IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Seeing Things - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Does this seem just a little bit unsettling? (Seen in Queensbury, NY.)

 

Does that pigeon know what owls are supposed to do or does it know a fake when it sees one?

 

For all of you x-ray crystallographers out there?

 

Is this about guilt-free shopping?

Area of A Triangle - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We learned back in Junior High School that to find the area of a triangle, you first identified one side of that triangle as its "base", then you ascertained (somehow) the triangles "height" and made the calculation that "Area equals one half the product of the base times the height." and voilà you had the answer.

Somebody pointed something out to me just yesterday at this writing and put me into astonishment that I had never noticed it. See the right hand sketch below:

The area of a triangle is one half the product of the lengths of two sides of the triangle times the sine of the angle between those two sides.

With this realization, you don't have to assign a "base" and you don't have find a value for the so-called "height" which need not even be an actual dimension of the triangle itself. Instead, the area comes right out of three geometric properties of the triangle itself.

Self evident?? Yes.

Had this obvious fact escaped my attention for nearly sixty years?? Yes.

Was I chagrinned?? Yes.

Energy Efficiency, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Five years ago, I wrote about "Energy Efficiency" at: Energy Efficiency

Among other things In that essay, I deplored adverse biological consequences for trees as a result of the yellowish light being emitted by sodium vapor street lighting, all in the name of energy efficiency.

My first encounter with sodium vapor street lighting had been in Baltimore in 1965. Someone I was visiting told me of these great new street lights being used there and would I like to go see them? We went and when I saw them, I was utterly appalled at the baleful, yellowish color that was cast over everything. Of course, those lights eventually appeared everywhere, much to my personal dismay.

Today, I see that sodium vapor street lighting is being replaced by LED street lighting. The whitish light of mercury vapor lamps which was lost to yellow fifty years ago is now becoming white again. From an aesthetic standpoint at least, I am personally delighted (no pun intended) by this new transition.

Today, I learned that one of my sons, his wife and several other people of their age are dismayed by the loss of the "romantic", tinted aura of sodium vapor street lighting.

My reaction to that: "Agggghhhh!!!"

Oh, well. I still love them dearly.

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

There was a science fiction writer some years ago named James Blish who took the first Star Trek series characters and wrote variants of the first series' episodes. Sometimes he added amusing additional dialog between Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy. One such exchange was about the transporter.

The premise in James Blish's work was that the transporter worked by recording every last particle of the transportee (forgive my coinage of that word) down to the sub-atomic level and then reconstructing the transportee at the transporter destination.

This bothered Doctor McCoy very much. He felt that the real Doctor McCoy had died many years ago when he stepped onto a transporter platform for the first time and that he himself was now only a duplicate, not the actual person. To Mister Spock, this was of no consequence at all. Since the reconstruction was absolutely perfect, there was nothing about which to voice any objection. "A difference which makes no difference is no difference." he opined.

Of course, this philosophical disagreement was never resolved between them, but the argument may have some applicability in the real world. Please see the following images, the original one on the left and the modified one on the right.

For no particular reason one day, I ran my scanner over my wristwatch just to see what the result would look like. Then I noticed something. The angular steps of the second hand were not all of the same size. There were differences that I highlighted on the right image just to make them more visible. Here was Mister Spock's "difference which makes no difference".

Of course, this becomes a question of what are acceptable tolerances under some given circumstance. I have no difficulty with a substantial difference between angular step sizes of the second hand, but I do want the sum of all sixty of the step sizes to be extremely precise!

So does this have any bearing on proper development of error budgets?

Exascale Computer Errors - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From the March 16th edition of IEEE Spectrum, we find an article starting on page 30 entitled "Supercomputing's Monster In the Closet", subtitled "Will Tomorrow's Exascale Machines Be Eaten Alive by Faults", written by Al Geist, the chief technologist for the computer science and mathematics division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Mr. Geist discusses some genuinely sobering thoughts about computer errors as computers become ever more complex, but the next-to-last paragraph of the article itself perhaps drives home, inadvertently I think, one of his main points as follows:

Humorist Garrison Keillor has recently introduced P.O.E.M. standing for the Professional Organization of English Majors. Please see: P.O.E.M.

Maybe this would be something for that group to look into.