The shifting rationales in the story of the Texas kid who brought a jury-rigged digital clock have been amazing. There’s been a steady progression of new excuses brought up to excuse throwing him in jail.
Early on, it was that it was simply precaution — they had standard procedures for dealing with potential threats. That’s patent nonsense. A standard response to a potential bomb would not involve throwing the “bomb” into the police car with the “bomb maker”. The school and the police knew it wasn’t a bomb from the beginning.
Then the complaint was that he didn’t properly explain what the device was. Simply not true: he said over and over precisely what it was, and all it was: it was a clock. Demanding that he say that it was something more when it wasn’t is absurd.
Then the yahoos all came out of the closet and said it sure doesn’t look like no clock to me. Yep. It was a collection of components strung together with wires, it was ugly and not too practical, but functionally, all it was was a clock. Sorry you don’t know much about electronics.
Then there were the detailed deconstructions of the clock, from the few pictures we have of it. This bit came from here, that bit came from there, here’s a dangling wire that has no purpose, there’s a cable that could be used to tap into the signal output from the clock. A terrorist could use this to set off a bomb! Sure. But they could also buy a $5 travel alarm from Wal-Mart even more easily to do the same thing. Can we arrest Wal-Mart now?
Then there were the nay-sayers: the kid was lying. He didn’t invent anything. This is true: a lot of us tinkered with old electronic components when we were his age, and assembled basic gadgets. I built a crystal radio, and made electric motors (looping those thin copper wires around and around was tedious). There was nothing revolutionary and lot that was clumsy in the clock. He disassembled and reassembled a Radio Shack digital gadget, nothing more. But so what? He’s 14! It’s excellent that he’s curious and is experimenting with technology, and is also enthused about it. That’s how scientists and engineers get started.
And now, at last, that lunatic Sarah Palin weighs in:
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,Palin rambled.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.
I thought we’d reached Peak Paranoia with Palin, until I read the comments on her post.
Guys, can’t you see between the lines? This was nothing less then a dry run, to test school security, had no one noticed it, next time, it would be the real thing
This little Muzzie was practicing his bomb making skills not “inventing a clock”.
It was a dry run to see how far they could get. They use their kids to bomb all the time in their country. They don’t care if their child dies in the process.
So now the demented right wing is convinced that Ahmed was actually planning to make a suicide attack on the school.
I’d like to believe we’ve reached the limit on this evolving set of excuses, but I’m not going to shortchange the astonishing imaginations of the American people.
So these are the actors and different intertwining storyline in this little play:
1/ A 14 year old who may or may not have exaggerated a bit his accomplishment.
2/ Adult school authorities who knew it was not a bomb, but anyway bullied a 14 year old like the authoritarian thugs they are, and then had the gal to call the cops for nothing.
3/ Adult cops who responded and possibly illegally tried to browbeat a 14 year old into confession something, anything, they could use against him.
You might be an authoritarian thug, right-wing reactionary or racist (possible all 3) if you want us to believe storyline 1 is the real story to concentrate on. Ugh.
Can we also lay to rest once and for all there is no such thing as islamophobia?
I quite like the idea that those of us not searching for reasons why Ahmed was wrong and bad didn’t realise that he hadn’t invented the clock. No shit. I had a digital clock – on my wrist no less – more than a decade ago!
So he uses the word “inventing” when he means “tinkering.” So what? That’s not fraud, it’s imperfect use of language. (And it’s imperfect use of language to describe a pretty impressive thing for a 14 year old, actually.)
Don’t forget about the part where they first said they thought it was a bomb, then when roundly ridiculed in the media, switched it to they thought it was a “hoax” bomb.
And also, the general group of people now most strenuously claiming “the police thought it was a hoax, but it’s ok that they arrested him and denied him access to his parents because you have to stay on the safe side and fake threats are bad too” are the same ones who say women are overreacting if they get explicitly detailed rape/death threats and want someone to look into it.
At least The Dawk has no weighed in with his usual clarity of the issue . . . Accusing the kid with “fraud” and saying he wanted to get arrested for the publicity is about the level of discourse I’d expect for the mighty (racist) thought leader.
It’s unbelievable how people will come up with all kind of bullshit reasons in order to try to justify the actions of the school and the police. Now some – including everyone’s favourite asshole, Richard Dawkins (he tweeted about it)- have switched to victim blaming. Apparently it has become very important that Ahmed didn’t actually invent the clock and therefore he deserves everything that happened to him because he misrepresented his invention. These people have no qualms about treating a 14-year old boy who likes to tinker with stuff as if he were an established scientist who falsified the results of his research.
More importantly:
1. whether he invented or not the clock is not relevant to the behaviour of the school and the police. He was arrested for building a hoax bomb – or so they say – not for lying about inventing a clock.
