I think it is about equally likely as the thing having been done with an intent in mind to see if it is possible to provoke a reaction and cry foul to the media afterwards. I guess we don't know if it is one or the other. Would the kid have gotten invited if the kid was a non-minority kid?
I don't know. I also don't know if this would have even happened if the kid was a non-minority. The issue here isn't simply the overreaction of the school. Its that the kid, rightly or wrongly, perceived that he was being punished on account of his race. That can be very disheartening and damaging to a young person's psyche. So, I think this gesture from the White House and these other supporters is a good thing. They are turning a difficult situation for him and turning into something positive by acknowledging his keen interest in science as a good thing. Anyway, I thought your point was about the behavior of the family. Obviously we can't blame the kid or his parents for getting an invite from the White House.
Indeed. And Obama fell for it, as he saw an opportunity to make it look like he was standing up for racism....even better that it was in Texas! we all know the answer to this. No.
At that age, I'd have thought the fact that it is actually is a clock and that fact could be demonstrated would be enough in case anybody got the wrong idea - the misunderstanding is on the party who misunderstands, and any actual outcomes would be based on what it actually is, not what it might look to someone who doesn't know the first thing about electronics. It took me a long time to fully understand people's ability to double down on stupid. The idea that the child is beholden to the free associations of people who are completely ignorant of what they are looking at is still offensive to me, but I understand people's irrationality better.
Kids get done for pop-tart guns and making their hand like a gun so bringing an unsolicited wire nest to school these days probably isn't the best idea. The dad buying pizza for his best friends the media makes the entire thing suspicious. And if it was a scheme to get a reaction the intent was to bring a fake bomb which is bad.
And Galileo probably shouldn't have told the Pope that the Earth rotates around the Sun from the perspective of his short term health, but I'm glad he did, and I doubt anybody would claim the Pope did the right thing.
You agree that this was a clock, right? The crux of the case is a kid brought a clock. The administrators misunderstood, and thought it was a bomb, even though it can be demonstrated otherwise, because they were totally ignorant of electronics. Usually, when there is a misunderstanding and one party is wrong, the party in the right doesn't get punished.
That didn't look like a clock. I have spent more than a few seconds with a soldering iron and it looks like a nest of ****ty wires. Honestly the kid sucks at building electronics. To me, bringing a fake bomb or gun to school is wrong and you can get done for it. I don't think there is anything wrong with wondering about the intent of the media savvy family wanting to be a victim. If they thought it was a bomb they would have called the squad.
Looks like a clock to me. I had a coworker that made an MP3 player in that exact case with about the same amount of stuff, before MP3 players were a commercial thing. Looked almost exactly like that, except it had a hard drive and a digital display instead of the LED's. If a cop pulled him over, would it have been cool to arrest him for having a bomb and punish him accordingly, even if it could be proven empirically that it wasn't? Should people who know stuff be beholden to the irratioal paranoia and fear of people who are completely ignorant? The first thing I look for in a bomb is the explosive. I see nothing that can remotely be construed as an explosive. I can't remotely see how anybody who can trace out the LCD from the clock registers from the transformer can imagine it is a bomb without any explosives. If you can find a single EOD tech who looks at that and thinks it is a functional bomb, I'll eat my shirt. The pages of Make magazine are full of projects like this. Most of you people would **** a brick if you walked in the doors of EPO. You'd think you'd found the al Qaeda headquarters of Texas. I made a theramin with vintage JAN tubes and point to point wiring. You guys would probably think it was a combination suitcase nuke/biological weapon. Makes this thing look neat and tidy by comparison. God help this kid if he ever decides to make a nixie clock. And I really suck at electronics. That's why I keep trying. Hopefully nobody mistakes my perfectly innocuous projects for a bomb and shoots me.
Sorry been going to EPO when I was 15 two locations ago. If your friend built something that looks like that your friend sucks at building stuff.
Same old dunces who can't look beyond the headline, dig deeper and think for themselves. Don't let the media tell you what your opinion should be -- form it yourself.
[rquoter] from Make This Is Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock After the news spread today of 9th-grader Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest for inadvertently confusing his teachers with his homebrew clock, we’ve all waited eagerly to see just how much his build looked like a bomb. Turns out, it doesn’t look much like a bomb at all. Unless of course, you’ve never seen an actual bomb (which, I’d garner, most of us haven’t). We examined the clock photo after its release and, while we’re pleased with Ahmed’s gumption, we’re also charmed by the innocence of the build. For starters, the case, mistakenly referred to as a briefcase by some outlets, appears to be a simple child’s pencil box (see the power plug on the right side as the “banana for scale”). Inside it, the electronics appear less as a combination of miscellaneous parts wired together into a timepiece, and more so as simply the guts of a standard digital alarm clock. Seen are a big seven-segment display, a transformer for stepping down the line voltage, 9-volt connector for power-outage battery backup, plus the control board with buttons to set the clock, and the main board that connects all the pieces together, attached to the display by a wide ribbon cable. Ahmed should be proud of his build. All 14-year-olds possess curiosity about taking things apart and putting them together; this is integral to learning and growing, which allows us to understand and master technology. It’s an extremely unfortunate situation that none of his teachers were able to understand the build, nor his intention to connect with them and find someone to foster his creative desires. We hope that through today’s events, Ahmed and all children misunderstood for their embracement of technology are given deeper consideration for their endeavors. There’s a lot of discussion still ongoing — some of it about STEM, some of it about race. All of this is good; today’s a day when a child’s arrest forced many overdue conversations to happen. [/rquoter]
Interesting is it point to point? Because this is a circuit board Spoiler and this is point to point Spoiler Let's see a picture of yours and see if you even know what a circuit board is whilst calling me out as an electronically illiterate.
Maybe you could show us the guts of some of the awesome stuff you built that totally doesn't look like a bomb, and let us judge?
