so the lil shit got a bit of a raw deal ,
so what.
No harm done.
Would he rather everyone just ignored all signs of possible problems/risks/terrorism .
Of course he will never make a mistake in his oh so perfect life.
And , he will never need the cops , or any help , or any protection .
Hope he aint anywhere near the next terrorist type action.
Just imagine how much the silly lil shit would want if he gets his rotten greedy lil dumb arse blown sky high

lmao

Ah well the cops can just go on holiday I guess ,
or look the other way , if he has a problem.
They certainly wouldn wanna be in a hurry to help him , lol , they might be wrong ,
n get slapped with a $15 mill writ

 

I did think the other day would he of got the same heroic treatment if the terrorist attack had happened to Paris just before the clock thing

 

Sure he would have. We would have been told that those two things are not related.

 

Interesting! A Muslim kid expresses an interest, and it's terrorism! The rabid right goes wild!

Not saying it's worth $15M, but this is definitely racial profiling. Besides, didn't they move out of the country?

 

'Clock Kid' Ahmed Mohamed wants $15 million, written apologies

Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old so-called “clock kid” who made headlines after being arrested for bringing a homemade clock to his Texas school, is seeking $15 million in damages and written apologies from the Irving, Texas mayor and police chief.

A “letter of demand” sent to Mohamed’s former school and city officials by his lawyers warns that they will be seeking $15 million and written apologies from Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne and Police Chief Larry Boyd for their handling of the situation.

“Ahmed clearly was singled out because of his race, national origin, and religion,” the letter says. “Let’s face it; if Ahmed’s clock were ‘Jennifer’s clock,’ and if the pencil case were ruby red bedazzled with a clear rhinestone skull and crossbones on the cover, this would never have happened.”

Mohamed was vaulted into the international spotlight in mid-September after he was arrested and allegedly interrogated by police for bringing a homemade clock to school that some felt looked like a bomb. The incident sparked a top-trending hashtag “#IStandWithAhmed“ and even prompted internship offers from Facebook and Google and a personal invitation to the White House from President Barack Obama.

Mohamed’s family has since moved to Qatar, where he was offered a chance to study at one of the county’s elite prep schools.

“Qatar is nice, but it is not Texas. That is their attitude toward this,” Mohamed’s lawyer kelly Hollingsworth told The Washington Post. “They are citizens of Irving, Texas, USA, first. Are they devout people devoted to their faith? Absolutely. But they are Texans, too, and they want to come home. What we are seeking is for them to be able to do that with their heads held high.”

The letter offers a timeline of events that range from the alleged interrogation of Mohamed at school (which the letter says involved at least seven adults) to Van Dunye’s appearance on Glenn Beck’s show and even an Internet meme that superimposed Mohamed’s head onto Osama bin Laden’s body and called him a “little terrorist.”

“Ahmed has suffered severe psychological trauma during his involuntarily separation from his grandmother and extended family,” the letter says.

It adds: “Ahmed fears for his physical safety after receiving many threatening emails… he will experience pain and suffering as result of this for the rest of his days.”

“There is no other way to put it: Ahmed’s reputation in the global community is permanently scarred.”

The letter demands that $5 million be paid to the family from the school district and $10 million be paid by the city.

 

Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock… and Ourselves.

I have something in common with Ahmed Mohamed: as a youngster, I was also an electronics enthusiast. At his age and even earlier, I frequently took apart electronic devices – anything from my own toys, to broken things around the house, 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 did.) I’d try and troubleshoot, repair, or sometimes just disassemble things and salvage components for future projects. I’d try and imagine how all those bits and pieces, lengths of wires, mazes of conductive circuit board traces all came together to produce an image, or a sound, or some other useful function. I wanted to know how it all worked.

Without dating myself – fast forward a bunch of years, and I’m the same way. I’ve even picked up an engineering degree over the course of those years. I don’t have to only imagine how things work anymore, I have a pretty good understanding now. When shopping for electronic devices, my first instinct is to see if there’s a way to build one myself (and, I frequently do!) When something of mine breaks, I don’t send it back, I take it as a personal challenge to get it working again. If I fail, I still salvage useful parts – they might come in handy to fix something else later. This aspect of myself – being both methodical, and curious – hasn’t changed a bit over the years.


High resolution police photo of Ahmed’s clock. Click to enlarge.

So, this story about a 14 year old boy in Texas that was arrested on suspicion of creating a bomb hoax (who, apparently just wanted to show off his latest electronics project to his teachers) that has blown up (no pun intended) all over the news and social media, caught my attention immediately. Not because of his race, or his religion, the seeming absurdity of the situation, the emotionally charged photo of a young boy in a NASA t-shirt being led off in hand cuffs, the hash tags, the presidential response… no, none of that. I’m an electronics geek. I was interested in the clock! I wanted to figure out what he had come up with.

I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)

For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was. Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory.

So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 765.


Image property of eBay seller curiosities_curios

The shape and design is a dead give away. The large screen. The buttons on the front laid out horizontally would have been on a separate board – a large snooze button, four control buttons, and two switches to turn the alarm on and off, and choose two brightness levels. A second board inside would have contained the actual “brains” of the unit. The clock features a 9v battery back-up, and a switch on the rear allows the owner to choose between 12 and 24 hour time. (Features like a battery back-up, and a 24 hour time selection seems awful superfluous for a hobby project, don’t you think?) Oh, and about that “M” logo on the circuit board mentioned above? Micronta.