2. in all the interviews and articles I read about this I can’t find a single place where Ahmed says he INVENTED anything. He says he MADE a clock because he wanted to start with something simple to show at school, so I think it’s clear some article used “invented” at some point and assholes just jumped on it.
Appalling through and through anyway…and all these adults so eager to blame a 14 year old ..well, they might think they are being adults and intellectuals about it…but everyone can see their bigotry and hatefulness.
to claim it was a “dry run” to test the schools security, implicitly is saying the response was inadequate. That if it were an actual bomb, the school would have been detonated since they never called in the bomb squad, with many deaths due to nor evacuating. This comment read to me like advocating permanent lockdown of schools with TSA security entrances only. Talk about overreaction!!! (need more exclamation marks).
Palin can’t compose a coherent sentence. And those she does cobble together always seem to slur Obama in any way possible. The term “sore loser” comes to mind. EG she’s trying to deride Obama for not inviting a kid to the WhiteHouse when reprimanded for nibbling a PopTart into the shape of a handgun. I suppose she thinks the nibbler warrants accolades for his sculpturing skillz, while electronics tinkering skills are pointless. alternatively, that tinkering with electronics and building a sloppy clock is as worthless as nibbling PopTarts into shapes.
Wow! Behind all her lip-flapping, the true reason for her outrage is pure, unadulterated racism.
And the idiots watching Faux News just eat it up.
Richard Dawkins has started in on Ahmed, too, calling him a FRAUD because Ahmed called his clock an “invention”.
When did Richard Dawkins become so fucking clueless and ridiculous?
A dry run? He was taking it to show his teacher…
Ahhh. I see, clearly Blofeld, Gen 2.0. Explains his cunning and evil schemes first _and_ has a dress rehearsal.
Rirchard Dawkins says that Ahmed’s “motives remain questionable” and that “Possibly [he] wanted to be arrested” and that the “ppolice played into his hands”.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–HIXn8d9w–/1438779534137004867.jpg
Yeah, Dawkins isn’t racist at all.
Dawkins expects every use of every word to be used absolutely rigorously. Has he never heard of “invent” used casually? As a casual synonym for, “built”, or “tinkered”, or “assembled from random bits and pieces”.
Words have more than a single, rigid, definition. Look it up. Dare ya.
To require the word to only be used withing the formal rigorous definition used to qualify for a patent is, (in slang terms), hidebound.
I need a new desk, i broke this one…and my head hurts….
Obviously SPECTRE was involved, it’s the only explanation. The only thing the kid missed was the white cat to stroke.
Jesus. We’re drowning in a burning lake of stupid.
Dawkins is really behaving like an asshole re this Ahmed clock issue.
There is no pussyfooting around that.
I don’t think even an abject apology will get him around this
grotesque & racist tinged stupidity.
Btw, that’s the difference between atheists & religious followers.
We do not defend our heroes when they act like dicks.
This isn’t the first time Dawkins has behaved like a racist asshole, and it certainly won’t be the last.
And let’s not pretend like he “just” started becoming a racist asshole in recent memory. He’s ALWAYS been like this … it’s just now he has a Twitter and we can read his racist thoughts in real time. Don’t fool yourselves into thinking he’s only just morphed into being a racist asshole.
This is Dawkins. As he has always been and always will be.
jimvj @ 16:
This is far from the first time Dawkins has been a compleat asshole. Of course, many of the previous times, he was just busy trashing women, so a good many atheists rushed to his defense.
I rather doubt his hardcore fan base will be upset with him, and most likely, it won’t be long before droves of people take it upon themselves to explain what Dawkins really meant.
Marilove@9: “When did Richard Dawkins become so fucking clueless and ridiculous?”
When he endorsed “my colleague N. K. Humphrey”‘s statement that “memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically” (if not well before)? (Speaking of expecting “every use of every word to be used absolutely rigorously”!)
Honesty, leerudolph, that was a silly question of me to ask … Dawkins has ALWAYS been this clueless and ridiculous. He just didn’t have a Twitter account to blast his every thought.
Oh, goody, Dawkins put kid in square quotes.
Christ, what an asshole.
He took it seriously. Of fucking course he did. Because he’s a racist fuckwad.
“Christ, what an asshole” should be the title of Dawkin’s biography.
The kid’s father apparently had a habit of standing up to the local Islamophobes, so they took it out on his kid.
Oh for pity’s sake. What. an. idiot. It was bad enough yesterday, when people started linking articles about how the clock wasn’t a true invention (honestly, did anyone who saw that clock think it was an invention?), because this just seemed to me a right lousy thing to do, with little point outside trashing Ahmed. Then comes along Dawkins, trailing along on the tide of idiocy, to point out that
Leave the fundies alone, PZ and the crowd. They are just foaming at their mouth because the story didn’t turn out the way they liked (i.e. the kid being put away for 50 years on a multitude of charges and all Muslims losing a few more percentage points of freedom).
