IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Driveway Feathers - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I came out of the house this morning and found feathers scattered all over my car, all over my driveway and all over the front yard on the driveway's west side.

It seemed pretty clear that while I was safely tucked in and fast asleep, something in my yard had fallen prey to something else. There was no carcass anywhere to be found so I'm guessing a dove got taken by a hawk, very much the way I saw that same thing happen in my back yard some years ago.

I guess that humankind has achieved some measure of isolation from at least some of the forces of nature, but those forces are still there all around us and now and then, we get reminded.

 

 

 

The Anti-Tesla - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I spotted this a few days ago.

(Sigh)

Medical Treatment Authorization For A Minor - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We have wonderful grandsons. They are hale, hearty and thriving. However, there is always the possibility of illness or injury so our family has taken various precautions which include authorizations of myself and my wife, the grandparents, to make any medical decisions that might be needed if Mom and Dad just happened for some reason to not be available at some crucial moment.

In the event of such a situation, we have the following document:

Both mother and father sign on the two lines.

Of course, there may be variants. If there is only one parent, then only that one person is named and only one person signs. Also, this document may include any number of children, not just two. In fact, my grandchildren number three.

I am NOT an attorney so this essay is NOT to be treated as legal advice. However, it is a step that we as a family have chosen to take and it is only presented in that way. Your own family situation may differ in various ways from our own so you would be well advised to seek appropriate professional guidance.

For example, similar authorization(s) might be applicable in the case of an elderly relative or someone with disabilities.

Just make the proper decisions. Don't let things go by default.

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

I saw another example today of sheer, mind bending stupidity that could have resulted in serous injury or even loss of life. The setting was a local supermarket parking lot.

The lot was pretty full so when this one car came to a vacant parking spot, it was like finding treasure. The driver of that car positioned his vehicle so he could back into that vacant spot. Just as he was starting to very slowly move in reverse, a pedestrian walked right in back of his car as if nothing was there.

The driver slammed on his brake so nobody got hurt but it was a close call and that pedestrian seemed totally unaware that he'd come rather close to meeting his creator.

Pete Seeger sang in "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" the lyric "When will they ever learn?"

That is a very good question.

Smoke is Fuel - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was listening to a storyteller on The Moth Radio Hour yesterday who was speaking about his experiences as a fire fighter. In the course of telling his tale, he spoke of the phrase "smoke is fuel" which very much caught my attention. I entered that phrase into Google.

The URL for the search result was probably the longest URL you can imagine but at the head of it all was the following text:

There is plenty more reading material waiting for you at that search result.

Because smoke generation is a process of incomplete combustion, that smoke is capable of sustaining further combustion. Smoke itself can ignite. If ignition happens while someone is enveloped in that smoke, that person can be immolated.

That person can be immediately burned to death.

Smoke inhalation is a widely known, a widely recognized cause of fire fatalities, but smoke immolation is I think less well understood by the general public.

If, heaven forbid, you are ever involved in a house fire or a workplace fire or any other fire disaster, please remember this and get yourself OUT of the area.

Your life will be at stake.

Amazing People - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

As a teenager into amateur radio (ham radio to some), I met some extraordinary people. I'd like to share a little of that.

Ginger was an older man whose apartment was in a four story walk-up building. He never spoke of it but I couldn't help but notice the facial scarring from his once having survived a terrible explosion that destroyed both of his eyes. His ham radio transmitter was "home-brew" using a pair of 6146 beam power tetrodes for the final power amplifier stage. Although a pair of 6146s could be safely operated at 100 watts of RF output, those tubes were only delivering 15 watts so that they would last virtually forever. With that transmitter and what I think was a Hammarlund HQ-129 receiver, he kept in contact with friends both locally and with one fellow in Shreveport, LA.

Bob was a man of middle age who was afflicted with extreme arthritis. He was quite rigid in a standing position throughout his whole body from his neck to his ankles. He had slight movement capability in his arms. His hands were functional. He ran a greeting card business from his apartment. The arthritis, he once told me, had developed gradually over time, mostly after graduation from college. His coping attitude was astonishing. He once said that in the far distant future when archaeologists were unearthing our present day civilizations and they found our skeletons, they would be really interested in his skeleton because of its arthritic structures but they wouldn't be the least bit interested in mine. He would be a unique find where I would be just another ordinary and uninteresting set of bones.

