Yes, it’s obvious that nobody in their right mind would fail to see this is a clock. Every clock in my house looks exactly like this. Silly scare-mongerers who can’t recognize a clock when they see one!
Of course, the kid is not to blame for anything. But it’s also understandable that people look at this and remember that Columbine was planned to be primarily a bombing attack. And framing this as “Texan idiots freak out about a clock” is a bit unfair.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thank you for sprinkling a little sanity into our outrage-driven batshit crazy world.
The kid never should’ve been arrested, but the number of people who’ve blindly assumed that the white rednecks in Texas were so racist that they couldn’t recognize a clock for what it was is staggering.
If any kid showed up on their doorstep with that device, half of them would freak out and call the police. And the press demonstrated its lack of professionalism by once again only sharing the facts that would spur the most outrage.
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“And the press demonstrated its lack of professionalism by once again only sharing the facts that would spur the most outrage.”
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Exactly.
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To be fair, there were plenty of places where this could have stopped before the kid was being led away in handcuffs by the police. If someone had simply confiscated the clock, or even sent the kid home with a “don’t bring scary looking gizmos to school” warning, no one outside of the school would ever have heard of it.
And the “genuinely thought it was a bomb” explanation doesn’t fit with the English teacher’s actions. I don’t know exactly what I would do if someone handed me what I believed to be a bomb, but I’m pretty sure that “put it in my desk and go on teaching as usual” isn’t it.
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What I’m objecting to is the constant referral to this object as “a clock” in the media. I actually thought it was A clock, meaning something generic and easily recognizable as a clock, until I finally discovered this photo.
This is dirty, dishonest reporting that strives to create as much hype as possible. This is a real low for journalists. And then they ask why their profession is dying.
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Well, it is a clock… That is what amateur electronic clocks look like. What do you think they should call it?
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That’s the image that comes to you when you hear the words “a clock”? Seriously? Do you believe that this is how most people imagine a clock to be?
I’m quite stunned by the eagerness with which people are defending what is obviously dirty, irresponsible journalism in this thread. I guess, as long as they sell a pleasing narrative, it doesn’t matter that they lie and manipulate. The reporting of news is not really about reporting or the news. It’s just a pretext for people to give free reign to emotions that predate the story.
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When you say “a clock” of course that’s not what I picture. When you say “a clock a kid built”, yes, that is almost exactly what I picture. Although if it’s a clock a kid built, I might also expect a potato or some other garden vegetable to be attached 😉
As you said below, people have very different life experiences and thus expectations of what a clock is. Some of us have very different experiences with what manipulative journalism looks like. Most articles that I saw had similar pictures of the clock in question, so it didn’t seem manipulative to me.
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I think “different life experiences” is right. If the news reports said that he had just brought a clock to school, I would have been confused. Since all of the ones I heard specified “homemade clock,” I wasn’t surprised by the teacher’s initial reaction, since I know that most homemade electronics can look like bombs to the untrained eye.
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A kid at 5, yes. Maybe even at 8, if there is some learning disability. But at 14??? Even without a potato, this is way bizarre for a 14-year-old.
But at this point, who knows? Maybe the kid does have retardation and we are not being told. I wouldn’t trust any report on this story at this point.
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That seems a bit harsh. Where did you get such high expectations of appliances made by teenagers? Was this a big part of your primary school curriculum? Hands-on electronics at my school were limited to creating a circuit to make a small light go on, and we only got to do that once.
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Yes, I forgot, this is the US, we are supposed to praise them exuberantly for managing to tie their shoelaces at 15. Then they come to college and fall apart every time they are not greeted with praise for managing to sit up straight. I’m on sabbatical, so I’m out of practice on my skill of saying “Good job!” every 5 minutes.
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So this is something you know how to do? You talk as if you know enough about making digital clocks to judge how advanced this project is. Have you done this kind of thing in the past?
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No, of course not. But teenagers should be capable of figuring out that in order to impress somebody -which was supposedly this guy’s goal – they need to do something that’s actually impressive.
