IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

A Drive To The City - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I had to make a drive to Brooklyn and back again today and for some reason, I decided to keep a woeful mental tally as I went along. That tally came out as follows.

I witnessed thirty-five moving violations which included drivers making illegal turns, drivers failing to stay in lane while passing through "Stay In Lane" zones, several red light violations and several Stop sign violations.

I saw the scenes of two major car crashes. One was on Sunrise Highway in Bellmore and one was on the Belt Parkway near Cross Bay Boulevard. In both cases, I saw very obviously totaled cars and, in both cases, there were several injured persons who were sitting on the ground while apparently awaiting medical attention that had not yet arrived.

For sheer stupidity, there were a lot more drivers than I could possibly count traveling at ROCKET velocities, often in vehicles that made a LOT of noise as they went past, often with obstructed or totally missing license plates and several drivers who made sudden and violent swerves from the far left of the parkways over to the right across multiple lanes to get to parkway exits, sometimes while in the clear of other cars but sometimes through the heart of a cluster of other cars.

The only police presence I saw at all was at the two crash scenes to which they had presumably been summoned after the fact by calls having been made to 911. Nowhere else were there any signs of police activity. Violators seemed able to commit their violations with absolute impunity while seemingly free from the encumbrance of any sense of self preservation.

Quite frankly, if all of those da...ed fools only endangered themselves, I would be appalled enough but their actions endanger me, my family, my friends, my acquaintances, the public at large and they cost everyone money to pay for all of the dollar costs that the inevitable consequences of their actions engender.

Resentment accompanies my fear.

I once had someone whom I thought to be quite mentally ill say to me that they didn't care about some particular traffic law.(Which law that was I no longer remember.) My perception was that the guy did too care about that law because without it, the choice to overtly flout it and feel special about doing so would be gone. If that law didn't exist, there would be no opportunity to abuse it and thus feel somehow over and above all the rest of us.

In today's news:

"1 Killed, 6 Injured in 4 Car Crash in the Bronx"      Car Crash

Periods, Commas and Decimals - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There was this day back in high school English class when the teacher mentioned the importance of a broad education. She used the term "splendid splinter" to describe someone who would get very, very deeply into some one particular area of intellectual endeavor and in doing so, would exclude everything else. The boy sitting in front of me got really angry and upset over this.

"What do I need all of this reading for??? I'm going to be an engineer and no engineer needs to know what Shakespeare wrote, right??? And why do I have to care about spelling and punctuation. You know what I mean, right???".

Well the answers to both questions were "No".

Shakespeare's characters have genuine psychological profiles. If you can learn to understand them, you have a better chance of understanding and being understood by the people to whom you are going to present your wonderful engineering achievements, to wit, your customers.

As to punctuation and spelling, consider these two phrases. Do they mean the same things?

"Good, by God. We're going to Pittsburgh."    -  and  -  "Goodbye, God. We're going to Pittsburgh."

There was a story I once read about a post apocalyptic world into which children had been born and who therefore had no background in what we would think of as civilization. In the course of the story, an elderly survivor of the cataclysm tries to explain to a youngster the meaning of some writings that involved numbers with decimal points.

The youngster dismissed the whole thing as useless because anything as small as a decimal point couldn't possibly be of any importance.

Kinda reminds me of my former classmate

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

This toy goes back to when our older son was perhaps three years old. It's a Pacman rubber ball with which he, and later his younger brother, often played.

I'm told that this is a somewhat unusual version of the Pacman toy because most of them didn't have teeth and this one does. Of course, it would gobble up everything in sight.

On Daddy's arm:  Chomp, chomp, chomp,..........

I remember being rather unhappy about this thing though because it was the first toy we gave to our son that wasn't friendly. Of course, I had no idea of what was to come meaning He-Man, Thunder Cats, Transformers (Autobots and Decepticons) and so forth.

Happily though, both of our sons have grown up to be wonderful men.

Our twin grandsons are playing with it now. (Sigh) 

Which Is The Top Of A Chicken? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I went to cook dinner this one fine night and the result was going to be roast chicken.

Understand that I have prepared this meal this many, many, many..... times but my wife being justifiably a bit distrustful of my culinary prowess told me to be sure to start the cooking with the top of the chicken facing down in the pan.