That foam, right there, is the sign that we have begun to turn the tide.
This handy flowchart will let you know when to listen to Richard Dawkins.
If there’s one thing the Columbine massacre, the Aurora shooting, or Charleston church slaughter showed the world, it’s that you don’t need a dry run to successfully slaughter people on a whim in the United States.
mastmaker @ 26:
Speaking for myself, no. I won’t leave them alone, and I sure as hell won’t stay silent.
No, it isn’t. It’s the shit we’re drowning in.
The tide has not “turned” all because one kid (regardless of how cool that kid is) didn’t get tossed in jail for no reason. Many other people are not nearly as lucky as Ahmed. It helps that Ahmed’s family is really savvy and had connections within the community.
Yes. Everyone knows the best way to get an invitation to the White House is to try to get arrested by building something and showing it to your teacher. *eyeroll*
Dawkins being a racist tool is utterly unsurprising at this juncture. You would think the Dawk, and the ranting idiots like Palin over in the US itself, would hesitate before going after a 14 year old child for a minor case improper language usage, but that would require a level of restraint and empathy they are clearly incapable of.
As for Dawkins placing the word kid in scare quotes, it seems that he wants to make it absolutely clear what a nauseatingly racist arsehat he truly is. He wouldn’t want people to underestimate the sheer depth of his knee jerk islamophobic bigotry, not when words must be used so very, very rigorously at all times…
Carlie @ 31:
Oh, but you don’t understand the deviousness at play! Now that the “kid” has wangled invitations to the White House and NASA, why he’ll go on a bomb hiding extravaganza! You just wait, you’ll see.
@Gently Benevolent, 6
I think Ahmed himself said that he likes to invent things in the video he posted to youtube, but I don’t recall him claiming that he’d invented the clock.
mastmaker, #26
Until it becomes an instant and total career-killer to say 90% the things the right wing politicians and media say openly and proudly, the tide has not begun to turn.
Anti-women, LGBT and POC platforms are actually considered mainstream and perfectly acceptable in our society. They’re considered legitimate discussions in politics that people are actually voting for in huge numbers.
The tide will turn when Mike Huckabee simply cannot afford to go on stage and say he wants to take rights away from those human beings.
Yeah, if the kid had been able to plan this all out, he’d be a bloody genius and you should REALLY invite him to Nasa. Probably best give him a room there.
Because really, there’S absolutely nothing that could have gone wrong with a devious plan like this, like being killed by the police.
Also, see the denial of childhood for children of colour. They are always judged as more adult, more mature than white kids
Yeah, the tide has NOT TURNED when racist fuckwad Donald Trump is not only running for president, but taken seriously, and leading in the polls.
The tide has not fucking turned.
Dawkins said something? I stopped paying attention to the Dawk when he doubled down on the Dear Muslima letter.
mastmaker
Neither Dawkins, nor Taslima, nor Maher, are fundies. This is not something that can be confined to a small group of extremists, sadly, it is a view that has been allowed to poison the entirety of US and EU culture.
Well, I for one, see this as a glorious victory for anti-profiling.
After all, if we know
good white kidsthe non-profile demographic brings a clock to school, it’s just fine, allowing us to concentrate our scarce resources on thebrown-skinned furriners with funny namespeople whodue to not being whitefor… reasons (you know – reasons!)… do not fall into our non-profiling category.None of which is reflective of perceived ethnic background. At all. Even a bit.
Nosiree bob, that would be racial profiling, and that would be bad.
Pinkie swear.
(Note: the above post was processed at a facility containing sarcasm, and may contain trace amounts.)
Some people talk about atheism because they enjoy being contrarian. Maher and Dawkins seem fit in this category.
I guess these idiots don’t know that the preferred trigger for IEDs is a cell phone. Just put a relay across the vibrator leads, so that when you call it, the relay closes and the main power triggers the cap. The nice thing about that approach is that the “ring/mute” switch is your safety, and it can be remotely triggered at extreme distances.
Everyone carrying a cell phone is supicious, except for Jerry Sienfeld.
I think that certainly fits Maher, but i don’t think it’s the case, at least not primarily, for Dawkins. I do think he genuinely cares about atheism on valid grounds, although i’m not saying contrarianism doesn’t also play some role on his motivations. Not that this makes any difference towards how much of an ass he is about so many other things…including his comments on this topic, i mean…..fucking hell….
There are plenty of atheists that defend Dawkins when he’s an asshole. There are people on Twitter right now defending his comments about Mohamed, including at least one person saying that the boy’s parents put him up to the whole thing.
