Summations Only

No matter how much you wish it was it was not a bomb.If they are going to arrest students for having something that could possibly if it had numerous alterations and the addition of an explosive, then they need to arrest any student with a cell phone. This clock is a rube goldberg contraption if it was meant to be a timer for a bomb. Any old cell phone would be much more efficient and practical. Or heck any old digital timer with a battery backup.It was a circuit board with a digital read out. Whooppee!!! I am sure I could make one with some circuit boards I have around here and I am sure I have something I can scavenge a digital display from. It would take a couple hours and not worth any of the effort whatsoever, but that a 14 year old wanted to do it is cool. That is how people learn. I learned a lot by deconstructing and constructing things as a kid. I suppose a home built ham radio now qualifies in your mind as a terrorist device.It was not a bomb, he never said it was a bomb, he never made any threat. You can think what you want in your fantasy world, but you can not alter the facts.

Because he fancies himself an enforcer.Petrophysics' claims, and that specific language, started appearing on rightwing sites and e-mail chains a day or two ago.I believed that's what he googled. It's a sort of meta-irony, his claim to have spotted a lie through original resarch...Sarah Palin's reaction was similar: "Right. That's a clock, and I'm the Queen of England."She compared reactions critical of the arrest to another case:

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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.

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She introduced a fictional father/son context. Family values!And turned the car into a truck. Country values!And turned six students into one. Lone Patriot values!As Sam Levine noted:

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In 2010, six students at a Michigan high school were suspended after school officials found firearms in their car that they had used on a deer hunt earlier that morning. School policy and signs clearly forbade the students from bringing the firearms onto school property.

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Bringing a clock to school warrants an arrest; bringing an arsenal to school is nothing to get excited about, even if you have to lie about it, because white guns.If Ahmed exaggerated his accomplishment, the only possible explanation is that he's an incipient terrorist, not an early teen looking to impress. If a bunch of white students bring an arsenal to school, it's obviously innocent. It's fascinating to read back over the comment sections following the original news stories, where self-proclaimed conservatives call the students' suspension an overreaction (they weren't arrested), and speculate that school "libtards" specifically targeted the kids with guns.Personally, I find both cases likely to be examples of innocently foolish teenagers looking to impress, but they've both inspired little white lies in the service of larger white truths.Edited by Omnivorous, : exagerrated spelling

And a lit 100mm cigarette inserted into a matchbook gives you a ten minute fuse. I learned that in the Army.Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, but don't get arrested.

Omnivorous,What I did was look at the pictures of this thing and determined it was a commercially manufactured digital alarm clock with battery backup. So he didn't make it.I've been a licensed amateur radio operator since Feb. 1963, have held an FCC commercial radiotelephone license (required to repair communications and radar equipment on ships and airplanes), have 22 semester hours of college credits in electronics engineering technology and spent 7 years working as an electronics tech before I became a petroleum geologist.And your qualifications are what?

I've been successfully spotting bullshit for 60+ years.What do your electronics qualifications have to do with anything I discussed?As I said, the plethora of similar claims made in similar language on sites that share your political bent, all of which predate your post, make your claims of independent discovery doubtful at best--not because you don't know enough about electronics, but because a dozen other people claim, in similar language, to have made the identical discovery.I guess at least one of them must be telling the truth. Are you the One?If we're going down this particular irrelevant road, shouldn't we just measure dicks?

So who exactly besides me said he didn't make this clock?I googled this story after reading about it here and what showed up were some CNN stories of which I read 2 and then looked at the pictures that showed up on my google search. The CNN stories were basically the same as what has shown up here, except it said he wasn't returning to school and in fact might be leaving the country.There are about 650,000 amateur radio operators in the US and a much larger number who know about electronics and could spot the lie. So if he lied about making the clock do you think you he might be lying about anything else, like way he brought it to school? I noticed that everyone here just believed the news reports.Oh and BTW people don't get arrested for breaking school rules unless the rule is the same as some existing law.

It seems more like you read this guy.
http://blogs.artvoice.com/...ed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves
No idea if the guys is correct but I venture to guess you are full of shit.Even if the parts did come from a commercially available clock he did make this. Electronics products I made as a child were quite similar. People who build Ham radios use stock parts. Of course he did not invent a clock. But he took a clock and reconfigured it and rebuilt it. The curiosity should be commended.
Or are your sensibilities insulted because he did not create his on circuit board?Edited by Theodoric, : No reason given.

The impression I got from all the newspaper articles was that Ahmed had cobbled together a clock mounted inside a case of some kind from salvaged parts, and that's what this looks like, with the display mounted in the lid and the electronics and power supply mounted inside: It's easy to see now why no one thought it a real bomb - the pencil case is obviously empty.If this is a hoax bomb then anything homemade with a digital display is a hoax bomb.--Percy

I read or heard someone describe the case as a briefcase, but when you look at it compared to the size of the electrical plug it seems to be clearly too small to be called a briefcase.

Looks to me like a fancy pencil case

Yep, and it looks used.I hope when he's an old guy that his memories of this incident are not all negative. It will be interesting to see if it turns out to be a defining moment in his life.

Pretty much looks like every bomb shown on TV shows.

Petrophysics, maybe it's as you say, and many folks independently looked at the clock's components, recognized their origin, and concluded it was thus somehow a fraud.But that meme has been surging through the cyberverse now for a couple of days; even Richard Dawkins--who is a magnet for rightwng e-mail--turned to twitter to first defend the boy, then to denounce the 'hoax' with the indignation of the duped, and then finally to admit that, yes, perhaps he was making an ass out of himself by denouncing a 14-year-old boy's pencil case clock as a hoax.It is rampant on Facebook. Type ahmeds clock into Google, and ahmeds clock hoax is the first auto-completion, with 2,830,000 hits.So, if you've been oblivious to all that, and genuinely drew your own conclusions, I apologize. I know conditional apologies are like kissing your sister, but it's the best I can do.And I'm not sure getting there on your own is better than being led there, when there is that mean and bigoted.

Like these?Which one looks the most like it?

I do not know and my guess is that you do not either. But I do know that the police responded to a call from the school and that the school is on the defensive about why they involved the police. I also know that the police believe the matter to be settled without the need for charges against the student.I am not going to cast aspersions on the police until the question of what the school reported is made clear. I believe I have stated that a couple of times in this thread. Handcuffs seem like overkill to me and I have said so.