This led to a problem.

I have long taken the following zoological perspective with regard to avian anatomy.

If I were to proceed as I thought I was being directed, when it was time to turn the chicken over at the mid-point of the cooking process, it would be facing the wrong way in the pan when the cooking had been completed.

"What??", I said.

"Put the top of the chicken facing down." came the reply.

"Do you mean start cooking with the breast down??", I asked.

"Yes, of course." came the reply whereupon I suddenly discovered the semantic miscommunication that was at hand and I also learned of the culinary perspective as opposed to the zoological.

The two perspectives for looking at this are quite the opposite of each other. Had I been using a cookbook of uncertain semantics that referred to the "top" of the chicken and which made the probably unwarranted assumption that I knew what that meant, I might easily have gotten things reversed.

So then, have you done any tech-writing lately?

Bay Area Drought Beats Dick LaRosa

From May through September, warm air from a Pacific high pressure area sits on top of the cool, moist marine air coming into San Francisco Bay. Normally, air temperature decreases as we measure at increasing altitude. But here we can have a temperature inversion, where the temperature jumps up a few degrees with a small increase in altitude. Vertical movement of air is suppressed because a parcel of heavy air from below cannot float up into the lighter air above and continue rising until its moisture condenses, leading to precipitation. Even without the temperature inversion, the upper air may not be cool and dense enough to buoy up the air from below. Therefore, I have been designing and calculating the performance of a large solar absorber floating on the bay. Its purpose is to heat the surface air so that it will expand and float up through the upper air, expand, cool, condense moisture, and bring precipitation.

San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward airports show fairly consistent wind direction and velocity during the five months, so it is possible to locate a solar absorber raft near these airports and align its long dimension with the dominant wind direction. The fundamental problem is that the heated air never has a chance of rising up through the temperature inversion over the bay area. Instead, it is carried inland at a speed of at least 10 mph, and then turns southward to replace the heated air that rises out of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. So, at great expense, we would be solar heating air that is supposed to be cooling these deserts.

I don't know how to fix this. But I do know that we have the wrong temperature vs. altitude in the bay area, and we still have the drought. So I'll keep working to solve the problem.

Celebrating Atomic War - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I noticed a poster being placed on various neighborhood store windows to advertise an air show of some kind that was to take place in a nearby state. Each poster depicted two B-29 bombers and in the picture background is the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.

I have removed as much identifying material as I could from this image without taking away the key items to which I hope to draw your attention.

Historically, I believe that the Enola Gay flew alone when it dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, that there weren't two aircraft flying in formation. However, that is the least of my objections to this picture.

Are we, the potential attendees, the potential patrons, the potential visitors, the potential air-show viewers actually supposed to be celebrating the depicted nuclear attack?

Have we as a people become so callous, so cold blooded, so whatever other synonymous descriptors that might come to mind, that advertising intended for us presents the memory of mass scale deaths as grist for our entertainment? It may indeed be so and sadly, I think that this is nothing new.

Back in 1978, my wife and I saw the first Star Wars movie. The plot involved the Death Star materializing in orbit and then destroying an entire world with a single energy discharge from its parabolic dish. The movie shows the killing of billions of people in that one event.

How many elderly people, how many babies, are we to surmise died in that fireball?

What comes next? Why, the Star Wars theme music starts up again and off we go to the next part of this glorious adventure story.

What so disturbed me that evening and what still disturbs me today was the celebratory mood of the audience in spite of the mass carnage that had just been presented to them. Imaginary or not, I was appalled at how they were happily humming and singing the Star Wars melody while exiting the theater.

CEU versus PDH - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

In some recent communications regarding credit for and the availability of Continuing Education Units (CEU) versus Professional Development Hours (PDH), I learned that I had been harboring some personal misconceptions.

Now, by shamelessly plagiarizing some writings that have been very kindly provided by Michelle Demydenko at IEEE and by Chris Early and Robert Weiner at The IEEE Consultants Network of Long Island (LICN), I will try to convey some information about this subject.

I do wish to preface this with a note that this is from a New York State perspective.