OH, PLEASE. This is bullshit. Atheists are not immune to blindly following their “heroes”. I think Dawkin Fanboys pretty much prove that.
SERIOUSLY, we really need to stop assuming that atheists are somehow more enlightened or more intelligent than those who believe. That’s demonstrability incorrect, as well as part of the fucking problem.
Dreaming @ 43:
Perhaps. It seems to me though, that Dawkins’s brand of atheism has always been a tad suspect, that it’s a rarefied and elite thing, a la The Brights. Maybe it’s just me, but Dawkins has always come across as a deliberately divisive person.
How many things did you invent, till you discovered someone else beat you to it?
Using the word ‘invention’ and showing at teacher what you made are not crimes.
Ramaus @ 47:
It’s particularly ridiculous in this case, all the people saying he didn’t invent the clock. No kidding. Every day, new designs for timekeeping are thought up and made. They didn’t invent timekeeping devices, either.
No, but Dawkins and Maher at least qualify as sectarian supremacists.
And let’s face it: fundies are dangerous because they are sectarian supremacists as well.
***
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh wait
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
One of my daily stops is hackaday — a place that features hacker projects, be they electronic, mechanical, or something appealing to that crowd. One of the editors of the site called for people to whip up a wire-laden clock as a show of support, which a few did. But holy hell there are a lot of people who, instead of seeing it as a “lets support the fledgling nerd” saw it as a “how dare you bring liberal politics into a tech blog” and stomped their feet endlessly. A typical post there gets 10-30 replies; this generated 130.
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/18/i-built-a-clock-to-spread-awareness-now-its-your-turn/
I did learn one great retort — one of the hyperskeptics got called an “askhole” for claiming anyone who supported the kid needs to be able to answer these questions before they claim to support the kid:
Ehh, for certain specific values of “we”, maybe.
And you think this is a reason we should “leave them alone”? Hell no. No coasting allowed.
Dawkins’ tweets confused me, but I clicked one of the links, and the criticism isn’t that Ahmed claimed that he “invented” a clock when he “made” a clock. The accusation is that Ahmed took an old working clock, took it out of its casing and put it in a pencil box, then claimed that he made a clock. I don’t know enough electronics to evaluate that claim.
kellym #52
That was only one part of Dawkins’ argument. The other was that the kid masterminded his own arrest in order to get to the White House.
I don’t think any knowledge of electronics is required to see through the second argument.
We seem to have got past it, with some help from Dawkins, but there seems to be a bit of confusion around the word “invent.”
The blogger is claiming that the kid took the guts out of a cheap digital clock, and installed them in a pencil case, and that seems to be more or less the case. The blogger is implying that this required zero know-how, and serves zero purpose, and therefore that it was in fact done to scare people or worse. His intent is to counter the narrative that the kid is curious and clever, and to insinuate that there’s at least smoke, if not fire.
The part about “no invention” is the claim that the kid designed no circuits, nor designed his own application of off-the shelf components. It’s not about whether he invented clocks, or even this one clock.
In my childhood, “building a digital clock” would have meant (for most of us) building our own circuits on bread boards, or using one of those kits that Radio Shack sells. My gramps was a TV repairman, and when I showed him my stuff, he would say, “you just followed the directions, like a paint by numbers.” He tried to convince me that it was easy to design my own oscillators, but 8 year old me didn’t get it, and I lost all interest.
At the big fair around here, there was a display by a tech-savvy youngster of a computer where the parts were all pretty standard, but they’d built the case out of Lego blocks. It was an impressive bit of engineering, and something that I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing as an adult with a science degree and experience building multiple computers. Ahmed pulled the innards out of an old clock and put them in a pencil case, and based on the images I can find, likely cut out part of the case wall to display the clock face. That takes skill, confidence, creativity, and knowledge of electronics that the hyperskeptics and naysayers are eliding and downplaying to make their case that the kid doesn’t deserve recognition, or that his story about wanting to show off this device is somehow disingenuous.
“Invention” is arguably not the right word to describe it, but I remember when my little brother was drawing “inventions” of cloning machines and fighting robots, and he wasn’t that much younger than Ahmed. Ahmed actually built a cool little briefcase-styled clock, and that’s not something you can buy off the shelf; calling it an invention doesn’t imply that he made all the parts himself and independently discovered the notion of measuring the passage of time. People–including “liberal” and “skeptical” and “pro-science” people–are building a grand terrorism conspiracy narrative around a fourteen-year-old’s (possible) inaccurate choice of vocabulary.
thanks Kelly M for identifying the case that Ahmed used for his clock “a pencil box” that happened to look like a briefcase. It seems also that in comparison we have praised Apple and Steve Jobs for doing essentially the same thing making electronic devices that were not original but primarily have superior industrial design elements but this “kid” is different.
