IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Lots of Loose Cables - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There is a big problem afoot in this area. Utility workers are leaving loose cables dangling down, even an entire electronic assembly of some kind at one location. As a result, I believe that passersby are being endangered.

In case you haven't seen it yet, please read the essay on EDN at: Loose Cables 

So far, I have identified and notified the town of dozens of addresses where such danger exists. At this writing, my most recent communications with the town were as follows:

These are addresses which I sent to the town:

Merely fixing the sites I report would not prevent the continued utility worker misconduct that has led to these dangers.

This looks like a major problem. We will see where this leads.

Musical Preferences - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My confession: I don't like most of the music of Beethoven or Chopin or Liszt or  Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Mahler or .......  

While these and other composers are revered all over the world for their musical works which have given generations of people great pleasure, I just don't share in that pleasure and I intensely dislike being compelled  to listen.

Although there are certain specific works which I do enjoy such as Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov (especially the 1964 recording that was conducted by Leopold Stokowsky), Bach's Mass in B-Minor, the opening passage of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (Yes, Beethoven.) and Pachelbel's Canon by Johann Pachelbel, do my likes balance my dislikes?

The world seems to tell me "no".

Whenever the topic comes up, I get asked questions like "But why don't you like ......." which is not really an inquiry into my preferences as much it's my being scolded for being an immature clod with an inadequate and juvenile attention span and a further judgmental assertion that I am in dire need of redemption, re-education and perhaps even psychiatric remediation. Think "the three R's". Of course, no classical music aficionado ever means to say that to me in a "bad" way.

Actually, I spent thirteen wonderful years as part of a choral group called The Armand Sodero Chorale and the sound of a harp is quite pleasing to my ear. However, I find the sound of a violin to be somewhat grating, even the finest Stradivarius.

I have been discovered to have some hearing deficits. Most notably, I have frequency response notches in my right ear's hearing at 3 kHz and 6 kHz. That plus some other hearing issues may have their consequences, but that doesn't matter to my detractors.

When my mother-in-law was alive, she and my wife enjoyed attending concerts at Lincoln Center. Having attended many such concerts myself and having disliked most of them, it became my practice to chauffeur them to Lincoln Center and to have a newspaper handy with which to occupy myself during each concert while I waited in the lobby, reading and doing the puzzle page. I didn't own a smartphone at the time.

I could hear the concert music coming through the lobby's muffled loudspeakers so I knew when it was time to go meet them as concerts ended. Encores would fool me now and then, but the basic strategy was sound. (Yes, pun intended.)

Now, if you'll please excuse me, I feel like listening to some songs as recorded by Ed Ames and Petula Clark.

More Sightings - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Seen at a local supermarket:

 

Wanna buy a used car? (Same grocery store's bulletin board.)

 

Spotted at a garden supply store and no, he did not want to make friends:

 

Somebody really loves Shakespeare:

 

I needed to contact Verizon's customer service for some reason so I dialed and got put on hold. I turned my phone's speaker on while waiting and busied myself with something else. Suddenly, I looked up at the phone display and saw that I'd been kept waiting on hold for over an hour.

 

Paper Lantern - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

What you see being made below is something I learned how to do in kindergarten. Decades later, I made one of these in the office of my then employer and suddenly there were dozens of them all over the place being made by my coworkers. It is a project within the capabilities of a small child, but it can hook adults too.

How to make a paper lantern:

Be careful if you attempt this. It can be habit forming.

Tire Stress - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I got into a little discussion quite some while back about tires on a moving vehicle. The question was given some particular forward velocity, how much G-force must the tire material endure? A simple minded look at that issue is shown here.

First consider the vehicle itself:

The tire tread that is in contact with the road is at zero velocity because the road does not move. As the wheel rotates, that formerly zero velocity point on the tire accelerates and gets up to double the vehicular speed when at the top. While that acceleration is in a constantly changing direction, going from vertical at the start to horizontal, I decided to simply use the V = a T equation to estimate acceleration because all I really wanted was an order of magnitude result and I don't have the mathematical ability to model the changing direction issue.

I found the following results for several vehicle speeds.

