September 18, 2015 by CoB

The Alarming Clock

A few days ago, a high school student in Irving, Texas, brought a homemade digital clock to school to impress his technology teacher. The teacher was impressed by the aspiring inventor’s work. Later in the day, another teacher saw the contraption and, becoming concerned, alerted the principal. The police were called, and the 14-year-old was handcuffed (“for his safety and for the safety of the officers”), arrested and removed to a juvenile detention facility, and interrogated without an attorney present.

Why? Because the device “looked like a bomb.” No one involved claims to have believed it actually was a bomb; the accusation was that the boy’s intention was to pretend it was a bomb, despite the fact that he showed the device to one teacher and kept it tucked away in his backpack without mentioning it to anyone else. The clock was discovered by another teacher only after it beeped once while in his backpack, and he maintained throughout his questioning by school officials and police that it was nothing more than a digital clock he had proudly built to demonstrate his technical skills to his new technology teacher.

But young Ahmed Mohamed was suspected of bringing his clock in with the intention of portraying it as a hoax bomb. Because he was Muslim and brown-skinned, Internet discussions quickly turned accusatory in all directions. I’m not going to write about the merits of any side in that discussion today. Instead, I’m going to write about a meme that made its way around the Internet in the days following.

The meme, shown below, is clever and amusing. However, the humor ends when some Internet denizens treat the meme as a convincing argument for the conclusion that suspicion was justified purely on the basis of three images that one can see with one’s own eyes, and therefore any suggestion that it might have had anything to do with the young man’s religion or skin color is misguided. The conclusion that Ahmed’s religion, name, and skin color were irrelevant factors may or may not be true; but this meme does not argue that conclusion successfully because the argument rests on two demonstrably flawed premises.

The two premises are:

1. This clock looks just like this bomb
2. This clock doesn’t look like a clock

This clock looks just like this bomb

The two images are shown at different scales, and it’s not particularly hard to tell. The clock is shown next to a polarized AC plug, something we’re all quite familiar with. The prongs on a polarized AC plug are 11/16ths of an inch long. Using that as a reference, I invite all readers to determine the approximate size of the clock-containing pencil box. Having done so, compare those measurements to the pencil boxes found at your local office supply store.

The suitcase bomb image contains a clue of its own – the luggage tag on the case’s handle. A luggage tag is 3-1/2 inches long. Again, I invite all readers to determine the size of the suitcase bomb.

You’ll find the scale something like this:

That’s not what the meme makes it look like, is it? Showing the two devices to scale would not have had the same impact. There are other clues to the deceptive nature of the image pairing, such as framing and perspective, but the point is made. Whether the deception was intended or not, it exists, and the premise that “this clock looks just like this bomb” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Electronics /= Bomb.

This clock doesn’t look like a clock

This one’s just too easy. The homemade clock is a digital-display clock, and the one shown for comparison is an analog-display clock. Compare the image below with the image of the analog-display clock shown in the meme. (Is that a detonator I see in the picture on the left?)

The meme cleverly plays on the difference in appearance between analog and digital clocks, but as a premise it’s pure equivocation.

Therefore,…

With the two premises rejected, the conclusion is invalid. That doesn’t mean it’s incorrect – but it does mean that this meme provides no valid argument to support it. In light of that fact, any rational person who wants to support the position that the young inventor’s arrest and interrogation without counsel were justified predominantly by factors other than his skin color and religion will have to make a different argument than the one presented by this meme. When we consider the admission by police and school officials that none of them ever actually believed it was a bomb, along with the fact that the young man never pretended it was anything but a clock, and the fact that he showed it discreetly to a single teacher, that argument may be difficult to make; but it’s not OK to resort to deception just because our argument is difficult to make honestly. To live in a rational society, we all have to do better than that.

P.S. If you’d like to make your own digital clock, look no further.