Does anyone think that even if he just copied a project off the internet, that his parents his father in this case encouraged him to confront the teacher and the administration justified the resultant reaction and behavior on their part calling, in the police, extended questioning, handcuffs, suspension the whole deal?
If anyone thinks that it does than the arrest of Rosa Parks should have been ignored because it meant nothing!
I do not know why I have not heard of anyone advocating building holding cells on school grounds along with the metal detectors I have heard about. It would make criminalizing children and “keeping them safe” much easier.
uncle frogy
Tom @ 55:
Word. The naysayers are grabbing onto this nonsense rather than focusing on the one real problem in the schoolhouse: bigotry. All those frothing off over the clock either don’t care about (or agree with) the school / police reaction, or they are deliberately throwing up a smoke screen so they can let loose with bigoted rhetoric.
Isn’t the very exact thing that engineers tend to say about themselves, that when they were kids they liked to “take things apart to see how they worked and try to put them back together again”? And then laugh about all of the electronics they dismantled and, in fact, were not able to make work again? (thereby usually exasperating their parents in the process?) And that this was a sign of a curious, mechanically inclined mind, and how much they learned from doing so? But now all of a sudden doing that is “zero know-how and serves zero purpose”. Ok, player. No internal consistency problems there at all.
zenlike:
Well, that’s certainly debatable. They’re not religious fundamentalists, since they’re not religious, but you can be a fundamentalist about lots of things. It’s like saying somebody is dogmatic. Often, the exact content of the dogma isn’t even important to the dogmatists. Same with fundies.
Ryan Cunningham:
Sadly, there are also people who think that because it’s okay to reject religious moral codes, it’s therefore okay to be a repugnant asshole.
Or more generally, there’s a pretty strong anti-intellectual tendency for some atheists/skeptics. You get accustomed to debunking so many terrible ideas, you just keep going and doing that about all sorts of stuff that isn’t terrible, because that’s worked well enough for you in the past
Also, because you happen to be right about an important idea, which not everybody agrees on, nor do they think about it very clearly or very much, you can start to internalize the idea that you know important things (especially if you’re well-educated, as a prominent atheist/skeptic “thought leader” is likely to be). The Dunning-Kruger effect kicks in hardcore, the moment you’re actually ignorant about something. You substitute that knowledge you should’ve tried to get for whatever crap that pops into your head.
You may think that biology, physics, math, scientific methodology, or whatever it is that you do, is the answer to all of our prayers. You know how to put together arguments, or at least say something that kinda-sorta sounds reasonable and persuasive, so you keep digging yourself deeper in all sorts of places where you shouldn’t. A little taste of intellectual “success” like this (as unimpressive as it really is) can easily turn you into a pompous fuckwit … or in other words, like Maher, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Coyne, thunderfool, and on and on and on. (Maybe I should take it easy on PZ, but he has his moments too.)
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia:
Valid maybe and perhaps he cares, but some of his claims/arguments about religions are actually very shallow, careless, wrongheaded, useless, etc. He’s gotten a lot of attention, and (at least until twitter came along) he knows how to write. That’s it. It doesn’t make him any good at thinking.
I wouldn’t say that “contrarianism” always works quite like a motivation for some people. It’s an approach that you take to problems. You don’t exactly care if you have the right answer, or if you’ve justified it and reasoned about it appropriately. Maybe you even enjoy watching everyone else squirm while they try to solve the problem for you. That’s easy to do, and it can make you feel smart the entire time, as if you had actually accomplished something. You may not do it deliberately, in the sense that you really want to be a useless shithead and take that sort of stance. You might really care that the problem is solved somehow, but your approach to it isn’t honest or constructive.
PZ:
Have you seen what Dawkins is saying about Ahmed on Twitter?
“Ahmed Mohamed just got a new Surface Pro 3, Band, and more from Microsoft”
A “movie bomb”. That’s the best they could do to stretch a 14 year old’s fun project into a terrorist plot. Not even a real thing but a fucking prop.
And when faced with this reality, the debate shifts to how he didn’t do a good enough job making it into a project truly worth being proud of, therefore suspicious. Fuck me.
Which is also completely irrelevant. The question how much of this he built or “invented” himself has nothing to do with how he got treated.
I totally agree. This is what I mean by “contrarian”. It’s knee-jerk naysaying to get attention and appear smart. At the end of the day, as you so aptly noted, it becomes a form of anti-intellectualism. Advocates of “rationalism” and “science” become anti-intellectuals.
For any other 14 year old, this kind of play tinkering is an indicator of curiosity and the potential for a budding interest and skill. Something lighthearted and to be met with a smile and a rustling of the hair. Ahmed, however, should have been manufacturing his own cold fussion reactor with nothing but ores and a lighter, otherwise he is just an asshole with dark motives.
