
Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock and Ourselves - privong
http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/
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jhallenworld
Oh boy Ahmed's Clock reminds me when I brought the (working) guts of a
transistor radio to school in 3rd or 4th grade. The teachers proclaimed that I
made a radio and had me show it to everyone. I ascribe this to the fact that
most people have not ever seen the insides of any electronic device.

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Gibbon1
I'm more than a little bothered by this.

Repackaging things is totally a classic and valid thing to do. People do that
with everything from custom cars, audio equipment, to yes clocks. Kid you not
there is a whole smallish subculture of making clocks of things.

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librvf
_I 'm more than a little bothered by this._

I'm way more bothered by the way everyone has just assumed that Ahmed's
teacher and all the police are clearly racist idiots refusing to back down in
the face of supposedly obvious misunderstanding, which seems FAR less obvious
the more evidence comes out.

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muaddirac
I don't think it has much bearing on the reaction to bringing the clock to his
school, but man it really bothered me when I saw a picture of it - who adds a
9v connector like that to what would almost certainly be a first or second
shot at an electronics project? (If it were only powered by 9v, like a small
headphone amp, sure, but who's that concerned with backup power on a learning
project?)

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hacker234
So he found a wrecked clock in the kerbside junk, got it running, then tidied
it up by stuffing it into an old pencil case.

Maybe he even wrecked it himself some time earlier.

Sounds like a reasonable project for a teenager. Why are you making such a
fuss?

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librvf
_Why are you making such a fuss?_

He's not making a fuss, the fuss was already made! Even the President tweeted
about it. Accusing someone of fussing for asking a reasonable question is
hostile and dishonest rhetoric. Indeed, seeking out and offering relevant
evidence to question the sensational outrage narrative is doing what _EVERY
responsible journalist_ covering this story should have done in the first
place.

Ahmed's clock looked suspicious and he was told by another teacher not to show
it to anyone else. But he did anyway. His responses in the interview are
rather odd and don't offer the sort of simple factual explanations like " _I
found a wrecked clock in the kerbside junk, got it running, then tidied it up
by stuffing it into an old pencil case_ ". He didn't say anything about _why_
he chose that particular pencil case, just that it's a common thing you can
buy off of Amazon. The police report said his behavior was suspicious.
Normally I'd discount a police report as being lies, especially with blatantly
subjective words like "suspicious", but in this case that just happens to fit
in with all the other facts that I've seen, which ARE suspicious. The final
fact being that somehow, CAIR was right there immediately to promote the
religious persecution and bigotry angle.

I'm not saying this sort of circumstantial evidence is enough to prove that
Ahmed intended to commit a bomb hoax, but it's more than enough to demolish
the outrageous and sensational media narrative of a poor precocious tinkerer
who is being oppressed by the evil bigots in bigot-filled Texas who are too
bigoted to recognize genius that is so plainly obvious to Mark Zuckerberg,
President Obama, and all the rest.

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hyperair
Dunno about others, but I think an alarm clock the shape of a scale model time
bomb is kind of cool (even more so if it looked like something right out of a
video game). I don't see it as particularly dangerous -- it's more on the same
level as painting Nerf guns green and black to make them look more realistic.

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librvf
> I don't see it as particularly dangerous

Well, you weren't in the classroom where he set the alarm to go off, were you?
So it's not like you're in a position to reasonably judge the reaction.

Suppose he did just take apart an old clock and piece it back together for
fun, and didn't specifically try to make it look like a bomb. What was the
purpose?

If it had been me, I would have been eager to explain why I chose that
particular case. Like maybe-- look "how portable this is" or "look how you can
hang this on the wall now" or something like that. Or maybe even just-- "well
I was messing around and just happened to have the case so that's why I chose
it." I also would have been up front about the fact that all I'd done was
dismantled and re-assembled an old clock. I wouldn't have tried to pass it off
as an original circuit-board project of my own.

There's nothing like that in this interview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE)

Also, as the OP notes, Ahmed makes a comment about using a cable to fasten it
shut to make it look less suspicious. OP wonders why would he have been
thinking something like that, if he did not know that a suitcase would in fact
be suspicious? Sure, such a comment might have been made as some sort of back-
rationalization after the whole thing blew up, but along with the other red
flags it's a suspicious statement.

And if he did deliberately try to make it look like a bomb and did nothing to
assure his teacher and fellow classmates that it was not real, then it's
perfectly fair to call it a hoax.