But I keep forgetting, this is an American kid. They expect to be celebrated all day long.
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Just because something isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it’s not impressive. I haven’t tried to make any digital clocks from scratch, but I understand that many of the worse looking ones are quite challenging for a beginner since you need to both wire them correctly and code them to tell the correct time.
And do you mean to tell me that you’ve never wanted to show off something new you learned to do just because you weren’t yet among the experts?
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You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is a mess. One of the articles – although who knows how much it can be trusted – says the kid threw this thing together in 40 minutes. That’s so very typical, unfortunately. Do the tiniest lick of work and expect to be celebrated.
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I have family in Texas, and, yes, the Texans in question are stupid enough not to realize it isn’t a bomb, and the mayor of Irving is very big on being paranoid about jihadis and Muslims being in her fair city.
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So everybody who looks at this and doesn’t think, “A clock” is stupid? Would you think this is a clock if you saw it on your table?
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Read what I wrote, Clarissa. I didn’t question that somebody might not recognize it as a clock, but that to think it was a bomb was idiotic is my opinion, like it or not.
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The greatest idiot is the person who wastes so much time on a blog of somebody he considers an idiot.
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The first thing I would do if I saw something I thought was a bomb, whatever its’ provenance, would be to call the local or county bomb squad. Was this done in this case?
I’m not exactly an expert in electronics, but it doesn’t scream out bomb to me. But then, I can see where the battery should go to make it operational, whatever it’s purpose.
And, to make things even clearer, I’ve lived in TX for 6 months when I was in Jr. High. I had some very good teachers there, the students, not so much. My relations on that side of my family range from the criminal, the idiotic, and the reasonable. I, at least, have a clean rap sheet.
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I’m not even aware that “the local or county bomb squad” exists. THis is the first time in my life I hear this expression.
People have different experiences from yours and a different image of what both a bomb and a clock looks like. This doesn’t mean they are necessarily evildoers. It simply means this isn’t their area of expertise.
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I think that’s part of the reason this initially caught so much attention from us science/tech nerds on the internet. We think it is a shame that people have so little working understanding of the electronics that permeate the world in which they live, that folks can’t tell the difference between a bomb and clock. And then they arrest the poor kid on top of it, for doing something so many of us nerdlings did as children which we already got teased for… it brings out a lot of emotions.
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I swear to god that I left my comment about the story being a pretext to express preexisting emotions before I read this response.
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A little research shows that Irving, TX does have a bomb squad :
http://cityofirving.org/903/Special-Operations-Division
Oh, and I never said they were evil doers, just that they are guilty of being Texas morons.
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The fact remains, however, that had he been a white Xtian, the response would have been very different. It is indeed anti-Muslim fear and racism. End of story.
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How can you know that? And how can you know that if he were white and Christian he’d still be getting invitations from the president and all these Twitter campaigns of support? I’m not saying he wouldn’t. I’m saying, how can you possibly know?
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I initially found the story here: http://www.loweringthebar.net/2015/09/texas-police-wont-charge-for-clock.html
It sheds some light on the behavior of the police, at least. Everyone later admitted that they knew it wasn’t a bomb, nor was it meant to be one.
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I think a lot of us know that if he were white he would have been treated differently because we did do things like this as white kids and never got in trouble. Hell, I have plenty of white friends who brought actually dangerous homemade things to school and got away with a pat on the head, and a “you’re so smart!”, and maybe if things actually went wrong a reminder to exercise better judgement in the future. Some of these friends went to school in TX not too long ago too!
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The discussion has stopped being serious.
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Sorry, I didn’t mean to be silly – just sharing my personal experiences and those of my friends (I swear we were actually discussing this point on Facebook).
Personal experiences aside, it has been shown that in US schools african-american and latino children get harsher punishments than white kids for the same infractions, on average. Just as darker skinned folks get harsher sentences in the criminal justice system than white people do. Again, it’s on average, so in any individual case it can be hard to tell. In this case though, for a large number of folks, it seems very likely that racial prejudices are playing a role.