Its kind of amazing that #5 was an exact prediction of what Dawkins would say. On any issue, he can be counted on to be an asshat.
The comments in goaded link are priceless. Granted it’s 9gag, but still. This kid must be a diabolical mastermind – how he cleverly planned his every move to not only get inside the White House, but also get a bunch of Microsoft gadgets (though the lack of XBox 1 is glaring). Brilliant.
However, it should be noted that he didn’t invent anything here either. Let us recall the case of Osama Bin Laden, whose publicity stunt got him an overseas surprise party from Obama. With choppers!
/sarcasm
mesh wrote:
All of it is just an excuse to cut him down. Obviously it’s not entirely his invention, but he did spend time working out how to fit it into that small case. The proper response would be to praise him for the work he did do, and challenge him to go further with it.
This was an excellent little springboard project if people weren’t paranoid about (essentially) nothing. Make it fit into something smaller (lots of empty space in that pencil case). Make it entirely battery powered. Make your own electronics circuit board for it. Make it automatically set the time from radio broadcasts. Make it more usable. Etc. Etc.
I was trying to find out when Ahmed’s family came to the US. Some of the wording in his quotes suggests awkwardness with English. Assuming he even said he “invented” anything, he may be getting knocked because English isn’t his primary language.
I haven’t found when they moved to the US, but his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, was in the news in 2011. According to this piece in the Dallas Observer from 2011, he played the “defense” attorney in Terry Jones’s mock trial of the Koran before burning a copy in church…sparking riots that left quite a few dead people.
According to this piece in the North Dallas Gazette, they are from the Sudan. Mohamed Elhassan is a businessman in Dallas and Sufi imam. He has been involved in Sudanese politics, including running for president in 2010 and apparently again this year.
If the Dallas Observer piece is to be believed, Mohamed Elhassan may hold some unorthodox views about the Koran and it’s relationship to the New Testament. Of course, as a Sufi he’s practically a heretic anyway.
For some mysterious reason the second embedded links keeps opening Pharyngula from the preview, so here they are:
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/why-mohamed-elhassan-the-dallas-imam-who-played-defense-attorney-in-quran-torching-church-says-he-admires-terry-jones-7130292
http://northdallasgazette.com/2015/02/23/irving-resident-makes-his-second-bid-for-election-as-president-of-sudan/
Not only so, but the SAME BLOGGER did this in the SAME POST in which he derided Ahmed’s project.
I’m a substitute teacher, and I’m very familiar with school security measures. PZ and slithy tove are right – if school staff had any suspicion that it was a bomb, they would have evacuated the school immediately. School staff knew full well that Ahmed and his clock were no danger. The bomb claim was an excuse to harass a nerdy Muslim, and nothing more.
I’m still really surprised there’s pushback from the atheo/skeptic community. Richard Feynman, for instance, got his start by pulling apart pre-built radios and stringing their guts around. It was an important part of his childhood, building the skills he needed to understand physics and deal with engineering challenges later in life.
To dismiss Ahmed for doing the same is to discourage him from tinkering, from engineering, from creating later in life. No fan of science should ever do that.
Has anyone seen this “14”-year-old’s birth certificate? Every-one is tossing out “14-year old” as though he just had a birthday and has only spent a few days or weeks in this youthful age. There’s absolutely *no* evidence that this “kid” hasn’t had a full 4, 6, or even 8 months to be utterly immersed and experienced and thoroughly seasoned rather than the tyro “14” year old everyone is claiming him to be.
And are we sure he’s actually that “nerdy”. How do we know he didn’t once go to a basketball game. He might have even *enjoyed* it.
How *could* the sophistication of the clock possibly be relevant?!?!? Is there some universal understanding that only the most brilliant kids only bring the most ingenious of projects to school? That it’s utterly inconceivable that bright, average, or god forbid dumb kid would bring a so-so project to school?
If Ahmed did just scoop the insides of the clock into a pencil box, I’m a bit disappointed because he seemed so bright but I don’t believe he did because I saw those circuit boards and relay dodads in his bed room so I’m pretty sure he has potential (and he was able to *identify* the components; this is a kid who can tie his own shoe-laces). However, seriously, there is no conceivable argument that that can be relevant.
FWIW (which is *nothing*) I’m fairly certain Ahmed did say in one of his videos “I took my invention to school”. If anyone actually gives a tinker’s dam I’ll try to see if I can verify this but I can’t see in anyway that this is relevant. I’m also pretty sure Ahmed never said he actively invented the clock or anything else specifically. He just referred to them and the clock generally as “my inventions”.
