Stupid Ahmed Mohamed question

by philg

Readers:

Here is a dumb question about Ahmed Mohamed, the student who has been in the news lately for “making a clock” and bringing it to a public high school.

MIT has admitted this child to the PhD program in Physics (let’s hope he doesn’t figure out the difference in pay between working as a Physics post-doc and as a medical doctor (see “Women in Science” for what happens when people do figure this out)). Barack Obama has invited him to the White House. Google invited him to come hang out. Twitter offered him a internship.

The one thing that no journalist has tried to explain, however, is what Mohamed actually did. Did he go to the beach, melt sand into silicon wafers, create discrete transistors and solder them together to “make a clock”? That would be challenging even for a grown-up. Did he get a clock kit, sort of like the old Heathkits that every American child was previously assumed competent to build (but now everyone is too busy on Xbox?)? Did he design a clock from scratch, and then build it from TTL chips or burn a PAL, then wire-wrap everything together? Did he find plans for a clock online and buy the parts from DigiKey to assemble it? What does “make a clock” mean in this case?

Can readers help? What did Ahmed Mohamed actually do, expressed in terms of schematics, components, soldering, wire-wrapping, etc.? (And I guess a separate question is why does nobody care enough that journalists would write about this? Is it truly impossible to explain 1960s technology to an American layperson?)

33 thoughts on “Stupid Ahmed Mohamed question”

  4. From what I’ve seen so far, Ahmed didn’t so much built, as disassembled a standard digital alarm clock, them added a converter and battery terminals to make it a stand alone one. Then he put the exposed PCB (rather large for mere clock, but maybe it was a “wall-plaque” one from the start) with running ribbon wires inside what looked like a 6in-wide lacquered school pencil case with KOOL! designs on it. Because he didn’t bother to save the button labels from the original product, in all likelihood he was unaware that the clock would beep at some present time – which happened when his “MIT-class clock invention” rested in the school’s locker. The rest is history.

    Picture of the “bomb” released by the police (I’ve seen better pictures of it, do not remember where)

    A sample comment from the discussion on “Schneier on Security” blog

    Glenn Greenwald has a thing or two to say about the it

  5. The depressing news making the rounds today is the realization is that neither the school administrators, nor the police, actually, really thought he had made a bomb, else they would have evacuated the school and called the bomb squad. It just goes to show that, no matter how cynical I am — and I ranted about government overreach in the wake of 9/11 in more than one place — I’m only ever half cynical enough.

  6. It looks like he took the guts from a digital alarm clock then mounted them in a box. Not impressive engineering, but hey he’s just a kid tinkering and probably has no technical guidance.

    My tech dad got me into electronics with Radio Shack kits and home brew projects. I’ve paid it forward by giving many kits (breadboard, jumpers, Arduino nano, LEDs, LCD, buzzers, buttons, etc.) to nephews + friend’s kids. About 50% are happy to do projects (eg: Pong game https://goo.gl/5V51Ex) with hands-on help, but <10% have shown interest beyond that. This https://goo.gl/yt1GGE shows that young kids do have the capacity to build electronics projects, but most seem to need lots of encouragement to do it.

    So when Ahmed "invents" a clock (however trivial) his initiative should be encouraged (except the exposed transformer wired to a 110v plug, yikes!).

  7. My son wants to be an engineer. I should help him put the guts of his XBONE in a project box, poorly, and maybe he’ll get accepted to MIT. Taking him out in handcuffs was an overreaction given they obviously didn’t think it was a bomb at that point, but a 7 segment display on a silver latching box looks sinister enough to me. Had this been sitting on a bench the bomb squad would have been called in and it would have been detonated without approaching it.

  8. You should check qntra: http://qntra.net/2015/09/war-on-engineering-teen-arrested-for-building-clock/

    Look carefully at the official photo.

    The kid, for reasons unknown to me, busted open a perfectly ordinary alarm clock. He did not engineer anything. Note the object in the lower half of the attache. It is a mains transformer, plug still attached. In the left side of the hinge, there is a 9v battery connector, hanging loose.