For the record, I do think this kid probably deserved a warning that these sorts of devices can scare people, and he should be careful. Like the many commenters above, I also think getting the police involved was probably a prejudice-driven and definitely a massive overstep. I am less sold on your idea that the press are purposely trying to misrepresent the situation (although I am sure some are).
And with that, I think I have out-commented my welcome for now 😉 and I need to get back to work anyway. I always do appreciate your different perspective though!
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I have seen anything remotely resembling an explanation why a terrorist would take the trouble to add a count-down timer to any bomb device. But if I got angry and wanted to scare somebody, I would add a timer to an empty box, as our views of the the world are created by Hollywood. (Also, among other things, ricocheting bullets won’t create sparks. If they aren’t hitting anything made of the rare metal zirkonium.)
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I’m an educator. I know nothing about bombs and timers and I don’t watch Hollywood movies. I’d freak out if I saw this thing in the classroom.
It would be great that instead of the ridiculous hype about “a clock”, the media started a discussion about the reasons why teachers and students don’t feel safe in the classroom.
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http://gawker.com/7-kids-not-named-mohamed-who-brought-homemade-clocks-to-1730999866
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The picture you have on top, with a briefcase, is that the clock that Ahmed brought to school?
And, sorry, the school doesn’t get a pass on this, given their history.
http://gawker.com/the-texas-school-board-that-governs-ahmeds-school-once-1731312348
Wackjob school board led by a wackjob mayor. Shit like this was bound to happen. They interrogated a minor without the presence of a guardian. In fact, they didn’t even let him call his family, which is a straight up violation of Texas law. He was led out in metal handcuffs.
—
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.
“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
“[The cop] said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
—
But officers still did not believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.
—
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I got it from here: http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2015/09/its-like-old-fashioned-ya-novel-but.html
My problem here is specifically with the reporting of the story. I insist that writing about this and using the words “a clock” without the picture is simply wrong.
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Ah ok. Agreed.
“And framing this as “Texan idiots freak out about a clock” is a bit unfair.”
How about ‘Texan idiots freak out about a muslim kid”?
It’s a given these people are idiots. We’re just debating about the form of the idiocy here.
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What I’m debating is how anybody can trust any reporting on any issue after this kind of stories? If this is “a clock”, who knows which other parts of the story were manipulated to make it more sellable?
I will never understand how people can see this and not get angry.
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I hadn’t been following this at all but had assumed it was something blown up* way out of proportion….. and it was.
As I said, post nation state media are all about mediating the consumers immediate emotional reactions massaging various pleasure points without actually addressing much of substance.
*get it? get it? I am zee wordy master of zee klever word playze!
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And later the English teacher admitted that she didn’t really think it was a bomb, nor was it meant to be one. And the police said so, too. This alone says that they were just looking for an excuse.
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None of this excuses the dirty, scandal-monging tactics of the reporters who refer to this thing as “a clock.” This is anything but A clock.
If journalists so easily manipulate facts to create a neat little scandal on this issue, how can anybody trust their reporting on anything else?
The kid is fine, he’s going to meet with Obama, he’s a hero now, everything is good. And we are all collectively left with the kind of media that will use any pretext to generate scandal and drama.
I don’t understand why nobody is appalled by this. It’s like people can only be angry about things these dirty journalists told them to be angry about.
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To me, on the other hand, this is clearly just a clock. It’s probably my experience with circuitry — there’s honestly no room in there for the thing to be anything but a digital clock. There are clearly no explosives inside, and the messiness of the whole thing speaks more to the haphazard way it was put together than anything else. I think a picture or description is essential — it’s always essential, though. The big thing is that the student was arrested and was not allowed to contact his parents. To me, the problem is that everyone later admitted that they all knew it wasn’t a bomb, nor was it intended to be a bomb, and yet they called it out anyway. That makes them seem more like the scandal-mongers, at least in this case.
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How do you know what they admitted or didn’t? From the same media that described this as “a clock”?