I want to go on the record for stating *days* ago that I disliked and was aware of the social media and bloggers (but not the original newspapers) “creeping” hyperbole to paint what appears to be a bright and utterly typical and identifiable kid who likes to tinker (as do *so* many) into a prodigy with a brilliant and utterly ingenious clock and deserving of a full scholarship to MIT. I also want to go on record as aknowledging after making that statement that it wasn’t in the least bit important.
The Far Right is wanking SO HARD to try to spin the story as the kid’s fault, to the point of pulling random images off Google Image Search and sloppily pasting them together to make up “facts.” This shit is already going around on FB, and the first I saw of it was when it was posted by one of my atheist friends. I made sure to comment that it’s already been debunked, not that this will stop anyone.
@ #74
I saw him quoted as saying “I like to invent things,” but I’ve never actually heard or seen him say that he invented the clock. Let’s face it, he’s not an idiot – who would say they invented a clock?
Which maybe explains the policeman’s “That’s who I expected” comment when they arrested Ahmed.
Still it takes a *hell* of a conspiracy theory to presume the father orchestrated it for the publicity (which I have heard suggested.)
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Okay, confession. When I was *significantly* older than Ahmed (and English *is* my primary language), I listed on a college application as among my hobbies was “constructing jigsaw puzzles”… Well, when you buy them they come all in pieces and when I put them together I’m “constructing” the finished image, right????
(The really embarrassing thing is I knew exactly what I was trying to pull. On the other hand, I am utterly convinced that Ahmed is thinking, I have kits and pieces for inventing things that I construct myself. These are some have unique applications while others have different construction choices. I made them so they are my inventions.)
( If I ever sit down with him with a soda I’ll point out the language misuse but it’s pretty freakin’ typical of kid-world, ain’t it?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE (It’s the very early Dallas News video.)
At the 34 second mark he says “They took my tablet and my invention” referring to the clock. So. I guess he deserved it and …
Okay. Look at the book title: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik. The boy, Hugo Cabret, *finds* a very strange and elaborate automaton and spends a lot of the book attempting to fix it and getting it into working shape. It’s a strange invention that he found and he was then in possession of it and, hence, the book’s title. (Actually, to tell the truth I was very irritated with the title. Although the movie title “Hugo” was worse. I’d assume that was a CGI cartoon about a dog.)
He’s 14 years old and had just gone through a traumatic event and was speaking relatively freely in a video he made himself. Who gives a fuck if a 14 year old KID doesn’t use perfect language? Ugh. Dawkins is seriously awful.
woozy@77:
Specifically, about a Sad Puppy, right?
This would be the same Dawkins who threw a tantrum after a jar of honey was confiscated from him at an airport, right? Freedom, a lack of paranoia and down with security theater for me, but not for thee.
Looks like my comment got automodded, I assume because it contained a link? Anyway, I’ll try it again without an A tag:
The Far Right is wanking SO HARD to try to spin the story as the kid’s fault, to the point of pulling random images off Google Image Search and sloppily pasting them together to make up “facts.” This shit is already going around on FB, and the first I saw of it was when it was posted by one of my atheist friends. I made sure to comment that it’s already been debunked, not that this will stop anyone.
http://www.martyduren.com/2015/09/19/that-ahmeds-clock-vs-suitcase-bomb-meme-its-more-fake-news/
Dagnabit, my link-containing comment is getting automodded, who do I contact these days to get it released?
I can’t believe that so many seemingly intelligent people are parsing this pathetic episode of Texas police overreaction so closely. Now even the great Prof. Dawkins is weighing in? He’s calling a 14 year old boy a fraud? Anyone else here ever 14? When I was 14 I was in the throws of raging puberty. Nobody is thinking clearly at that age. So what if he did fib his inventiveness a bit? Is this such an affront to Dawkins’ prickly sense of scientific rectitude? Oh, right, he’s a Brit academic. Anyone who’s ever studied under one at college knows the type.
And who gives a shit what that halfwit Palin thinks about anything?
Why didn’t his engineering teacher put in a word for him? Was the teacher never informed?
@ccfoo242: Isn’t it interesting that the engineering teacher told Ahmed not to show his clock to the other teachers. It’s like he knew that his co-workers were a bunch of bigoted fucksticks. And I’m guessing his ability to put in a word that would be listened to, by people who had already made up their mind to harass this kid, was zero.
woozy at 78:
This is totally off-topic, but the Title The Invention of Hugo Cabret refers to Hugo’s invention of himself, which, as I recall, is made clear only right at the end of the book.
On topic: This story has been making me angry since it first broke, and the reasons for my anger keep changing as the nasty characters emerge one after another. I have a son just this age, and cannot help but empathize with this child. He did something fun and innocent, and had no intention of it being anything major for anyone else but him, and a parade of fools just won’t let it go.
