high school the year of the Columbine massacre. Suddenly everyone was scared of the moody goth nerds. We had metal detectors at prom. I recall once having to evacuate the school because of a perceived "bomb" that someone found backstage in the theater. It turned out to be some type of theater prop- an alarm clock or answering machine or something like that. People who run public schools are real brain trusts, you know. But back then, once the administration figured out that there wasn't really a threat, we just went back to class and carried on.

It's the mentality that we have to punish someone because we scared ourselves that I find so disturbing.

"But seeing circuit boards and components makes them freak out. I've been amazed over the years at the visceral reaction some people have to the sight of electronic components."

I have that reaction to wire nests too CD, but for a different reason. Parasitic inductance is no joke. As is maintenance and sustainability. Route your wires cleanly and use lacing cord damn it!

I had to repair a calibration fixture that had hundreds of wires, all white, and all point to point. Days of wasted work trying to figure out what went where so I could fix it.

When this incident first came to light, I'd assumed that it was a typical case of ZT overreaction as well. But then more details started to emerge.

1. Ahmed didn't make a 'clock', someone disassembled an LED clock and mounted it into a metal case w/ a bunch of unnecessary wiring. They made something that looks like the beginnings of a small suitcase bomb.

2. The father is a political activist who has refused to discuss this situation with the school, rather he's engaged CAIR.

3. The family is delivering canned statements to the press with the obvious intention of politicizing this situation. They've created a hash tag for this purpose as well.

4. Ahmed doesn't seem to know much about electronics. Listen to his TV interview. It doesn't seem likely that he'd built the clock.

-------------
I agree that schools often do go overboard. But consider what would happen if there was a bombing and it was discovered that several weeks earlier a school had confiscated a prototype for the device.

That a new student had brought it in, but couldn't answer questions about its purpose or construction. He told them that it was a clock that he invented. So they gave it back to him and never reported the incident. Only later did they realize that one of his relatives used it in a bombing.

There would be hell to pay.

"Route your wires cleanly and use lacing cord damn it!"

You're so old fashioned... seriously, I got my first lesson on that as a teenager, when I volunteered to try to fix a friend's guitar amp. He had powered it up without the speaker cab connected, and there was a small lightning storm under the chassis. I wound up re-wiring almost the whole thing and replacing most of the tube sockets. When you get across 350V DC, it hurts, damn it. Since then I try to avoid poking around inside tube guitar amps.

I've seen suggestions that this is some sort of a 'test' or 'publicity stunt' - based on not very much evidence, but let that pass.

Even if it was - I don't think it was, but even if it was - then double the stupid on the school and the police for letting themselves be led around by the nose like this.

Repeat after me. It's not a bomb. It does not contain any bomb-like materials. It does not contain anything that looks like bomb materials. Bombs don't look anything like this in real life - they only look like this in movies, which are not real life.

Any passing idea that anyone had that it might be a bomb, or any part of a bomb, could have been dispelled in about 30 seconds of examination by anyone with a functioning and skeptical brain.

Either way - innocent science project or deliberate hoax - the school and the police acted like total morons throughout. And the vapid and unquestioning way in which the official statements of the police and school officials are being repeated just reinforce how dumb they are - they're retreating behind canned platitudes and sinister suggestions, instead of coming out and telling a straight story. Everyone's lawyering up.

Oh, for a plain old shift sergeant who would come out and say 'Some teacher at the school got her panties in a wad because of something that she thought looked like something she'd seen in a "Die Hard" movie. We responded, took a 30 second look, realized it was not a bomb, and cleared the call. No crime here = no reason for police involvement. We don't know what the kid did, or why, and we don't care. Anything he did is now between the school and his parents. We'll respond to any call of a suspicious object. As soon as we determine, by a common-sense investigation, that it's not a suspicious object, then our involvement ends." But they just couldn't help themselves from turning a curious but not-illegal event into a criminal matter. Now they're stuck with what they did, and their only choice is to double down.

llater,

llamas

"Now they're stuck with what they did, and their only choice is to double down."

No, they're not stuck with it. They could always say, "Sorry, we screwed up, it won't happen again", and that would pretty much be the end of it. What happened is: As Reynolds said the other day, the ignorant thugs who run our institutions these days are so secure in their power base, they feel comfortable in doubling down, just to rub everyone's noses in it. It's what bullies do when they know they will face no reprisals for their actions.

Even if it was - I don't think it was, but even if it was - then double the stupid on the school and the police for letting themselves be led around by the nose like this.

Exactly.

And look, I don't except English teachers to be experts on bomb apparatuses but even a modicum of critical thinking skill would indicate that at minimum a bomb should have, I dunno, some explosive material therein.

To be sure, my lab partner managed to make a fiery circuit board in our engineering class but a) it still didn't explode and b) I don't think Ahmed connected 12V to ground.

Sadly, critical thinking was ruled out at schools some time ago.

I have to agree that it looked like a suitcase bomb; however, consider the source--this is a teenager. And if you can remember to those days you would remember that most teenager's goals are to f*ck with The Man (or a more inclusive, The Power). IMHO, he made it within a suitcase to mess with those who would see it, to make them think it looked like a bomb.

This is a perfectly rational action seen through the eyes of a teenager.

However, the reaction was not rational. Yes, this was most likely meant as a tacit joke but it was taken way too seriously once any rational adult figured out that it was just a trolling exercise. Did he deserve to get suspended for a few days for a bad joke. I think yes. But did he need to be arrested for a stupid prank? No.

Has anyone seen the "official" picture of this thing?

Becuase I've seen FIVE different representations from something the size of a calculator to the size of a briefcase, and none of them are anything to write home about.

http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/

I think that there is a pretty good chance that Ahmed, or someone, intended to make something that looked like a bomb, at least the sort of bomb you see in movies.

It's also apparent that this whole situation is being stage managed by his family.

"One had about 5 gallons of home made jet fuel in a drum on his front porch."

Oh, Christ on a popsicle stick...

"Jet Fuel" is a very, very clean variety of kerosene, which you can buy at any WalMart. OR naptha. See article.

That's all. No magic, space-warping, arc-flashing miracle to it. Modern jets get their power & efficiency by achieving a ram/pumped-air "compression ratio" of about 80:1.

Ok Rad, I should have put 'Jet Fuel' in scare quotes. I don't know exactly what he had in that drum, but that is what he called it and it went boom quite nicely. Similarly his 'fireworks' would more correctly be called home made grenades. Honestly he was not a dangerous fellow to anyone but himself. He had a strong interest in high energy chemistry and liked to experiment.

Crazily the Secret Service wasn't interested in him for any of that. Not their job after all. He was on an anti-Clinton blog back during the Lewinsky stuff. I'm guessing some guys wanted to go on a road trip so they checked him out. Like Amy has experienced they tried all the petty intimidation tricks on him. Suits and dark sunglasses. Threateningly saying "We hear you don't like the president." To which he responded "I don't. They should impeach the bastard." and slammed the door in their face. Then they tried spying on him and were disappointingly incompetent about it. Yes they had all kinds of neat high teck gadgets. And they probably would have worked in an urban setting. But out in the country their toy helicopter stuck out like a sore thumb due to the noise it made. I hope those were not our top agents, but I wouldn't guarantee it.