I won’t read a single article on this situation after it has become clear that this is an attempt to manipulate. I don’t trust these reporters.
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http://popehat.com/2015/09/16/willful-paranoia-the-classic-excuse-for-willful-paranoia-istandwithahmed/
This one’s a legal blog. There’s some discussion about why classrooms feel unsafe, as well.
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I have almost no experience with circuitry, but this still doesn’t look like a bomb (or something that I’d freak out about) to me. Clarissa’s right that there needs to be a discussion about the reasons why teachers and students don’t feel safe in classrooms anymore though – if a bit of exposed circuitry is enough to make people even slightly worried, let alone freaked out, the society in which those people live has serious problems.
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“None of this excuses the dirty, scandal-monging tactics of the reporters who refer to this thing as “a clock.” This is anything but A clock.”
But it IS a clock. Its main function is to tell time, therefore it is a clock. The problem was that this fact is not apparent to the average citizen. If a news organization is saying that no one in their right mind would thing it was a bomb, then they are being dishonest, but it is not dishonest to call it a clock.
This is sometimes an issue with DIY electronics. I made myself an mp3 speaker from a kit I got at the Maker faire. It works very well and I’m proud of it. Every once in a while I’ll look at it and think, “That thing kind of looks like a bomb,” but it is still a speaker.
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I can oy repeat my question: when you hear the words “a clock”, is this the image that comes to your mind? Is this the image you believe comes to most people’s minds?
This discussion is reminding me of an old joke about a conversation between a masochist and a sadist.
“Hit me, hurt me, brutalize me,” says the masochist.
“No, I wont, no, I won’t,” says the sadist.
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So what do you think the news reporters should have called it, in order to be more honest?
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They could have simply posted a picture. Not a single account I saw, including the NYTIMES did. Except for the blogger I linked. And that’s a screaming shame.
But I’m no longer surprised since everyone seems happy with this sort of reporting.
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It’s not so much that I’m “happy” as that I haven’t completely trusted any news source for some time now. When I hear about some ridiculous outrage, I usually google it until I find a more complete version of the story, and this is far from the most deceptive reporting I have seen recently.
The news outlets reported accurately that a homemade clock was mistaken for a bomb. It didn’t even occur to me that people would be picturing the type of clock one would buy in a store, because that wouldn’t make any sense. I also didn’t realize that any of the outrage was over the fact that a clock was mistaken for a bomb, and that it wasn’t just about how the kid was treated.
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http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/ahmed-mohamed-meets-americas-fear-of-bright-non-white-kids/3145
It turns out the kid built it in twenty minutes, hence its pretty messy appearance.
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I don’t object to the fact that they initially thought it was a bomb. I do object to the fact that they had the kid arrested and continued to punish him after they learned it wasn’t. A lot of DIY electronics projects look like they could be bombs, and they are becoming increasingly more popular as learning tools for kids.
This is something that school administrators are going to have to learn to deal with in a rational manner.
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And while I can’t blame the kid who made the clock for being a bit naive, the person who tried to board an airplane with this thing is an idiot!
http://www.travelpulse.com/news/impacting-travel/teenager-attempts-to-bring-bomb-shaped-alarm-clock-on-airplane.html
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“I can repeat my question: when you hear the words “a clock”, is this the image that comes to your mind?”
No, but when I hear the words ‘a clock made for a science project at school’ this is exactly what comes to mind.
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The more I read about it the more I think it was engineered (get it? get it? I slay me) by the father (a wannabe politician in a country he cares about – Sudan).
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Always with the dog whistles, this guy.
‘..in a country he cares about’. What a weird turn of phrase.
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Guess what, everybody?
That device the kid brought to the school REALLY IS A CLOCK…but he didn’t invent it. It’s this 1970’s LED Radio Shack clock,
opened up, with the external frame and keypad removed,
and then fastened into a pencil box case like this one:
Whatever stunt the kid was pulling — and regardless of how stupid the adults around him acted — this story is not the way the media presented it.
