Yeah, the homemade clock board looked like it was the guts out of something. The board was dipped in lead, not hand soldered. Not at all like the wire wrapped quadrature clocks and baud rate generators I used to make. But still, the kid showed some ingenuity in recycling the parts. I wouldn't have thought it was a bomb either.

But the adults in the room thought it was a bomb, then social media got a hold of the story, then Obama had his little photo-op, and now the kid and his family have split.

What do we learn from this? Beats me.

PS: I posted a link to the Malcolm Gladwell piece on the gulch, It seemed fascinating to me, but nobody else thought much of it. (As usual, tough crowd, all you can do is post and see if anybody else is interested ). The comparison of the school shooters motivation to the behavior of people in a riot was rather insightful, I thought.

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

Any kind of kid could have suffered the same oppression. I think that the fact that he was bullied in junior high was not really directly related to his being Muslim or Sudanese, but merely being different. His ethnicity was just a label that the bullies used. It could have been anything.

It is said that in high school (junior high) jocks bully nerds. Usually, they do not, because they travel in different groups. The bullies tend to be the most commonly normal kids who do not belong to any group except the largest one of "everyone."

That speaks to the reaction to the old clock in a new box. Most people are afraid of anything they do not understand. Curiosity is a special trait.