    But now that he was picked up by his local idiots, he is suddenly a celebrity, assured of an audience with the Führer and, hell, perhaps a scholarship to MIT [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ]!

  11. Does it matter?

    I agree that this has been blown out of the water, but I think what MIT, the White House, Goolge etc… did was to show how ridicule the situation was and that a lot of doors will open for people with intellectual curiosity and pride in what they do.

  12. dorfsmay – Yes it does matter. Intellectual curiosity and pride will only get you so far. Ahmed is being hailed as some sort of new Edison when all he did was take a commercial digital clock out of its case and put in (unsafely) in a box. He is more Forrest Gump than Edison or Jobs. The problem is that we are increasingly living in an idiocracy where teachers are too dumb to know the difference, the police are too dumb to know the difference, reporters are too dumb to know the difference, the President is too dumb…, etc.

    Upton Sinclair said, ” It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I think that there was a lot of paid misunderstanding here – everyone has been so busy promoting their own private agenda that reality has been shove to the side.

    I really do hope that Ahmed doesn’t end up at MIT – I fear he would be in over his head in short order. Really bright 14 year olds do build digital clocks out of bits and pieces but Ahmed is not one of them.

  13. I really do hope that Ahmed doesn’t end up at MIT – I fear he would be in over his head in short order. Really bright 14 year olds do build digital clocks out of bits and pieces but Ahmed is not one of them.

    Quite. One underage (true) prodigy Ted Kaczynski admitted to Harvard at 16, and, partly as a result of that, turning homicidal, is enough. Also, were MIT-Ahmed to ultimately come to law enforcement’s attention, they’d plaster the media with WE TOLD YOU ALL ALONG.

  15. Best I can tell, he took an off-the-shelf clock and disassembled it to make it look like a briefcase bomb. Which it did. Not clear if that constitutes grounds for admission into MIT for Physics, but maybe Poli-Sci?

  16. What he did technically is probably not much, expect that 99.9% of other kids have no interest and couldn’t be bothered to do it. What he did is how most good geeks start.

  17. The idea of this kid being like Edison is ridiculous. There is no evidence that he ever appropriated the work of a more gifted classmate.

  19. @dorfsmay, you’re making this sound like Hilary when she said “What difference does it make” about U.S. consulate mess in Benghzai, Libya.

    Getting invited to the White House for this incident? Really?!

    Why not invite real genus kids who are attending MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc. and make example of them to the nation? Why not put them on the front page of the news to set an example?

    We are creating victims out of thin-air just to be politically correct, that’s what this is all about.

  20. I can see why Obama would use this to score political points, but I don’t see why MIT and Google need to join in.

    I think it is ridiculous that the kid got into so much trouble for something that is obviously not a threat.

    I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the Idiocracy going on.

  21. MIT has had a terrible record lately of siding with the government against harmless hackers. They helped drive Swartz to suicide by rolling over for the US attorney’s office, and they didn’t do anything to help Star Simpson when she was almost machine gunned at Logan for having blinky lights on a home made badge. So I’m not sure what’s up here. Maybe overcompensating for past horrendous fuck ups?

  22. Good point, Anon…I never though about Aaron Swartz — that mess was indeed terrible. But, I have watched the documentaries about it, MIT said to the prosecutor that they did not want him charged after it blew up, but the prosecutor did not listen to them; so while I still believe that are somewhat at fault, they do not deserve all the blame, as they tried to make it right. In regards to Ahmed, I don’t care if he “made” the clock or whatever — it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain he disassembled an existing clock and put it back together inside of a pencil case. Let me ask you this — Did Steve Jobs, or Apple, invent the smartphone? Of course not — there were smartphones long before the iPhone. Did they invent the tablet computer? Nope. But the reason why people like iPads and iPhones better than the competition is because of the old ideas being put to use in new ways and new applications. Everyone has to start somewhere; Ahmed was trying to learn by doing and tinkering around, and this sort of activity should be encouraged among youth, not demonized. That to me is the most important point here.

