Posted on 09/19/2015 5:51:43 AM PDT by 1010RD
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.
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 63 756.
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 Mohamad 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 exist 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.
* Correction: A reader and commenter, Joe Donaldson, tracked down the clock in a Radio Shack catalog dated 1986. It’s likely that my guess of mid-to-late 70s was off by a bit, and it’s now obvious it was a model that was for sale in the mid 80s. Though it doesn’t really change the point, I want to post this correction here for accuracy sake and thank Joe for the heads up. (See the comment here, with link to the catalog page.)
He’s an archetypal Muslim inventor. Take 70’s technology, make it even more primitive, and use it for an evil purpose it was never intended for. It’s their entire technological history.
If Muslims had to use their own inventions, the Twin Towers would still be standing.
I suspected the same thing - he removed an old electronic clock from its case and put the circuit board and parts in the pencil box. I bet he didn’t have to solder one connection!
When I was a teenager I did a few real things with electronics. I built an audio filter - just two chips and a few other parts, I drew the circuit board. The audio filter went into my tube-type ham radio transceiver. I tapped the filament voltage and converted it to DC to run the filter. With a turn of the switch the unfiltered audio would either go to the audio amplifier tube unfiltered of it would pass through the audio filter first. I installed it all inside the radio’s case. The filter helped me to hear Morse Code signals better without interference. I have fond memories of getting on my bicycle and going to Radio Shack to get parts for this or that.
The real news is that our president, and the CEO of Facebook are too stupid to know what true technical creativity is.
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Our president’s a fraud, and Facebook guy stole his technology. They are just giving the little Jihadist hoaxer professional courtesy.
In any case the "clock device" looks like the components of some inexpensive alarm clock removed from the case and stuck in a pencil box, not in the manner of a science project, or an invention, or to impress some high school "engineering teacher" (who has yet to be identified), but in a manner to create a suspicious looking device with visible electronics and wiring. This is indicated in part by putting the LED display inside the case along with the wiring and AC-powered transformer.
This kid pulsed the system, and his father used (if not helped plan) the scheme to weaken the terrorist profiling efforts of the school and community.
Now Traitorobama, aided by the fifth-column media, has helped to spread this plot to weaken anti-islamoterrorism efforts nationwide, and to further his aims of bringing even more islamoterrorists into this country.
So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamad 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
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Good enough for an invite to the White House.
Get a typical mohammaden first name, repackage a cheap, crude 1970s clock to look like a bomb, get huffy and indignant when questioned by your zero-tolerance policy school, and get Obama to invite you to the White House for your “love of science.” That is so sick and outrageous, but so typical.
What about these kids who are barely older than this mohammaden creep? Has Obola honored them? Probably not because there or no Mohammed’s or Achmeds. But Intel did.
Raymond Wang, 17, was awarded first place for engineering a new air inlet system for airplane cabins to improve air quality and curb disease transmission. Wang’s system improves the availability of fresh air in the cabin by more than 190 percent while reducing pathogen inhalation concentrations by up to 55 times compared to conventional designs, and can be easily and economically incorporated in existing airplanes.
Nicole Ticea, 16, developed an inexpensive, easy-to-use testing device to combat the high rate of undiagnosed HIV infection in low-income communities. Her disposable, electricity-free device provides results in an hour and should cost less than $5 to produce. Ticea has already founded her own company.
Karan Jerath, 18, developed a method of refining and testing a novel device that should allow an undersea oil well to rapidly and safely recover following a blowout. Jerath developed a better containment enclosure that separates the natural gas, oil and ocean water; accommodates different water depths, pipe sizes and fluid compositions; and can prevent the formation of potentially clogging methane hydrate.
I have a background similar to the author of the piece. The guy is absolutely right. The kid didn’t “invent” anything. He took out the guts of an old clock.
I will be surprised if Obama follows through on his plan to bring the kid to the White House. The story will quietly go away.
it’s awful dangerous to have an exposed power transformer sitting near the snooze button
It was a 120V device. This could have gone very badly for the kid mainly because it looks like he was woefully ignorant of the safety rules for electricity. In other words, it was a deliberate, stupid prank by an ignorant, stupid kid.
Begrudgingly I must salute the nefarious genius of his con-artist dad: like a perfect key inserting into a well oiled lock, ALL the elements are there for the American GuiGuilt Narrative.
The really insightful, creative flourish was the NASA t-shirt.
My guess is that careful questioning would show the boy knows NOTHING about either electronics or NASA.
He has NEVER before brought any electonics to school, has never before discussed them with his best friends at school.
This is Bonfire of the Vanities at Romper Room.
The Arab dads daily bread and butter has been guilt manipulation and this is only his latest work, Paliwood come to America.
This is exactly as I have been saying on FR since this story first broke. Did Ahmed actually invent a new clock or a new way of telling time or simply make his own electronic clock himself? There is nothing scholarly or inventive about taking an existing, working clock’s innards and putting them inside a suitcase like box, where the clock can’t even be read. It was clearly a hoax bomb, which is wrong to bring to a school or public place, and probably illegal.
We need a photo skit:
Obama talking to Mohamed w clock in briefcase sitting there:
“You didn’t build that!”
“somebody gave you those parts”
“somebody gave you those instructions from the bomb making manual.”
This was no science project.
Exactamundo, FRiend. This was a hoax bomb intended to garner attention. Muslim grievance theater. Mission accomplished.
Posted on September 19 2015 - 1:01 AM - Posted by: iizthatiiz
Governor Palin weighs in on the student who brought a facsimile bomb into school:
I Guess Muhammad’s Pencil Box is Cooler Than the Palin Kids’
"It doesn’t look like a pencil box to me." I love Bristol’s perspective on this. You have to read this:
http://www.patheos.com/…/obama-invites-kid-mistakenly-arre…/
Talk about the dangers of a reactionary-slash-biased media! The first reports on this potential bomb-imitator were so fishy to begin with.
Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade "clock" that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told "if you see something, say something!") gets invited to the White House.
By the way, President Obama’s practice of jumping in cases prematurely to interject himself as the cool savior, wanting so badly to attach himself to the issue-of-the-day, got old years ago. Remember him accusing police officers doing their job as "acting stupid"; claiming if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin; claiming he needed to know who was a fault in an industrial accident so he’d "know who’s a** to kick"; etc., etc. Those actions are about as presidential as his selfie stick.
Here’s background on Muhammad’s innocent "clock" he brought to school, and his suspicious refusal to answer authorities:
http://www.breitbart.com/…/09/18/real-story-istandwithahmed/
Yep, believing that’s a clock in a school pencil box is like believing Barack Obama is ruling over the most transparent administration in history. Right. That’s a clock, and I’m the Queen of England.
Compare Muhammad’s pencil box to the ones laying around the Palin household:
-— This is Bonfire of the Vanities at Romper Room. -—
And now the 24 media spin cycle is over and no one will know the truth. The media is good at what they do.
IMO he was trying to impress his father.
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