Race and some degree of technophobia are the obvious contributing factors in the response. The Time Machine reference was intended to highlight the latter.
I apologize for any misunderstanding.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive IMO.
Whether what this student did was, in truth,“impressive” or not (from the standpoint of what a young tinkerer / inventor might do) seems hardly germane at all to anything. Whether the average person could readily distinguish a bomb from a non-bomb seems very relevant, as whether the student was white, black, purple or polka-dotted, it’s reasonable to take certain precautions if a student is suspected of having a bomb on him.
I also have no idea why the device beeped during English class.
A couple of possibilities:
- The student did not know that an alarm was pre-set, that would go off at that time.
- The device beeped because it was running low on power, and the student did not anticipate that.
Then you have item 1 or 2, but they were anticipated or even arranged by the student.
CC is the only place that I have seen reference to a “countdown clock,” in this connection. Was there any actual counting down? Does anyone have a reliable media reference to that? Did the student modify the device to make it count down? Did the clock already have that feature?
Why did the student ignore the advice of the engineering teacher not to show the device to anyone? Did he consider having it in his backpack–where it might beep–to be compliant with that? Maybe.
Was there some reason that the device beeped in English class (or history class), rather than science or math class, other than sheer accident?
Did the student’s family already intend to have him transfer to a different school, even before any of this happened?
Haven’t read all the posts but has anyone mentioned that the older sister brought a hoax bomb to middle school a few years ago?
Back on the Eloi vs. Morlock issue, and taking it as a non-techie/techie divide: To the extent that the Eloi represent the upper class, I think this could be used as an allusion to people at the top, who have no need to understand or repair the technology themselves. At some point, people in this group might become aware that their lack of knowledge makes them vulnerable. This can generate fear–and when it is combined with a general tendency to be more fearful of some people, rather than others, it can lead to bad outcomes.
The Morlocks (I think) originated as a representation of the working class, who operated machinery or worked in the mines, and kept things running. For all of the STEM-uber-alles discussion, it is still the case that being a techie will put one–generally speaking, Bill Gates, etc. excepted–on the middle rungs of society, where they keep things running. The people at the top have “people to do that.”
If a person builds a clock at a young age, it suggests that a person might be a proto-techie, and hence a proto-Morlock, in the allusion as I have understood it.
If you do not understand the technology, and you can’t tell what you are looking at when you see a circuit device (and honestly, how many people can?), it’s not totally irrational to be fearful of it when it seems out of place.
End of comments. Except that I would appreciate some links to mainstream media accounts that might answer some of these questions. Some of the information that I have seen on CC about this, I have not seen anywhere else.
Thanks for your post #600, 50N40W, I apparently understood your allusion, more or less, and I think it is spot-on, in terms of the discussion on the thread.
PG, #601, I think whether the clock was “impressive” or not is germane to the response by MIT, JPL, and NASA, which are part of the story, and all are substantially overblown if the device was not impressive. I don’t know whether it is impressive or not–there’s not enough information to tell–though it does seem to incorporate a circuit board that was commercially constructed, rather than being built by the student.
Your point?
^A family history of hoax bombs would be highly relevant. As is the fact that his tinkering and invention consisted solely of taking a commercial clock out of its plastic case.
Can someone post a REPUTABLE link about that? Googling points me to WND and Breitbart, and you’ll excuse me if I trust neither of those.
I wouldn’t trust a story that was posted at Breitbart or WND only, without a link to a source, and I wouldn’t trust a story that was posted at, say, the Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo without a link to a source either. If Ahmed’s sister indeed was disciplined for bringing a hoax bomb to school, that would be news, and why wouldn’t it be in mainstream news sources?