  24. The first thing one does if one wants to build a clock is take apart an existing clock to see how it works. Ahmed may not be an inventor (yet) but he seems to want to become one. We pay the educators in his school a lot of money. Their job is to nurture the inventor in Ahmed, not to arrest him for his first baby steps toward that goal. The story isn’t about what Ahmed did or didn’t do. The story is about what the adults around Ahmed did.

  25. Most of you lack empathy for Ahmed who did something bright but was traumatized by the end result. Is being a prodigy or genius a perquisite to visit (or having a short stint) the said establishments? Is America such a harsh place now?

  26. No, it’s not a harsh place – it’s a place where we are being manipulated by propaganda and its (barely) still OK to question the manipulation, but only in out of the way places that don’t endanger the influence of the regime over the masses. This could apply to Putin’s Russia but also to the US today.

    Ahmed is a modern day Stakhanov – an exemplary character who is elevated in order to instruct the masses. Whether his miraculous feats are as they have been portrayed is beside the point as long as he can be used to illustrate the propaganda point that is being promoted. If you question his feats then you are by implication questioning the Party Line and this must not be permitted.

  27. The latest allegation is that he case-modded. Not saying this is true in Mohammad’s case, but I do recall Radio Shack selling kit forms of their digital clocks.

    At any rate, no it doesn’t look like he was doing electrical engineering. He was doing physical engineering.

  28. A 14 year-old brought a box to school containing a bunch of electronic components. The police were called and he was arrested, handcuffed and fingerprinted. The contents of the box are really irrelevant, except for the fact that there was nothing the box that is illegal to possess in Texas.

  29. Dartren – it was not a kit. Someone on the interwebs found the clock that he took apart – it was an old Radio Shack clock that was sold as a complete clock, not a kit. Basically he removed the innards from their factory case and stuck them loosely in a small briefcase. This was the extent of his great invention or “engineering”.

    Vince – The stuff that he brought was, arguably (and this is what the police investigated) a “hoax device” – not a bomb but something that looks like a bomb. The device looked sufficiently like a (movie prop) bomb that one teacher told him not to show it to anyone else. Ahmed ignored that advice and proceeded to plug the device and have its alarm go off during his English class, which not only disrupted the class (thus justifying his school suspension) but also appeared to his English teacher (not without justification) to resemble a bomb. The basic ingredients of a movie prop bomb/ hoax device are (a) a large digital display with (b) a bunch of wires usually inside (c) a briefcase. His fit the bill rather well. Possession of hoax devices is also illegal in Texas.

    It’s possible (maybe even likely) that this was all just an innocent comedy of errors but it’s also possible that the boy (encouraged by his Muslim activist father) was encouraged to do this to see if he could create a stink and yet preserve deniability. What will happen the next time a Muslim kid brings in something that looks like a bomb and really is and is he is not stopped because we have be told that assuming that Muslims carrying things that look like bombs may really be bombs is racist? Can Ahmed bring in a pressure cooker to school next week and say that it’s just to show off his mother’s cooking? When Ahmed brings his device to show the President, how much do you want to bet that the Secret Service goes over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure that it’s really not a bomb? There’s one standard for our rulers and another for everyone else.

  30. Possession of hoax devices is also illegal in Texas? Is that true? What is the Texas legal definition of a hoax device? If the kid broke the law, why was he not charged with anything? You also say that his box of electronics looks a movie bomb. That’s probably not even correct. Even in the movies there are usually a couple of sticks of dynamite or something that would actually explode in the bomb.

  31. Sec. 46.08. HOAX BOMBS.

    (a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly manufactures, sells, purchases, transports, or possesses a hoax bomb with intent to use the hoax bomb to:

    (1) make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device; or

    (2) cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies.

    He was not charged because he ultimately convinced the police that he lacked the necessary intent.

  32. What that means, Izzie, is that the Texas legislature is partially to blame for the events that took place in that school. I wonder if the law defines what a hoax bomb is. Furthermore, if the police needed to talk to the kid to determine his intent, I would think that that could have been done in a few minutes and that handcuffs and fingerprints would be unnecessary.

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