Very well. I like your technical information a great deal, and it answers several questions. But it looks as though you address the hypothetical as well, so lets get a little more hypothetical.
What percentage of Boston dwellers would recognize a resistor? What percentage of them could recognize a resisitor from a distance? And those who COULD recognize a resistor and perhaps mistake these "lite brites" as an explosive device, could assume a resistor might be a part of a trigger circuit or something else? For that matter, would Joe Average Bostonian know the function of ANY circuit board upon distant examination, whether it is to power a LED array, play Pac Man or functions as a television chassis?
What are the odds of one of these devices failing, especially since as you said the electronics were exposed? Would the weather cause one or more of these devices to stop glowing? What are the odds of one of these devices failing due to poor craftsmanship?
And if ONE of these failed devices, affixed to the pillar of an overpass or something else that one might deem as important infrastructure, is mistaken for an IED or whatever... Boom, We have what happened in Boston.
I'm seriously curious about this. So far, the BPD have been made out to look like idiots on the Internet and in the MSM, but I believe that they behaved appropriately given the circumstance.
APf
Maybe the BPD needs to hire some EE interns from MIT or Harvard, to help out the bomb squad. There are probably thousands of kids, at those two Boston schools alone, who could have looked at the devices, and told them there was no bomb.
Lots of people saw these devices over the three week period they were up. Some people took them home. There are Livejournal posts to that effect.
Ever been to a stadium where they have those wraparound displays that show pictures and text? Lots of people recognize LED displays. Cities are full of neon signs, LED signs, plain old light-up signs and so forth.
For three weeks, lots of folks saw these for what they were and nobody ran away screaming. (Menino probably thinks these were not "reasonable people")
I find it hard to imagine that the cops did not see these objects- they were not hidden and were as bright as traffic lights and were at least a foot square and were placed where pedestrians would see them. No cop saw one?
http://www.campdoha.org/soldiers/ieds.htm
has a briefing on how to spot IEDs- none look like Lite-Brite signs, but they do mention black trash bags and even soda cans as being a true threat. The brief does say that anything can be a bomb, but the examples given are of actual devices.
So Boston PD Bomb Squad probably had a similar brief, possibly a better one. In a city filled with discarded soda cans, black trash bags, and parked cars, after three weeks of deployment, they eventually had bright signs pointed out to them by a non-police person.
They did what they were trained to do when they get a suspicious device call, and some of what they found were NOT these signs- the thing in the subway was not a sign, and possibly the thing on Longfellow Bridge was a fake pipe bomb but news accounts are hazy. They had just responded to a hoax pipe bomb in a hospital.
So they did a pretty good job, but when they came across the second LED sign, they should not have gone berzerk.