There is a distinction to be borne in mind between CEUs and PDHs. The IEEE gives out CEUs for Continuing Education and they do so even if the seminar is not valid for PE licensure purposes.

For instance, there are certain topics which could go through the Continuing Education process and for which CEU certificates could be issued, but those CEUs might not be valid for New York State Professional Engineers (PE) license renewal requirements. The reason is that New York State specifically excludes some topics from the list of acceptable subject matter, even though another state might find some of those materials acceptable.

CEUs may be used for purposes outside of being a PE.  For instance, a teacher might be given bonuses or other union benefits when they take Continuing Education courses. Keep in mind however that once a CEU is received, a PE must still follow the guidelines appropriate for his or her state. This includes the topics, who issued the certificates and perhaps other criteria.

In New York State, once those guidelines are met, the CEUs convert to PDHs with a 1 to 10 ratio where one CEU equals ten PDH.

There are various affinity groups here on Long Island where CEU/PDH lectures are provided and I have handled the paperwork via IEEE for several of them. This service via IEEE is available to any attendee. There is no requirement of IEEE membership for certificates/credit.

Happy learning!!

Imminent Structural Collapse - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A few years ago, the Long Island Railroad performed some renovations at our local train station here in Merrick. Among the projects they undertook was the installation of new staircases and yes, the old ones that were replaced were very much in need of replacement.

However, in the few years since then, severe structural deterioration has set in as shown below.

For some reason, some of the newly installed nut and bolt combinations serving as fasteners were not chosen to be of the same alloy as some of the others. One of those alloys has stood up well, but the other alloy has not.

Instead, there are what look to me like hundreds of structural joints that are so badly rusted, so severely corroded that they no longer serve their strength of attachment purposes  in consequence of which, I fear that staircase structural failures, outright collapse, may be imminent.

I have not checked, but I would imagine that the same trouble that I describe here for Merrick is likely to be the case elsewhere in the system as well.

I contacted the Long Island Railroad about this problem using their website.

May 24, 2015

Today, June 5, 2015, I received this communication:

 

From: MTA Email [mailto:mta_nyc@custhelp.com]
Sent: Friday, June 05, 2015 11:46 AM
To: ambertec@ieee.org
Subject: Strctural Integrity Failures [Incident: 150524-000168]

 

Recently you requested personal   assistance from our on-line support center. Below is a summary of your   request and our response.

Subject

Strctural Integrity Failures Discussion Thread

Response By Email (Mike Zinkowski)   (06/05/2015 11:45   AM) Dear Mr. Dunn:     We have received your e-mail regarding conditions at the MTA Long Island Rail   Road's Merrick Station.     Your comments and observations regarding the condition of the staircases at   the Merrick Station have been shared with personnel in the LIRR's Engineering   and System Safety Departments. I have asked that they schedule an inspection   of the staircases as soon as possible and make any needed repairs.     Thank you bringing this matter to our attention. The LIRR is committed to   providing a safe, secure and comfortable station environment for our   customers, and we will continue striving to improve our operation.     Sincerely,   M. Zinkowski   Manager - Public Affairs Customer By CSS Web (John Dunn) (05/24/2015 10:58   PM) A few years ago, the Long Island   Railroad performed some renovations at our local train station here in   Merrick. Among the projects they undertook was the installation of new   staircases and yes, the old ones that were replaced were very much in need of   replacement.     However, in the few years since then, severe structural deterioration has set   in.     For some reason, some of the newly installed nut and bolt combinations   serving as fasteners were not chosen to be of the same alloy as some of the   others. One of those alloys has stood up well, but the other alloy has not.     Instead, there are what look to me like hundreds of structural joints that   are so badly rusted, so severely corroded that they no longer serve their   strength of attachment purposes in consequence of which, I fear that   staircase structural failures, outright collapse, may be imminent.     I have not checked, but I would imagine that the same trouble that I describe   here for Merrick is likely to be the case elsewhere in the system as well.     I would request that you forward this to the attention of David L. Mayer,   Chief Safety Officer.

Question Reference #   150524-000168

Date   Created: 05/24/2015 10:58 PM   Date   Last Updated: 06/05/2015 11:45 AM   Status:   Closed

So now we'll see how this issue is further addressed.