Of course, if he had manufactured cutting-edge technology from scratch in his basement, then the right wing would be howling for his head anyway, because he’d obviously be an evil bomb-making genius. There’s no way to win the “be a brown-skinned Muslim conservatives don’t hate” game.
I think DAwkins is just jealous he didn’tg et invited to the White House after Honeygate.
You gotta look at this from his persepective: Important people are spending time on a kid of colour, time that could be spent on a white guy, preferrably a professor emeritus.
Sadly, your parody doesn’t go past the point of absurdity for even Dawkins – he already made that exact leap, which is a pernicious component of racism.
ccfoo242, #85
Good question. Makes me wonder just how bad the environment is at that school. Maybe the engineering teacher knew exactly what would happen to xir if xe speaks up against the racist administration.
Re the engineering teacher: At least one article I’ve read said that he showed the clock to his engineering teacher first. The teacher told him that he’d done a nice job but that he shouldn’t show it to any other teachers. That doesn’t say much about the teacher’s motives (maybe he* feared for his job given the environment or maybe he thought Ahmed deserved what he got for not listening or maybe he did try to defend Ahmed but no one listened or maybe some other possibility that I haven’t thought of), but it does say something about the school environment. The engineering teacher knew that the environment was toxic and that showing something like that would be dangerous to Ahmed. That already says it’s a pretty nasty environment.
*I have a vague memory that the teacher was identified in the piece as male. I could, of course, be wrong. Or they could.
Exactly my thoughts. How this would constitute a “hoax” is only telling of the paranoia and repressed guilty-conscience in the minds of middle-aged men. I call “projection”!
I am certain someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t musical pieces where the composer/performer just playing around called “Inventions”?
OK, from Wikipedia (I know, not always the best source):
I guess transplanting the guts of a clock designed for one case into another could fit this definition.
shadow:
Definitely not. Numerous pieces were labeled that over a very long period of time, and generally speaking they don’t have anything in common with one another. It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the structure, how it was made, or perhaps anything at all. In the Renaissance, some titles like that were apparently inspired by ancient philosophical texts, on aesthetics or rhetoric (e.g., Cicero’s De Inventione, and Aristotle’s Poetics is still somewhat influential), which discussed some principles of art or creativity, how to organize speeches and various bits like that.
A lot of that theory/analysis is not really important to (or even studied by) most composers anymore, since analogies with language (or visual arts, drama) usually aren’t especially helpful or don’t give you something very definite to work with about what the actual musical content will be. It might not be too misleading to say that formal properties (as opposed to compositional methods or principles) became more important, as many of those began to crystallize during the Baroque period anyway — dance forms, song forms, sonata form, etc., things you would still recognize today, if you know what you’re looking for. Besides the works themselves, music theory itself also started to offer a lot more interesting stuff that basically changed a lot about which features of music people listened for and cared about. In any case, especially for composers like J.S. Bach, many “inventions” are actually very tightly structured works, with a deliberate and logical flow from beginning to end. It’s about as far from accidental or “just playing around” as you can get.
I guess improvisation might be loosely described as “just playing around,” in certain cases. It depends on the improviser. But it’s important to understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is planned ahead of time (like the structure, instrumentation, key, etc.), nor does it mean none of the specific content is quoting or is derived from preexisting material (melodies, harmonies, rhythms, you name it). It does not mean you don’t know what you’re going to do, are just winging it or making it all up on the spot, or that it’s some totally “unique” or “original” thing that has never existed before even on paper.
So he isn’t Tony Stark; I want to see some of his critics try to transplant a clock circuit. Not everybody can identify components, remember wiring, and successfully reconnect all the pieces for a functioning result.
“Muzzies”? Oh, those Christies!
I’ve got a very personal viewpoint in situations like this, because this sort of thing happened to me, but with far less national attention… I’ll just copy this word for word from another of those b type logs.
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I have kept this to myself for a long time, but I’ll share it as it is emotionally relevant. I personally have been heavily affected by a baseless claim back in high school. This was shortly after Columbine, and not 1, not 2, but 3 different students all came forward as witnesses to a supposed claim I made that I was going to do the same thing at that school. The school’s principal designed to simply expel me without any further statement. As for my side? Well, I never even knew the student’s names. I was basically a loner, keeping to myself because there wasn’t any other option. Some students approached me asking me about the Columbine incident and asking if I would ever do such a thing, and as my sense of humor is my only defense, I said “I’d never do something like that, besides I wouldn’t have the first idea where to get guns anyway.”. Funny? No, and likely in bad taste, but certainly a far cry from their claim later on. I have a hard time really hating anyone there, I was never close enough to form any sort of emotional bond, but I do recall the principle in particular seeming a rather cowardly sort who didn’t seem capable of standing up for anyone.
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Take of this story what you will.