IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

The Hoboken Train Crash - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We read the following paragraph excerpted from this link: NJ train crash raises many familiar safety issues

"The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, has been calling on railroads to start using the safety technology, called positive train control, or PTC, for nearly four decades. New Jersey Transit is in the process of installing the technology, but it was not in operation yet on any of the agency's trains or tracks."

Reference is made above to forty years but I remember growing up in the 1950s meaning sixty years ago, and learning from my father that train motorman controls always included a "dead man's switch" (also called the "dead man's brake") which required the motorman to always keep manual pressure on the train's throttle.

If a motorman were to have a stroke or a heart attack and fail to maintain that throttle control pressure, the train would automatically decelerate and come to a stop. This was the implementation of "positive train control" at a time when the leading edge of semiconductor technology was the CK722. It was not complex, it was not expensive, but it was effective. 

NTSB wants to ask railroads to START using safety technology, but I would like to ask when and why did railroads STOP using safety technology. In my view it's absence was a virtual guarantee of eventual tragedy which has now taken place.

 

Still More Funny Stuff - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Seen on a car's trunk lid:

 

This telephone appears to  be reserved, but for whom?

 

What kind of cheese?????

 

Talk about an opportunist:

 

That's one way to look at it:

Outdated Phrases - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From my parents' era, there were dated phrases like "flapper", "lounge lizard", "a five cent cup of coffee" and "23 skiddoo" but today we have lots more of them. Some phrases from my own youth have likewise gone out of use and are effectively retired but there are still more which just plain ought to be retired. Just for fun, I'll leave it up to you to decide which are which.

With the advent of digital recordings: "You sound like a broken record."

With the advent of flat screen televisions: "What's on the old boob tube?"

With the advent of television remote controls: "Don't touch that dial."

With the advent of push button telephones: "Listen for the dial tone."

With the advent of video recordings: "Footage". ( I do still hear this one from time to time. )

For announcements ahead of the late night news: "Film at eleven."

With the advent of zip codes and from an Elvis Presley lyric: "..... no such zone."

From a Chuck Berry lyric: "..... long as she got a dime the music won't ever stop."

From the New York City subways: "The IND", "The IRT" (especially "The Flushing IRT") and "The BMT".

With the advent of e-mail: "I just got this TWX." (Pronounced "twix" which term has nothing at all to do with Time Warner.)

With the advent of telephone area codes: "Long distance, please."

With having to start a cold automobile engine: "Pull the choke out."

With the advent of word processing: "Make a carbon of that."

From various nefarious advertisements:  "What do doctors recommend ........"

Got any more??

A Dangerous Kitchen Stove - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We have a recently purchased kitchen stove in which we have discovered a characteristic that can be extremely dangerous. I suspect that this particular stove is not alone in having the described issue. Check your own for this problem when you finish reading.

Our stove looks like this:

There are four knobs along the apron, one for each burner, Each knob handles like a switch with operating positions arranged as OFF - IGNITE - HIGH - MED - LOW.  You light a selected burner by pressing its knob in towards the center of the stove and then rotating the knob to its ignition position and then further on to select the flame height you want for your cooking. Unfortunately, we have discovered that this seemingly logical arrangement is very dangerous.

The hand pressure that is required to press a knob inward is very slight and the torque required to rotate a knob to any position is also very slight.

My wife was reaching over the stove for a pot on a rear burner when she accidentally bumped into a front burner knob which inadvertently moved inward and rotated slightly causing that front burner to ignite and deliver a high flame right underneath her outstretched arm.

My wife stands approximately 5'4". If she were my own height of 6'4", that scenario would probably not have occurred, but at her stature, the peril is very real. Fortunately, she jumped and escaped injury, but it was still a close call with possibilities that are too horrifying to be gone into in further detail.  

To avoid that happening again, we bought knob covers that are sold for keeping babies from harm.

One goes over each knob like this:

...  and when a knob is not in use, it looks like this:

The cover not only prevents a baby from accidentally activating a stove burner, it keeps a cook's hip from doing so as well.

It's a small inconvenience to open a cover first before turning a burner on, but it's a small price to pay against the possibility of self immolation.

Safer Message Deletions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

So, as you always do, you've meticulously exercised appropriate caution against opening up suspicious e-mails, many of uncertain origin, that just might contain malware or malicious payloads. You have this collection of suspect messages all exiled to the Deleted Items page of your Outlook utility. Of course, they aren't really deleted yet. They're all waiting for your next move but as obvious as the following cautionary tale might seem, I have too often seen it overlooked.

Those unwanted messages are patiently sitting there,waiting for their final coup de grâce of permanent removal. If you're at all like me though, you have to be very careful not to accidentally open any one of those messages by accident while you're trying to get rid of them.

I enjoy pretty good health these days, but I do have an neurological tremor in my right hand which means if I try to single-click a mouse button, there is a reasonable chance that I will accidentally do a double-click instead. If that happens while I'm trying to get rid of a malware-bearing message, I could inadvertently open that message and bring about all of the horrible consequences that such a blunder might entail.

To avoid that danger, I go through a carefully rehearsed choreography of steps whenever I'm purging the bad stuff. The process goes this way.

The underlying point of all of this is to AVOID accidentally double clicking the mouse on some single line corresponding to a possibly malicious message. If you follow these steps, your likelihood of accidentally doing that terrible thing will at least be reduced.

 

Upbeat Music - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From the Harvard Business Review at the following link, we read an article with which I take issue:  Upbeat Music

My Very First Transistor - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This is the data sheet that came with my first personal transistor, a 2N107 made by General Electric, that I bought for one dollar at Beam Electronics on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills, NY in 1956. That's sixty years ago! 

