Just Blame Fred

This MIT Student wasn’t doing anything all that different from what I did as a kid. The breadboard she mounted to her jacket is a very common and very basic part in the tool chest of any electronic tinkerer. I used those very breadboards myself when I was that girl’s age and younger — quite a bit younger. I think I started around age 13 building all kinds of cool electronic circuits using LEDs, ICs, capacitors, resistors, transistors, and diodes. What did I build? Everything from decade counters to simple multiplexers, from wierd music devices to photo-detectors and alarms. I even built a 1024-bit binary counter out of a single 1024-bit by one DRAM chip and some supporting electronics. Once I even built a “character” generator to display a 16 by 16-bit field from a static ram chip onto a TV — using discrete components.

Those were the days.

Even before I got my hands on those cool breadboards, I was building electronic circuits. I once built a tone generator and placed that in a plastic box. I gave that to a neighborhood kid to do his science project with. I tried to explain to the poor kid how the thing worked, but I don’t think he quite grasped it. However, I think he got a good grade anyway!

I could see happening to myself what happened to Star Simpson, had this silly craze of terrorism paranoia been rampant around my time. And I can understand perfectly why she might not even consider for a moment that anyone would be so stupid as to think that a simple circuit breadboard could be mistaken for a bomb. It simply probably didn’t even occur to her, as it would not to myself. At least not my younger self.

Today, I have painfully learned the hard way how stupid your average person is. And that goes 10 times for someone working in the security field of nearly any sort. You can simply — I am sad to say — estimate just how stupid an arbitrary person can be. And I deal with the sad reality all the time.

My full support goes out to Star Simpson, and hope she fairs well in this stick quagmire she stumbled into. As far as the rest of the country is concerned, consider that 41,000 people a year die in vehicle accidents. I see no outcry there. Even my younger brother, a truck driver for FedEx, died in a horrible crash where his body was burned so badly we had a closed-casket funeral for him. Compared to traffic accidents and the related death toll, so-called threats of “terrorism” in our country is a non-issue, even taking 9/11, a single incident, into account. I would say the priorities of our government and the people of this country are totally back-asswards.