Romani, I don’t know if that story is true and don’t care, because for me it’s enough that every student be held to the same standards of behavior to which each family agreed in writing, but in all sorts of topics, it is the stories that remain unreported by the news outlets favoring the point of view that would be harmed that should always be looked at most closely. Every media outlet has a point of view, and every one is happy to bury stories that don’t advance its point of view, which is where seeking out information on those stories and either accepting or rejecting them ourselves becomes a prudent course of action. My personal theory is that when a person or incident perfectly advances a particular cause, then what is too good to be true likely is too good to be true. I wonder based on Mark Cuban’s comments and the boys own comments on video if there isn’t more to the story.
You will never find me disagreeing with the fact that media is biased. However, I happen to know quite a bit about the inner workings of Breitbart and WND is notoriously false about a lot of things (not to mention that they are prone to advance conspiracy theories as fact) so I need something more than that. Otherwise, I wish people wouldn’t spew rumors.
TatinG, please provide the underlying source for that story. Where do Breitbart or WND claim they got the story from? It’s absolute 100% nonsense to imply that the story, if true, would have been unreported by the mainstream news media, including Reuters and AP and Fox, etc.
Pizzagirl, you should know perfectly well that the kid was not for one second “suspected of having a bomb on him”; if he had been – as has been pointed out at least 50 times – the school would have been evacuated in approximately two seconds.
Re PG’s post #601 and my post #606, I also think it is relevant whether the student thought that the device would appear impressive to someone at the school, or not.
Taking the electronics out of one case and putting them into another: Not impressive to most 8-year-olds, I wouldn’t think.
Taking the electronics out of one case, modifying them, and putting them into another: Maybe impressive enough to show around, depending on what the modification was.
I can’t tell from the new reports I’ve read whether there was any modification or not. Whether or not the student thought that the device would be impressive is relevant to my overall understanding of this situation–at the moment, the full situation is unclear to me.
It goes without saying that profiling people based on race or religion is wrong.
“If Ahmed’s sister indeed was disciplined for bringing a hoax bomb to school, that would be news, and why wouldn’t it be in mainstream news sources?”
Because it’s made up. That’s what Breitbart and WND do.
OK, according to Snopes, Ahmed’s sister has said “that she had been suspended from school a few years earlier because another student (falsely) accused her of wanting to ‘blow up the school.’”
See http://m.snopes.com/2015/09/16/ahmed-mohamed/#kdSrJm0u7HUEDVoB.99
I find it fascinating and even slightly amusing – but not the least bit surprising – that this has somehow been transformed into TatinG’s factual assertion (unsupported by any citation) that “the older sister brought a hoax bomb to middle school a few years ago.”
One blogger called it a countdown clock. It was not. It was a regular alarm clock that displayed time.
I think part of the issue is that, to most, the electronics is the fancy part of a bomb and the hardest to understand. The gunpowder/dynamite/gasoline part is easy to understand. Once someone is capable of modifying a kitchen timer to a flash circuit, they have the capacity to build the “hard to understand” part. The missing component in all of this is the desire to build a bomb or any semblance of the other necessary components. It is paranoia to imagine a piece of electronics is a bomb part. Having only the electronics is like having only a rectangular piece of wood that could be made into a bomb if you add a match head and a stick of dynamite.
People are often led astray by slanted wording in agenda driven media accounts. We really have no facts on the incident involving Ahmed’s sister, so I will not comment. But I don’t find that assertion any less objectionable than the one that has permeated this thread - that those who felt that the school needed to follow whatever policies and procedures that were in place were somehow motivated by the fact that Ahmed was Muslim.
In this current environment schools have some pretty rigid protocols in place. Not everyone agrees with them. But once one domino falls it pretty much is an “unstoppable train” - at least in the schools I am familiar with. I have gotten more than my fair share of alarming text messages from my children’s schools - majority of them turned out to be nothing to worry about. But in that one or two instance where there was something to worry about, I was very thankful that those protocols were in place.
@DonnaL, you said:
But Snopes only said:
Snopes does not claim the sister said it, and Snopes also does not weigh in on whether such a claim is true or not.