Check out the unit of output capacitance in "µµf" or micro-micro-farads which would today be "pF" or picofarads and the unit of frequency in "mc" or megacycles which would today be "MHz" or megahertz.

I tried to make a one-transistor radio with it per a magazine article I found, but that radio never worked. The transistor operated as an audio amplifier in that I could hear 60 Hz line-frequency hum when I touched my finger to the transistor's base, but the 1N64 crystal diode detector never picked up anything, not even the nearby WQXR transmitter running at fifty thousand watts.

That apartment building my family lived in must have been like some kind of super-duper screen room.

Design Blunders - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

You may fill in any epithetical blanks wherever you find them here.

The Takata airbag problem is perhaps as egregious a design blunder as one can imagine. It has cost lives. Still, we are beset with design blunders at many levels, not necessarily lethal, not even dangerous, but inexcusably stupid and unnecessary. Please consider the following three examples.

 

My telephone:

This is my telephone and answering machine with its built-in caller-ID feature. When a call comes in, the alphanumeric display shows the caller's name, the caller's phone number and the date and time of the call, but only while the phone is still ringing.

Once pickup has occurred and my stentorian greeting message starts to play, all of that vital information vanishes and is replaced by the utterly useless line "Call Answered".

I've gotten slower of foot over the years so when the phone starts ringing and I finally manage to get these old bones up from the living room sofa, I don't easily get to the phone before the answering machine's message has gone into action.

By the time I finally do get there, the caller data I want to see has been replaced with that useless "Call Answered" line which despite my years, is a fact I am still quite able to ascertain without assistance.

This da.....ed "feature" makes me want find whoever programmed this miserable contraption, grab a handful of collar and yell: "Hey, Stupid!! I know the call has been answered. What I want to know is WHO is calling."

Instead, once the answering machine function has kicked in, I have to stand around and wait for my cheerful recorded greeting to finally end so I can find out if the caller is legit or not.  

The proper design of this phone would have been for the caller information to stay viewable and not get replaced by something so utterly useless.

 

My car key:

What idiot is responsible for designing car keys and key fobs with buttons are so easily pressed by accident? 

Far too often I've had the car alarm sound off or the trunk lid pop open because one of these four key fob buttons got accidentally activated. This key is for my Toyota, but I've seen this happen to a neighbor's Honda too so I know I'm not the only victim of this kind of design blunder.

 

My car's dashboard:

There is a "feature" in my car's dashboard where the brightness of the dashboard lighting changes automatically versus changes of brightness of the ambient daylight. As I drive through overpasses or alongside groves of trees that cast shadows across the road, the dashboard lighting goes from bright to dim to bright to dim to bright to dim to ..... over and over and over again. To me, that erratically changing brightness is extremely distracting. I would like to have a word with the techno-fool who decided that this was a good idea. The only proper design, in my view, would be to have the dashboard lighting remain constant at whatever level I choose to set it.

I intend to defeat this one though by covering up the dashboard-mounted light sensor with something opaque. If the car doesn't know that the ambient light is changing, it won't be able to respond to those changes.

We'll see how that works out.

Credit Card Solicitations - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Many people will understand about receiving objectionable mail that asks you to sign up for this or that credit card. It's so "easy" to do but when that stuff comes, I want no part of it.

One day, a credit card solicitation arrived and therein I saw something about getting removed from solicitation list(s). I took a look at the URL for removal and found a line where I was supposed  to enter my social security number, my SSN.

I don't care if the URL begins with "https" or not. There is NO WAY that I am going to type my SSN into anything I find on line. I left that website behind and to this day, the credit card solicitations keep coming.   

The upshot is that I have to get rid of those papers but that ain't so simple. Look at this one for example:

There are several code numbers which I imagine would uniquely identify me to the credit card company and they appear in print more than just once. If I want to purge this page of all of those numbers before throwing away the paper, I have to make sure I cut ALL of them out.

A paper shredder will not do. I have to engage in involuntary origami and when I throw away the little number-bearing scraps, they go in a separate receptacle from where the main paper itself goes.

This case is only one example of what you can receive. The multiplicity of numbers and their multiple printings in this paperwork were fairly easy to spot, but sometimes those numbers can be rather well hidden in small type and/or they can be surrounded by lots of distracting text and graphics.

Protect yourself against this venue for identity theft. Be very thorough.

Bat Signals - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I used to notice that when comic books or comic strips depicted a character using a flashlight, the light was always shown as a perfect cone of light that shone evenly over whoever or whatever the flashlight was pointed at. I also noticed that real flashlights didn't do that.

The effect would vary from specific flashlight to specific flashlight but there were always irregularities in the light pattern, areas where illumination was dimmer than elsewhere.

I also noticed in the comics that Batman's signal light, the Bat Signal, was always shown evenly too but even worse (Yes, it's a pun.), a visible icon could be seen in the open sky where there was no movie screen or the like on which any image could be projected.

The laws of physics didn't seem to matter in Gotham City.

The other day, I had an old flashlight go bad so I went to the store to buy a new one. All I could find in that store were LED based products so I bought one. It was not the bulb based product I would normally have chosen.

I got a surprise when I went to use it.

The illumination pattern of the L:ED flashlight was evenly distributed with no dimmed down areas so far as I could see. This was the flashlight of the comic books now come to the real world and the truth be told, this thing is a pleasure to use because of the evenness of its beam.

Well, so far as I know, nobody has come up with a practical Bat Signal yet, but if I live long enough, who knows what else I might see achieved.