Sol was a podiatrist who also took super good care of my grandmother's feet. He also performed podiatric services free of charge as a volunteer at a nearby prison. The prisoners knew that when he came, he made their foot pains go away. Sol told me that many of the prisoners had long term and untreated foot conditions and that many of them were in nearly constant and often very severe pain from which he provided surcease and relief. Word got around in that facility and every single prisoner who came to him treated him with the utmost courtesy and respect. They knew.

I've always been grateful for the life lessons I learned from these three men. They often cross my mind to this very day.

No Online Financial Transactions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have often been exhorted to set up online access to banking and investment services in the name of convenience and speediness. I never accept. I always decline.

I will not do any financial transactions on line, not by "Online Access", not by "E-delivery" or whatever this or that feature may be called. Similarly, I do not pay medical, household or utility bills electronically. Every transaction in which I engage requires paper, ink and postage stamps.

It may be just my personal prejudice, but I have absolutely no faith whatever in ANY online security measures that ANY institution or business entity may now have in place supposedly for my protection, or may plan to put in place in the future, because such measures cannot address any vulnerabilities in the PC that sits right here at my desk.

Although I do have antimalware provisions installed, more than one actually, and I use them, such provisions seem to get automatically updated maybe once every few days or updated whenever I happen to initiate a download. Therefore, in my view, there is a reasonable likelihood that my admittedly modest antimalware measures can easily be breached.

Any such breach would totally negate whatever super-sophisticated security measures might happen to be in place anywhere else, including in “the cloud”.  

My pens have yet to be compromised or corrupted by malware although one of them did run dry the other day.

Fourth Dimension - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When we talk of dimensions, we think of three-dimensional space dimensions as in the x, y and z axis. To that we might add other situational dimensions such as time, temperature, illumination and so forth, but spatially, we find ourselves confined to just three.

Imagine then that you have a three dimensional cube which you can view from end-on and that your end-on view can be depicted in a two-dimensional sketch.

The two dimensional image on the left, one square within another square, can be thought of as a two dimensional representation of the three dimensional object, a cube, on the right.

Now consider having one cube within another cube and what that might represent.

Is it possible that the three dimensional object on the left might be a three dimensional representation of a four dimensional object on the right?

It's rather a brain teaser and I have no personal hope of finding an answer. However, I did once see this question posed in a science magazine article as food for thought.

Bon appétit.

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

The following diatribe is something I conjured up while pondering some of the aberrant nonsense I've been noticing during this pandemic:

This kind of wretched nonsense just seems to keep on coming.

What distresses me most is that all of it has actually come about either directly to me in person or via news items. Such thinking blocks out one's abilities to assimilate new information. New information is coming about almost every day and it is often being disregarded.

The hard boiled cynic over estimates his/her own intellectual prowess and his/her own ability to accurately assess the world that we all share in common. For that cynic, there is no room for uncertainty and there is no room for my own possibly different perspectives. There is only room for pessimism, confrontation and a high likelihood of personal medical calamity.

This is not new. I read one essay about the 1918 flu pandemic which stated that many people refused even then to take the most basic of sanitary precautions such as washing hands, keeping away from other people and using protective face masks.

Those simple rules were well known and well understood even in 1918 but were spurned by many people. The result was fifty-million deaths worldwide and 675,000 deaths in the US.

Cynicism, from whatever historical source(s), from whatever modern day punditry, is pushing us in that same direction.

Can we be less cynical? Our very survival is in jeopardy. Get the shots!

Mud Daubers - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I happened to notice this nest attached to an ousitde wall and under an overhang of the mansion at Bayard Cutting Arboretum.

When I got home, I looked up wasp nests and came to:  https://www.thebeeguy.com/IdentifyYourPest 

Therein was this image:

I suppose this isn't anything new or rare, but I'd never seen it before so I thought I should share.