So there you go.

The most typical comment of all boils down to “it sure do look like a bomb to me”, they all nod sagely, and Ahmed Mohamed is therefore a terrorist.

I do hate to step into the swamp of arguing about the sincerely held beliefs of rightwingers, but I think this poor kid deserves a defense this one time.

That linked article showcased the common smear that “he didn’t build that!”. “It’s not an ‘invention’!”. Well, actually, this 14 year old showed more inventiveness in his science project than I did in mine at that age. What he did was combine a clock kit with a backup battery and a few switches, and put it into an old pencil case he had laying around, and called that novel combination of junk that had never existed before his “invention”. And for a 14-year old, that sure as hell is an invention.

When I was his age and needed to come up with something for a school science project, I just threw together this thing based on an article I’d recently read in Popular Science or some publication like that. It was a 10 by 10 matrix of neon lights, wired to two rotary switches, one below and one to the right, in such a way that a single bulb would light up when its row and column had been selected by the two switches. Number the positions on the switches 1 through 10, and scrawl the numbers 1 through 100 next to the lights, and shazzam! that 14 year old had invented a computer! Yay me! And they called me a “mathematical genius”, I kid you not.

Betcha Ahmed was shooting about that high, but his skin and religion condemned him to suspicion, arrest, and notoriety instead. But it seems to have turned out ok for him, in the end, as long as he ignores the screeching on the right side of the Internet.

Can you say “like a kid at Christmas”?

The police are under condemnation for arresting a ‘genius maker’ who just wanted to show off his innocent invention. I suspect several of them want to defend their actions, but having already been dragged through the mud on this, their superiors just want it to go away quietly. If they were to try and explain their actions as legit law enforcement, they would be shouted down by the masses, so why bother.

Like an alarm clock made in china and stuffed in a pencil box…time will tell.

Its sad that the events of 9/11 have suddenly turned a routine obnoxious brat story into a national civil rights issue. If he hadn’t of been Muslim, there would be no story here.

I’m not one to get excited about conspiracy theories. This doesn’t need to be a vast right-wing or left wing or islamic conspiracy. I bet this is a kid who probably made something as a prank and brought it to school. It quickly got out of hand and rather than fess up he pretended he built it from scratch.

Surely the police must have come to the same conclusion, which is why he was eventually released. In light of the new information that the clock wasn’t really invented, I’m going to hold off on my opinion as to what the appropriate response by police should have been for now.

When I was a kid in the 80′s I made an S.O.S sign on some bark while playing in the back woods. I was just playing, but later my older brother found it and showed it to my mom. My mom took my brother with the sign to turn it into the sheriff just in case. Nobody ever asked me if I made it, but I certainly wasn’t going to fess up to it now that the police were involved. Now had my mom asked all of her kids if this was something one of us made, I would have said something, but not after the over-reaction. I bet Ahmed is in the same pickle. He made something foolish, got caught in a lie and now has to continue the lie because he’s in too deep.

The question now is will anybody notice the lie and get him to own up now that the geek community has made such a fuss over him and lavished him with gifts.