IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

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

When I first got into MA101 in college, my first calculus course, I was confounded when the professor referred to equations involving a multitude of dimensions each of which was orthogonal to all of the others. Taking the word "orthogonal" to be a synonym for the word "perpendicular", I couldn't envision the idea of more than three dimensions other than in what I thought must be some abstruse, arcane or even imaginary sense and that really bothered me.

I never claimed to be a great math student and I guess this personal anecdote proves the point. What I failed to grasp was the following.

Imagine that I have the one particular "point". The physical position can be described in terms of the x-coordinate, the y-coordinate and the z-coordinate which gives us three dimensions. So far, so good.

At that same exact point however, we may have some particular temperature as a fourth dimension, some particular barometric pressure as a fifth dimension (not the musical group), some particular time as a sixth dimension, some particular level of illumination as a seventh dimension and maybe more if we keep thinking about this. 

The key point about these seven dimensions is that a change in value of any one of them does not require that there be a resultant change of value of any of the others and this is orthogonality. Each of these seven dimensions is orthogonal to the other six. 

I finally understood that perpendicularity refers to a three-dimensional subset of orthogonality but it took me a long while and it was a real conceptual impediment for me in that MA101 class. 

Snapping Turtle - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I met this charming individual at Bayard Cutting Arboretum today. He is one really big snapping turtle.

There was a crowd of other people watching too including this one woman who decided she was going to reach down and tickle this guy's nose. I and several others immediately yelled at her with one voice DON'T!!!

There are warning signs posted right there to tell us that this kind of critter can take off part of your hand if you get careless. They make it clear that you must leave the snapping turtles ALONE!!!

Astonishingly, this woman seemed utterly oblivious to the danger. I didn't notice, but my wife said she spoke with accented English so perhaps she was from overseas and perhaps she didn't understand the written signs. 

Thank heaven though, nothing happened but maybe only because someone upstairs was protecting her at that moment. 

Gas Station Fire - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This is a picture of what used to be a Gulf gas station located not too far from here.

There was a fire here in which, so far as I know, nobody got killed but in which several people were badly hurt.

Please see this URL about the event itself:  Gas Station Fire

It is one thing to see such a thing in a photo like this, but seeing it up close in person is a starker experience indeed.

The following Google search is recommended:  Gasoline Safety  

Also, my advice to you is, even if you've read that there is no problem, even if you've been told not to worry about it, when you are handling gasoline, TURN OFF THAT D.....ED CELL PHONE.  

Debt Collector - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please see the article entitled "Woman wins $83 million in lawsuit against debt collector" at the following URL.  

Woman wins $83 million  

This article refers to a company called Portfolio Recovery Associates who sought payment for a debt  and sued a woman who did not owe that money. The article refers to "malicious prosecution".

This same company once came after my wife back in 2006. I wrote to them as follows.

I later received the following reply. 

The lesson is that you must keep meticulous records and you must keep those records forever.

Where it will Rain - Dick LaRosa

In my last post, I explained how it might be possible to solar heat the cool, heavy air overlying San Francisco Bay so that it will expand and rise up through the temperature inversion that exists from May through September. But what happens to the air that gets through the temperature inversion? The temperature inversion is caused by a high pressure area that is located over the ocean west of the California coast. The air in the high pressure area is flowing downward and is being compressed and heated as it encounters the higher atmospheric pressure at the lower altitude. This means that its temperature decreases with increasing altitude, so that a parcel of solar-heated air that reaches this altitude will be able to convect upward due to the buoyancy of the surrounding air. This air from below will contain water vapor, which will condense, as it rises, expands, and cools. This should produce rainfall - but where?

We know the wind direction below the temperature inversion, but the wind direction above the inversion might be different and maybe the rain could fall uselessly in the ocean. Fortunately, this is not the case from May through September. The bay area is a low point in the mountain ranges that run parallel to the coast.  Here, air is drawn inland to replace air that is heated and rises up from the Mojave Desert in southern California and the Sonoran Desert that straddles the border between California and Arizona on the north with Mexico to the south. This inward flow at the San Francisco coastline is a property of the large-scale atmospheric circulation, independent of the circulation below the temperature inversion.

I was able to verify the consistent inward flow of air with printouts of weather.com streamline maps from the beginning of 2013 to mid-November of 2014. During May through September of both years there was a consistent inward flow from the ocean at San Francisco. This often involved an abrupt left turn from the general southward flow along the coast. The southward flow is part of the clockwise circulation around the high pressure region over the Pacific Ocean. The downwelling air tries to spread out radially, and the Coriolis force makes it turn to the right. Hence the clockwise circulation around the high pressure center, with air flowing southward along the coast. But always (May through September) some of this is drawn inland to entrain the moist air that we are attempting to lift up from the bay.

Compatibility Mode - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Talk about legacy software, please consider Paintbrush from Windows 3.1. As you may recall, its on-screen presentation looked like this:

I've been carrying this little bit of software into my later PCs using Windows 98SE and 32-bit Windows Vista where it has done yeoman service, but when I try to use it with 64-bit Windows Vista or with Windows 7, it does not work.

As an example using Windows 7, there is supposed to be a compatibility mode that will let me run this program. So, when I select the tab for that mode, I first get the following: 

The trouble is that no matter what I choose the compatibility mode to be, no matter what I choose the Settings to be, such as for Windows 98 / Windows ME and 256 colors in this example, this is what I get:

There seems to be no version of compatibility for which Paintbrush will work with Windows 7.

Does anyone know why? Does anyone know how I can get Paintbrush to work in Windws 7?

Also, I ask the same questions regarding 64-bit Windows Vista.

