Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?

[Foster]

Daisies, you appear to be a CD troll, with your only three posts in the last few hours all getting negative responses. While opposing views on CD are welcome, I don't think your writings are. But as all things CD, I'm going to take you at face value.

I'm not going to go back and attempt to refute your points by a point by point response. I will respond to main part of your "ideas"

-- Family and their activities in the Muslim community. Yay for them. They are devout Muslims and are doing things to protect their faith. The father tried to stop a Florida "minister" from doing a mass burning of the Koran (the equivalent of Christianity Bible). This isn't the 1500-1600's and the Crusades. Who / what / when they worship is up to them. I worship the "Sourcebook of Electronic Components"

-- It's a RadioShack clock, not something he built. Who cares? I've left a huge swath of disassembled radios, TVs, high voltage neon signs, computers, two and four stroke engines both gas and diesel equipment, and who knows what of junk components from electronic recyclers. Some of it got repurposed, some of it was junked after I learned about it, some more I paid serious dollars to get it reassembled and working. ALL OF IT WAS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. He's 14, there are posts saying "Well when I could first crawl I took apart grandma's TV. Good for them, good for this kid at 14, he's trying to learn. The 28 year old lit teacher also had a learning experience. You are never too old to take stuff apart. Get a butter knife out and take your laptop apart right now!!! Learn something!

-- The school got into their "Zero Tolerance Policy" roadmap where all destinations are Failtown. "It's beeping. What is that? It's a clock. Ok, shut it off and sit down." One possible path. The path they took was "What is that? It's a clock. Looks like a bomb. Shut it off and when class is over we will start the process of `bringing things to school that do not have school district numbers' ". Which all end up with police action.

The school called the police from a town that has an avowed Muslim hater as a Mayor. Four officers show up and question a 14 year old boy, without his parents, a lawyer for 3 hours about a clock. After that, hand cuffed (for his safety!!) and transported to a detention center to be photographed and fingerprinted.

-- Treasures heaped upon this student. People heard and did individual things. It wasn't a coordinated effort. The President invited him to come to the Whitehouse. And while people are out there going "Of course, our Muslim President is helping a Muslim kid (false, the president is a Christian) I look at it as more of a geek President is helping a geek kid.

Facebook, Apple, Intel, etc, etc "Come see us". Easy to do for them. I'd rather see them come to the school and present to the TEACHERS on how cool geeks can be and the geek tech we use. Come present to students that geeks that have made their lives better come in multiple shades of skin colors, multiple religions, multiple countries, multiple sexual preferences and are all "people". But it appears that I don't tell them what to do and it's not my money.

In "Foster World" (tm) this would have been handled differently. In this Earth timeline it was handled poorly. They could have taken all that money, time and future effort to reach out to more future roboteers.

-- Lastly, please don't visit my house. My workbench is covered with devices with wires all over, flashing LED in both lights and 8 segment display formats. Lots of the stuff is mounted in Sugru, a white Playdo like substance that looks a lot like movie C4. The stuff is great for building little containers for small circuits until I win Powerball and can buy a 3D printer.

-- Summary: Kid new to ripping things apart does a project and takes it to school. School invokes "Zero tolerance == Zero Success cause we dump stuff on the police". Police handle the situation badly. World sees and tries to right a single injustice.


It catches Daisies eye, since it's tech related, but if they would Google search "other screwed up thing in the world" they will find a litany of "Wow is that going on?" things in the world and see that other people are trying to fix other things. We all pick the stuff that we think is wrong and try to fix it.

I'm a robotics Mentor. I'm trying to improve my small corner of this Earth Timeline. There is way too much broken things in this timeline. If you have time Daisies to complain about how other people are making a difference, it's clear that YOU are not working hard enough to make a difference. I run my test "is it helping?" In this case one kid, and since I deal in the "one roboteer success" program, they pass, so I turn back to my job as a Mentor.

Good luck Daisies on helping the world.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Foster

Hey, NASA has reached out:

Chris Hadfield ‏@Cmdr_Hadfield (NASA Astronaut)

Hi @IStandWithAhmed ! I'd love you to join us for our science show Generator in Toronto on 28 Oct. There's a ticket waiting for you.

Slight nitpick: Chris Hadfield is a CSA astronaut... Hence why he would be doing a show in Toronto. AFAIK out of all CSA astronauts over the years, he's the most accomplished (even getting to be commander over an ISS Expidition).