Well shit. Guess I’d be a terrible teacher then 
Please cite any of those who have called the kid a genius of any stripe. Bonus points for citing anyone calling him a “tech genius.” Extra-special bonus points if you can cite anyone in this thread doing either. (Non-sarcastically, of course.)
I’m pretty sure the clock itself is an issue. If he didn’t make it, somebody reported some shit that wasn’t true.
Well that’s a fair point I guess. But IIRC from the initial reporting, all of the evidence that he’s a tinkerer came directly from his dad, who’s a political activist, so I don’t think there’s a lot to go on either way. But I see your point, I’m trying to apply occam’s razor based on tiny bits and pieces of a story.
Then stop adding entities.
False. Peers were also quoted as saying he is a kid who tinkers and builds cameras out of cardboard.
I’m sure that they are shitty cameras, though. You’d never buy one.
Of course. See, he’s a budding inventor. That kid that chewed his pop tart into the shape of a gun and was suspended for it is a budding sculptor. That other kid that wrote a story about shooting a dinosaur with a gun and was arrested and suspended for it is a budding writer. Yet those two had the misfortune of being white. So no messages from Obama for them, no Microsoft gifts, no adulation in the press and in the media. And of course, no one claiming that they were mistreated because they were white.
Pop Tart kid was suspended, not arrested (and apparently suspended due to a long history of disruptive behavior not that sole incident). Dinosaur kid was arrested for being disorderly, not for writing a story. Ahmed was arrested for bringing a clock to school.
But, you know, white discrimination or something.
it is a home made clock - his re-purposing of existing clock components doesn’t invalidate that.
When you make a home made sandwich - do you grow everyhing from scratch?
I think the jury’s still out on that.
This guy says the kid really made a clock out of pieces.
When you get a Subway sandwich and put it in a Wendy’s box, is it a homemade sandwich?
“Inside it, the electronics appear less as a combination of miscellaneous parts wired together into a timepiece, and more so as simply the guts of a standard digital alarm clock.” - the opposite of “made a clock out of pieces”.
no - that would be a hoax sandwich.
Point is - he wanted a clock “like this” and he built it -even if he had bought a blank board and the readouts/controllers, etc (while significantly harder) it would still be using existing components.
Did he ‘create’ a clock? no
did he “build” a clock? yes. (or more correctly - he disassemlbed and rebuilt a clock to meet his requirements/ideas)
The important thing is that we all have the chance to say to a kid who thought he did something kind of cool “no, sorry kid, but that thing you were playing with totally sucks and is stupid”. God forbid he actually be encouraged to tinker and learn something.
As I said, it’s some weird petty envy. Maybe their own parents or teachers didn’t give them enough attention or love or something.
“Look, I made a clock!”
“Fuck you, this is garbage and you’re a liar!”
Maybe i’m jaded, but i’m rather surprised at how much attention is being paid to this kid’s level of technical skill, either for or against. I’m sure there are 14-year-olds in the American public schools who could build things much more sophisticated than a clock, but there are also 14-years-old who are barely literate. And there are millions of 14-year-olds who fall somewhere in the middle. Hell, i have students in my university classes who can barely put together a coherent sentence.
But none of that matters.
I know it will probably surprise some people here, but Obama didn’t invite this kid to the White House because he needs technical advice about updating the security of government servers or redesigning the West Wing’s alarm system. He didn’t even invite him because the clock he built represents some sort of groundbreaking effort by a 14-year-old.
He invited him as an act of political solidarity, and that was a good thing to do. He invited him to say “Fuck you” to the asshole bigots who run that Texas school district. He invited him to let him know that not everyone in the country subscribes to the narrow provincialism and anti-intellectualism and sheer stubborn idiocy demonstrated in this case.
All the other people and groups offering memberships and stuff to Ahmed Mohamed did so for pretty much the same reason: to stand by a kid who was subjected to treatment that is contrary to the values that Americans claim to uphold.
Ernesto Miranda was a fucking horrible person, but he deserved the right to an attorney, and he deserved to know what his rights were under the law. You might think that wearing your pants down below your butt looks stupid, but that doesn’t excuse a police officer detaining a young black man without reasonable suspicion, or arresting him without probable cause. Some gays and lesbians might end up involved in shitty marriages and some might be crappy parents, but they deserve the same right to marry and to have children anyway.
And by the same token, it doesn’t matter if the clock isn’t particularly special. The sophistication of the clock is completely irrelevant. Whatever the level of sophistication, no-one actually denies that it actually IS a clock, the student never represented it as anything BUT a clock, and his science teacher also recognized and acknowledged that it was, in fact, a fucking clock. And he was still questioned by the cops, and he was still arrested, and he was still suspended. That’s why people are involved in this. When you stand beside someone based on a principle, you do it for the principle itself.
Taking that initiative - and keeping it working/functional - is something to be admired - its a first (of many steps) to understanding these things.
I dissasmebled many a thing in those years - @ 14, I was rebuilding small engines, etc.
I never got to the point of designing my own in any real scale - but the skills I learned serve me to this day - knowing you ‘can’ take something apart and put it back together (and it still work) is a valuable skill - bonus points if you can manage to re-purpose it into something else - and even more if you can repair/fix.
These are very real skills that our ‘throw away and buy new’ society loses.
Perfectly said.
He built the clock that morning before school for lulz. He has apparently constructed much more complicated devices in the past.
agreed -