IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

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

Epiphany. From http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/epiphany

"A usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. An intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking. An illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure. A revealing scene or moment."

I had one a while back after driving my son to his college in Albany. I needed to find some supper before driving back to Long Island, so I went to the only place that was open in the area, a T.G.I.F. in a nearby shopping center.

Energy Efficiency - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Mercury vapor street lamps used to give off, I think, a rather good simulation of daylight as they enabled people to see clearly into otherwise dark places, but mercury vapor street lamps have now been replaced with sodium vapor street lamps because, we are told, the sodium vapor lamps use up less electricity.

As with LED traffic lights, we see the focus on a search for energy efficiency and never mind any unintended consequences.

Unfortunately, the yellow color of the sodium vapor lamps has been reported to cause diurnal (day-night) cycle disruptions of some street trees which then start to sicken.

Plugged Drain Channel Notion - Dick LaRosa

Real oceanographers have been studying the Carribean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) for many years to explain the antics of the Loop Current (LC). I came along with the notion that the sea level difference between the GoM entrance at Cabo San Antonio (CSA) and the Florida Current outlet at Settlement Point (SP) is driving the LC behavior. Unable to upgrade this notion into a respectable hypothesis, I examined the sea level at Key West (KW), which is the junction between the LC and the Florida Straits. I have come to view the Florida Straits and Florida Current as the drain channel for the GoM. I view the GoM as a big tub, whose sea level has a profound effect on New Orleans.

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

On a couple of different occasions, I needed to move a plastic tray of roughly 12 by 18 inches, filled with a couple of inches of water, from one part of the building to the other. At first, I tried to simply carry the thing, but it was too much of a challenge not to spill it. Slosh, slosh, round and about, oh boy!

So the next time, I thought I'd smarten up. I got this really slick rolling cart with great big smooth-riding wheels. That card would glide across a tile floor like Michelle Kwan on ice.

I put the filled tray on the cart and started off down the hall, but it wasn't long before the water started to really swing around in there, slosh, slosh, round and about, good grief!!

Purple Monkeys - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There was a wonderful expression used on The Simpsons some while ago, a reference to a "purple monkey dish washer". The semantic possibilities were a great lesson in how to not be understood. Just which of the following could this phrase refer to?

1) A purple monkey that washes dishes.

2) A device for washing monkey dishes that are colored purple.

3) A purple device that washes dishes used by monkeys.

In a similar vein, my son told me that at work, he had to send some pictures to "the printer". Did he mean ink-jet or laser? No, he meant this company in California that does printing services.

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

I attended a seminar recently which was about medical issues, not electronics. What struck me was how poorly many people, including some of the speakers, seem to be at verbal communication.

There were several microphones set up, but one of them went dead. The speaker to whom that microphone had been provided kept trying to use it. Why?? I have no idea. It didn't work, yet he seemed certain that if he kept the thing near his face, his words would somehow carry across that room which must have held several hundred listeners. Mind you, this person was a doctor, an intelligent man whom you would think would know better.

At the end of the spoken presentations, the floor was opened up for questions and answers. A man was sent out into the crowd carrying a wireless microphone, but not everyone whom the moderator recognized was given that thing in order to be heard.

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.

Corner Reflectors and Bonner - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

"As I went to Bonner, I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honour." - Mother Goose rhyme

Upon my own word and honor, I once met an engineer, a living and breathing, bipedal, mammalian being, seemingly well educated in the sciences, who insisted that the entire Apollo space program was a fake and that nobody had ever actually landed on the moon. 

I told him how when Armstrong and Aldrin were at Tranquility Base, they installed a set of corner reflectors that are still there and which are still operational. NASA and other groups send pulsed laser beams to the reflectors which bounce the beams right back from whence they came. Measurements of the round trip transit times tell how far away the reflectors are and thus how far away the moon is.

He'd never even heard of corner reflectors, much to my further astonishment, so let's take a look at that.

Dot Matrix Average of Dots - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The frequency of usage of letters in a six-hundred word essay was used to estimate the average power dissipation of an alpha-numeric, 7 x 5 dot matrix display using LEDs.

Each letter has some particular number of dots turned on. The letter "A" for example, activates seventeen dots. Then from the essay, each letter was found to have some frequency of usage which again, for the commonly used letter "E", was 13.54%, but for the rarely used letter "Q", was only 0.03%.

The average usage in ordinary text turned out to be of 15.6 dots per character.      

AMAZING IMPROVEMENTS IN 5KW---200KW MOTOR SIZE—Carl Schwab

When the writer studied AC and DC machinery design at about 1950, the one thing we
did NOT have was the VVVF, (variable voltage, variable frequency) drives. Whether it
was AC or DC the motor fabrication was mainly slot and skein. Whether it was the field
or the armature, they were stacks of laminations with slots stamped into them for the wire skeins.

For power sources we had variable DC or 50-60 cycle AC, probably 3-phase. A variable
frequency source invariably was a DC motor driving an alternator as the generator.
Hardly convenient and frequently more complex to operate. If you really wanted a
variable speed drive, it would be a DC motor with various combinations of series and
parallel field windings used. We spent a LOT of time including lab work, separating iron
loss from copper loss from windage loss etc. to compute efficiency. Much of our design
study was to understand the theory of the motors and in the case of the AC machines
learning the various methods of starting under load etc.