The acceleration rates for these speeds are phenomenal and so are the G-force numbers.

Tires are made out of tough stuff!

Tapetum Lucidum - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From Tapetum,  we find "Tapetum lucidum" described as follows.

Now say hello to my son's cat, Mickey.

He's certainly got what it takes!

Say Something Interesting - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I spent most of the year 1971 in Wakefield, MA representing my employer at the time regarding acceptance test procedures at the facility of a subcontractor. I was often in the company of quality assurance people. One time, at the end of a tiring day, the QA man and I went to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

Both of us were pretty tired and conversation was a bit slow until the fellow spoke to me: "Say something interesting!" and I did.

I told him that the earth was going around the sun at an orbital velocity of approximately eighteen miles per second. Since the earth's diameter is approximately eight thousand miles, that means that where the two of us were just ten minutes ago was now an airless void.

He freaked out! He took a sip or two from the screwdriver drink he'd ordered and then he regained his breath.

Looking a bit more closely at the numbers, they actually come out a little bit different.

I chose the phrase "traversal time" to mean how long it takes the earth to move an orbital distance equal to the earth's own diameter.

Of course, I hadn't factored in the solar system's orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy nor the galaxy's linear velocity toward "the great attractor" on the other side of Sagittarius but, y'know, I don't think it really mattered,

Finding True North - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P. C.

The pyramids of ancient Egypt are accurately aligned with true north. How, one might ask, how could denizens of a primitive society possibly have determined which way true north was? Obviously, some bloviating folks tell us, there must have been space aliens on this planet to provide the necessary guidance, right???

Nope.

In that part of the world, the landscape is quite flat, the weather is often clear and there are unobstructed views to the horizon in pretty much every direction. I have heard of two theories of how true north might have been located.

One theory was for ancient astronomers to have tracked the exact point of the rise of a particular star above the horizon and later the exact point of the disappearance of that same star below the horizon. From one's point of observation, two lines could be plotted toward those points of appearance and disappearance creating an angle which when bisected, would lead to true north.

Another theory is that ancient astronomers placed a very long and exactly vertical rod into the ground and studied its shadow on solstice exactly at dawn and exactly at sunset.

By carefully noting the rod shadow positions exactly at sunrise and exactly at sunset and bisecting the resultant angle as shown, true north could be readily determined.

No godly chariots or UFOs, no little green men, no Erich von Däniken, nothing but some insightful thinking was all that it would have taken.

What If I Were An Extraterrestrial - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I visited a hospital the other day where to get in, I had to present identification that turned out to be my driver's license. The license was put into a scanner from which my photograph was reproduced on a visitor's badge. Elsewhere, I've had my picture taken with a desk mounted camera, but this was different.

Here's the image:

This picture, if I may laughingly call it that, has a signal to noise ratio pretty close to zero dB. I stared at it for several minutes before I first began to vaguely see my face. The longer I still stare at it, the more easily I see myself, but the visual noise is quite overwhelming.

What if I was an extraterrestrial being trying to make first contact with humanity and this picture is what arrived at Project SETI? Would it be discoverable or would the noise level block discovery?

Klatu, Spock, Flebdap and I will have to discuss that I guess.

            Image used with permission of Guy Gilchrist, https://www.aguygilchristproduction.com/contact/

 

 

No Parking Scofflaws - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There is a large school on a very busy road near here which has No Parking on that street in front of the school building. Many drivers have habitually ignored that prohibition.

Vehicles get parked there throughout the morning as students arrive and traffic flow is very much impeded, especially when those illegally parked vehicles are large SUVs or pickup trucks that come to their stop a large distance from the curb. Other vehicles must veer around the illegal parkers which leads to many close-call collision events.

Recently, I have noticed traffic cones being set out in an apparent attempt to dissuade the illegal parking.

I don't know if those cones are the doing of school officials or the police, but even with those cones in place, some drivers still park along this stretch, often with doors flung wide open as stuff is retrieved from here and there within the passenger compartment.

How long before someone is killed because of all this is unknown, but I fear that with circumstances as they are, such a tragedy is ultimately inevitable.