much ado

ok, so this from salon.com......Star Simpson, a 19-year-old MIT student, was arrested at gunpoint Friday morning at Boston's Logan Airport when officers suspected that a circuit board and battery she had pinned to her sweatshirt was a bomb. Indeed, every news outlet is now referring to the thing as a "fake bomb," and Simpson has been charged with possessing a "hoax device."

But pictures of the sweatshirt that officials are putting out show something quite less scary -- I have no idea what a real bomb looks like, but I don't think it's a plastic board with a 9-volt battery on it. Simpson's explanation is that the jacket was a wearable-art project she made so she could stand out at her school's career day (the plastic board lights up). All information now streaming in supports that view, and suggests that the affair could have been a misunderstanding, one that very nearly turned tragic.

This is my speculation only, but it seems quite possible that rather than intending to deliberately walk into Logan with a fake bomb, Simpson might instead have rolled out of bed with an art jacket she often wore around campus and slipped it on in a rush on her way to pick up a friend -- forgetting that she was heading into the all-fear-all-the-time black hole that is U.S. aviation.

What's the evidence for this? For one thing, as Xeni Jardin points out in Boing Boing's marvelous roundup on the story, Simpson is much into making cool, out-there techie stuff, things like a jacket that lights up. Her own Web site is currently offline -- click here later -- but you can check out some of Simpson's handiwork at her Instructables profile and look here for one of her recent school projects.

Simpson describes herself this way on the Web:
In a sentence, I'm an inventor, artist, engineer, and student, I love to build things and I love crazy ideas.