For one last bit of confirmation, I located the pencil box Ahmed used for his project. During this video interview he again claims it was his “invention” and that he “made” the device – but the important thing at the moment, at 1:13, we see him showing the pencil box on his computer screen. Here it is on Amazon, where it’s clearly labeled as being 8.25 inches wide. Our eBay seller also conveniently took a photo of the clock next to a ruler to show it’s scale – about 8 inches wide. The dimensions all line up perfectly.

So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamed did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.

If we accept the story about “inventing” an alarm clock is made up, as I think I’ve made a pretty good case for, it’s fair to wonder what other parts of the story might be made up, not reported factually by the media, or at least, exaggerated.

I refer back again to this YouTube video interview with Ahmed. He explains that he closed up the box with a piece of cord because he didn’t want it to look suspicious. I’m curious, why would “looking suspicious” have even crossed his mind before this whole event unfolded, if he was truly showing off a hobby project, something so innocuous as an alarm clock. Why did he choose a pencil box, one that looks like a miniature briefcase no less, as an enclosure for a clock? It’s awful hard to see the clock with the case closed. On the other hand, with the case open, it’s awful dangerous to have an exposed power transformer sitting near the snooze button (unless, perhaps his invention was to stop serial-snooze-button pressers by giving them a dangerous electrical shock!)

So again, I’m pointing all this out – about the specifics of the clock – not to pick on the poor kid. I’m picking on us, our culture, and our media. I don’t even care about the clock itself at this point.

If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? 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!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. 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. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, 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. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

I don’t know any of these things. But I’m intellectually mature enough to admit I don’t know, and to also be OK with that. I don’t feel a need to take the first exit to conclusionville. But I do like to find facts where I can, and prefer to let them lead me to conclusions, rather than a knee jerk judgement based on a headline or sound bite.

I think the whole event – and our collective response, with everybody up to the President chiming in, says a whole lot about us. We don’t care that none of us were there and knows what happened, we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts. We care about the story, but we don’t care about the actual facts. Headlines and click-bait are far more interesting than thinking for ourselves. We like to point out other any bit of perceived injustice or discrimination we can find – it’s practically a new national past-time. We like playing victim, and we like talking about victims – so much so we sometimes find victims where none really existed. We also like to find somebody to blame, even when there’s nobody at fault. We like to play social justice warrior on our Facebooks and Twitters, posting memes and headlines without digging in behind the sensationalism, winning bonus sensitivity points in the forms of likes and re-tweets. Once group-think kicks in, we rally around hash tags and start shouting moral outrage in a deafeningly loud national chorus. The media plays us like a fiddle, and we don’t even notice we’ve all been had.

As for me, I’m glad to apply the lessons I’ve learned as an electronics enthusiast to other aspects of life. There’s no emotion in troubleshooting a circuit, electricity doesn’t have morals. There’s just physics, and logic, and methodology. I think we could all benefit from applying a little more of that sort of thinking to these situations.

 

oh dear it was racial profiling , how absolutely terrible
oh dear it was religious prejudice,
how totally unforgiveable
Blah de blah de blah

FFS
Wake up m smell the flowers

Who predominantly are the types who commit terrorist type attrocities ?

Oh dear , but we cant say that.

Well sorry folks , it is an unavoidable reality.

What dose a home made bomb actually look like ?
a drink can ?
a shoe ?
a brief case ?
a cassette player ?
radio , cell phone , pair if underpants ?
a real wind up clockwork clock ?

oh , but surely never a bodgied up pencil case with a bunch of wires and electrical looking type thingy's ,
no no no , how stupid to think that was even possible.
and of course there was never the slightest possibility the silly lil tyke actually intended it to look like a bomb
(untill he got the correct reaction , which he hadn't allowed for , and instantly realised he might actually be in deep doggy doo'z)
oh no no no

Well
News Flash
News Flash
the world has become an even more dangerous.place over recent years (in terms of terrorism)
and sorry folks ,
but pc'ness and delicate stupid sensativities etc. aint gonna cut it ,
if we want any chance of preventing more of it

Rights and freedoms etc. come with responsabilities and obligations ,
and ,
costs .

We've got used to it at airports and similar places ,
guess what ,,,,
better get used to a lot more if it.

Time t get real folks

 

Right-wing americans.

 

Ahmed Mohamed Visits The White House, Meets Obama

'Clock boy' Ahmed Mohamed meets Google boss Sergey Brin

Clockmaker Ahmed Mohamed accepts full scholarship at Qatar innovation school

Space camp extends scholarship to Ahmed Mohamed, teen arrested for clock


Poor kid. I wonder how many years of therapy it's gonna take for him to get over instant celebrity and recipient of a whole lot of free stuff.

 

The school and cops royally fucked up. The knew it was no bomb - the school was never evacuated nor was the bomb squad called.

 

Excellent post. Finally some intelligent honest reporting. Yeah, probably was a kid's joke that went wrong, that a slick lawyer wants to turn into a new Porshe for himself. Ain't America great! We the people will be paying for that Porshe. We should have SUCKER tattooed on our foreheads. lol!!!

 

He builds a timer. Then moves to the middle east. He'll be building timers for the terrorists.

 

Someone should blow up the lawyer's house....

 

lol , or the kid's

Funny how long it took him to become So-ooo traumatised ,
after being so happy n pleased with his self , when the attention was on him .
Musta happened wen all those goodies stopped fallin offa the tree

Perhaps real life turned out to much like hard work ,
after celebrity .

 

I hope he gets the money I like to see people get hooked up

 

His time has run out..

 

Fifteen million will help him build a shit load of bombs...sorry, I meant clocks in his future.

 

He should just make hour glasses; sand being something they should all embrace.

 

America should give him the 15 million, but in the form of 15 million worth of sand.

 

Give him a dollar a year for 15 million years..... Have that scumbag terrorist brat set his clock for that....