IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Ghoti - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My son once bemoaned how difficult he found it was to spell words properly. I had to sympathasize with him. After all, the words "soap" and "hope" could have been "sope" and "hoap".

Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, once addressed this issue with a cartoon of a hoodlum with an apparent head cold pushing a plowshare through a massive bowl of cookie dough with the caption "The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough."  with all of those "...ough" words having different pronunciations.

Bubba Meisah - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Ever hear of the term Bubba Meisah (bubba meye-seh)? It means in Yiddish a "grandmother's story," or and old wives' tale.

Somebody once suggested looking for a particular vitamin supplement in this one particular store, so I and my wife went over there. As my wife was reading the vitamin bottle labels, I noticed a clerk who was lecturing a customer at great length about herbal supplements, holistic health care, the synergistic interactions of particular foods, the proper way to achieve a healthy life style and on and on and on and on....... while the customer stood there listening and going "I see. Uh-huh. Really! Oh, I didn't know that. and on and on and on........."

A Short Story for Managers

A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can't be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don't get pissed off and buy another product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The Age Table - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I once had someone who was approaching the age of age forty ( At the time, so was I. ) bemoan the perception of getting older. Since this person was well versed in digital logic and the associated mathematics, I suggested that instead of counting age decimally, age should be counted in hexadecimal by which 40 Dec comes to 28 Hex and one could say that one's age was only twenty-eight.

I got the most peculiar stare.

Mandrake The Magician and the Planck Frequency - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time, we find the following:   

 
for which we read at this URL that:

"Theoretically, this is the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible,^[3] roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, for times less than one Planck time apart, we can neither measure nor detect any change."

Conversely, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_angular_frequency, we find the following:  

 
Thus, if the Planck time is the smallest possible unit of time that can exist, then the Planck angular frequency must be the maximum possible frequency that can exist.

Preconceptions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Preconception 1:  Harmless

The movie "Beauty and the Beast" was released in 1946 in French as "La Belle et la Bête" and was shown on local television some years ago. As I watched, I found myself thinking "How can an animal like that have learned to speak French? How silly."

Now if the Beast had been speaking English, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. After all, so many beasts can do that. Think of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny for example. Clearly, I have long had and apparently still do have the preconception that the English language would have given the Beast no problem at all.

Of course not.

 

The Tchotchke - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Maybe this URL will be off-line by the time you read this, but if not, it's worth a look. It shows what is supposed to be the world's most useless machine.

http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/12/6624781-the-worlds-most-useless-machine-version-20?gt1=43001

It reminds me of a Candid Camera program of many years ago where Alan Funt showed a useless machine. It was a Bud box with nine NE-2 neon lamps mounted in rubber grommets with each lamp blinking on and off at its own individual rate in what was obviously a collection of relaxation oscillators.

You remember this thing, right? A ninety volt battery, a 0.1 µF capacitor in parallel with the NE-2 and a multi-megohm resistor feeding them.

The Checksum - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Leonardo da Vinci's works have been published and re-published and studied and examined and pored over by scholars and historians and scientists and mathematicians and.....  However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City once had an exhibit, not of da Vinci's great and finished works,

but of his scraps, the leftover detritus of da Vinci's manifold efforts.

Solfeggio - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please consider the following from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary at

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solfeggio :

Definition of SOLFEGGIO:    SOLFÈGE

Origin of SOLFEGGIO   Italian, from sol-fa   First Known Use: 1774

sol•fège    noun \säl-ˈfezh\

1: the application of the sol-fa syllables to a musical scale or to a melody

2: a singing exercise especially using sol-fa syllables; also : practice in sight-reading vocal music using the sol-fa syllables

In other words, when you sing a scale as in do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do, you are practicing solfeggio.

With this in mind, please see the link below to see what the great comic genius Ernie Kovacks went and did with it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoLTFQsFswM

The Fires - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Some years ago, there was an item on WNYC radio about this road that was built out west someplace where it was decided to use chopped up, steel belted radial automobile tires as a base underneath the asphalt. What a mistake.

The story was that as time went on, the steel that had been part of the tires gradually rusted and as that oxidation took place, it would release just a little bit of heat which had nowhere to go and just accumulated.

As temperatures rose and rose and rose.... the tires would ignite. Result: The road surface was constantly erupting in flames. Fires would burst out over here, then over there, later on over that-a-way; one never knew where it was going to happen next.

As you can imagine, motorists and the local fire departments did not like that.

I think the episode is really a lesson about unintended consequences. "The best laid plans of mice and men", and all that, but in the final evaluation, it was a major engineering blunder.

I never did hear if they rebuilt that road.