Home Sweet Home - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There is a riverside walking path at Bayard Cutting Arboretum in Great River, NY that is really worth your time to be there.

Please see:   Bayard Cuttng Arboretum 

As you stroll along the riverbank, you will come to this really tall pole on top of which there is a wooden platform which serves as a nesting site for osprey which live there and which catch fish from the river.

When occupied, the platform looks like this:

On one occasion as we walked along that path, we saw two osprey chicks up there (No, they weren't cute.) and the tending adult bird as well.

There is a nearby sign which tells us that a single osprey nest can weigh as much as two-thousand pounds, approximately the weight of a small car which to my thinking, is really impressive.

With the nice weather coming in, I heartily recommend the visit.

Rain from Solar Heat - Dick LaRosa

In previous blog posts I have examined the possibility of relieving the drought in California's Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys by means of a large solar absorber raft floating on San Francisco Bay. This could heat the cool, moist air that lies on top of the bay, and make it expand so that it is light enough to convect up into the warm air that downwells from a high pressure area over the eastern Pacific Ocean. In other geographic areas, where air can convect freely in response to small disturbances, the air temperature decreases with increasing altitude. This is because air pressure is lower at higher altitude so the air expands if it rises. The expanding air does work in pushing the surrounding air out of the way. The temperature of the expanding air is reduced because the energy for doing this work comes from the internal energy of the expanding air. If no moisture condenses, the temperature decreases 6.5 C per kilometer of altitude. This is far from the situation in the Bay area from May through September.There, the temperature jumps up a few degrees as you ascend through an altitude like one kilometer. This is called a temperature inversion because it is opposite to the expected temperature change with altitude. The altitude and temperature jump of the inversion varies from hour-to-hour and day-to-day. It is caused by warm Pacific air downwelling and sitting on top of the cool maritime air coming in at sea level, which is too heavy to rise through the temperature inversion. The questions to be answered are how large must the raft be, what direction should it point, where in the bay should it be located, and thousands of other design, construction, deployment, cost, environmental, competing use, and performance questions. Here's where the investigation is headed.

I have a road map of the bay and surrounding land with a paper cutout of a bow-tie-shaped solar absorber raft scotch-taped with its long dimension oriented midway between west and WNW. The length scales to about 10 miles. One corner of it is near the San Francisco International Airport. The diagonally-opposite corner is near the Oakland International Airport on the opposite side of the bay. In June the average wind speed at S F Airport is 15 mph, and at Oakland it is 12 mph. Previous calculations indicated that a parcel of air must be heated for about one hour to make it expand enough to rise through a temperature inversion of a few degrees. At times when the wind speed is below average, the 10-mile length will just about allow the air parcel to remain over the solar heater for an hour. The raft is located at the widest part of the bay, so it cannot be made longer. We also need to put about a one-mile-wide deep water navigation channel through it, running in a north-south direction. This subtracts from the length of the heating path, so we may be dependent on times when the wind speed is below average. We have wind direction statistics for S F, Oakland, and Hayward Municipal Airport, which lies along the center line of the raft toward the east. The angles of the bow tie shape accommodate the wind direction variations at the three airports during the season from May through September, but I wonder if this would be true if we exclude times when the wind speed is average or greater. And so it goes. Every step brings more questions. Enough for now.

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

There are a number of places in the world that have proven to be rich in dinosaur fossils just waiting to be found by the intrepid researcher. Among these are the Gobi Desert, Alberta and Patagonia. (This is not an exhaustive list, but just a few of the better known places.)

I once read something about Patagonian dinosaurs though, one of the hadrosaur species I think, which made nests and tended them much as modern birds do today. Unhatched eggs that were found in fossil nests in Patagonia had shells that were "crenulated" meaning that the shells had uneven surfaces which helped prevent them from accidentally rolling away and falling out of their nests.

From dictionary.com, we find the following:

crenulation      /ˌkrɛnjʊˈleɪʃən/             noun

1. any of the teeth or notches of a crenulate structure

2. a crenulate formation

crenation      /krɪˈneɪʃən/     noun

1.  any of the rounded teeth or the notches between them on a crenate structure

The other day, I found these in a box of eggs:

 

These are certainly not our commonplace eggshells and they are not from Patagonia but whaddaya think?

Are we maybe seeing a little atavism going on?

  

Step Hazard - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was at a social gathering the other day, an afternoon dinner and concert. It was very nice. It took place at what had once been a wealthy family's mansion that had been constructed in 1912.

As I walked from the main entrance toward the dining area, I nearly had a fall down a single step that I didn't see coming. The step was a transition between two different floor levels and it was virtually invisible in the direction from which I approached. I wrenched my back a little, but fortunately for me, nothing lasting seems to have happened. I can still walk about normally.

The step-down situation looked like this:  

Later, I e-mailed the owners of the facility about what had happened and why. Part of the reply I got back was this:  

"I appreciate your very detailed letter, photos and concern for the well-being of others.  Unfortunately, Xxxxxxx Xxxx was built in 1912 as a private residence, long before safety conditions were a concern."

The reply goes on to describe some nominal, but in my view inadequate, attention to safety issues that the owners have taken. However, my position is that even if the building is over a century old, safety issues should be paramount. In this case, simply putting out "STEP DOWN" signs would be a positive step. (No pun intended.)

I am reminded of my son's college dormitory in Boston which was constructed in 1865. That building had dangerous wiring dating from its electrification back in 1920. According to one Boston official with whom I conversed back then, that building was "grandfathered" into immunity from  later safety requirements.

For that story, please see: 

http://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/12/grandfathering-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

I certainly hope that having received and acknowledged my message, that the owners of the facility where this recent incident occurred will take measures to correct the safety hazard.

Maybe next year, I'll find out.