(Maybe the truth will come out when Obama and the kid hold a joint press conference at the White House.)
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I hope you’re proud of yourself, Dreidel.
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You got it!!
By the way, when are you going to respond to my question to you in “Liberal Philosophy of Foreign Policy?”
(And I thank you for providing the instructions that have enabled me to post images in comments.)
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I didn’t hear anyone claim he invented it either. I assumed he got the directions from a site like Instructables.
http://www.instructables.com/howto/digital+clock/
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Everybody treats this kid like an object and not a person. It would be a lot more useful instead of the current campaign of mindless and dishonest adulation (“Oh, you are going to be a great scientist! This is how all great inventors begin!”) that somebody told him honestly, “Look, the clock is not very good just yet, but here are some books and a membership in a young inventors club, and after you learn and work hard, you’ll make a real kickass clock.”
Instead, the kid is being told that you can throw together some messy tangle of parts in under an hour and everybody will go nuts over how talented and fantastic you are. It’s downright cruel to do this to him.
He’s too young to understand that none of this is about him, that he’s just a useful little toy for people who are eager to demonstrate how tolerant and progressive they are.
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I understand that perspective, I have no idea how I could have handled this amount of attention at his age. I will also admit that I have definitely seem some more impressive projects. I’m just a little bit taken aback by the hostility towards him here.
I might also be having a bit of a personal reaction because I have recently started getting into this kind of thing and so far my only really successful projects have been with kits that were designed to be easy for beginners. After and entire evening of trying unsuccessfully just to install a program to make a touchscreen work, seeing someone insult another person’s much more successful project can feel a bit personal.
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“Instead, the kid is being told that you can throw together some messy tangle of parts in under an hour and everybody will go nuts over how talented and fantastic you are. It’s downright cruel to do this to him.”
Yep. It seems an entire generation of Americans cannot distinguish between “You could have done a better job” and “You’re a terrible person!”
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I see these kids come into my office to demand praise for 8-page essays with literally hundreds of mistakes and I realize that somebody has messed up pretty bad. When these kids finally realize that the world is not going to applaud their half-assed efforts and often not even their successes, they became the first candidates for antidepressants, pill – popping, addiction, etc.
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Actually, if someone had simply turned over the circuit board so those with the knowledge could see the components on it, this should have been figured out fairly quickly …
To me it looks like:
one four digit seven-segment LED display with two LEDs for colons, meaning that it’s meant for use in a clock or a timer;
a printed circuit board with a ribbon connector that’s big enough to directly drive the LEDs, plus another ribbon connector to what we can assume is a power conversion board;
a hastily added US mains power lead that’s connected (somewhat unsafely) to a small step-down transformer which is connected to another board with some sort of zener clamp/diode rectifier for DC output, which is why it’s probably for power conversion (and in fact the transformer might have been attached to this board prior to bodging);
an unused 9V DC battery lead connected to the segment driver board for no obvious purpose since the entire thing could be mains powered (or that it’s the “battery backup” for the clock from which he “borrowed” the lot);
a fantastic aluminium case that’s been horribly bodged up for this bodge job, which I would happily take away from him so I could give him a cruddy (but electrically neutral or earthed) plastic electronic hobby box with enough room to mount that transformer securely, along with the other boards and wiring.
In other words, to me it looks like it could be a clock, but as badly bodged up as it is, the thing could very well be a crappy timer for some unknown purpose. Without being able to see the components on the boards, I can’t actually identify whether it’s a clock or not for certain.
What it looks like to me is that it’s probably a clock that’s been badly savaged by tinkering, and that all of the parts were transferred into a case more or less intact in order to make the clock have the appearance of having been built, rather than having been salvaged.
It’s quite possible that aside from some not-so-fantastic bodging, nothing was actually built, with fairly obvious implications …
[never cuts the green wire — the green wire is for sissies anyway …] 🙂
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I said from the start that this was a jumbled mess of cords and not an invention that was going to land this boy in MIT. But people only see what suits their narrative, and the mess became a sophisticated invention in popular discourse.
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