IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

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

Now and then, I've read nature magazine articles which assert that animals respond to the deaths of others of their own species. The other day, I saw that happen first hand.

Around noon, I saw two sparrows on a sidewalk. One sparrow was alive but the other one was dead. To my astonishment, the live one was trying to revive the dead one.

Over and over again the live one would raise the dead one's head and drop it back down. Then it would try to feed the dead one while fluttering all over the place with the effort. An hour or so later when I walked by that spot again, the same thing was still going on.

This time as I stood there, the live sparrow seemed to become aware that it was being watched. All at once it stood very still next to the dead one, then it flew up to a nearby perch and after a short while, it flew away altogether.

I didn't take any cell phone pictures of what was happening. Somehow I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

It just didn't seem right.

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

In the same vein as shallow turns, I saw this foolish maneuver take place around that same time.

With seemingly no regard for approaching oncoming vehicles, this one driver couldn't be bothered to wait for  just a moment or two while another car was trying to exit from a local parking lot.

Instead, the offending driver swerved very abruptly across the roadway's center line to swing past the exiting car and came very close to causing a head on collision as sketched here.

Again, we have to ponder the eventual consequences of stupidity when combined with the law of averages.

Shallow Turns - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Three times in the last two days, I saw the situation below take place. Twice, there was a loud screech of tires just in the nick of time to avert a major car crash. The cause was the same each time, a car making an improper left turn.

A properly executed left turn would look much like this first sketch. Here, the left turning car gets by safely and the second car shown approaching the intersection is also safe.

The three scenarios I saw take place were all like in this second sketch below. Here, the left turning car while targeting the right hand lane of the next street, takes a "shallow" path that puts in on course for a head-on collision with that second car.

All three incidents took place during afternoon rush hour. My guess is that the offending drivers were tired and super-impatient to get home but think of the stupidity of doing this.

The law of averages says that eventually the offending driver's luck will run out. So will the luck of the driver of the second car.

Cell Phone Photography - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My so-called "flip phone" ( Thankfully, I haven't yet fallen prey to owning a "smart phone". ) contains a crude camera of sorts with which I have been taking lots of pictures of my two grandsons. The nice thing about it is that I can slip the phone easily into and out of my shirt pocket at a moment's notice and so lots of stuff like this happens.

Unfortunately though, problems sometimes arise such as getting the following message when I tried to e-mail one particular photograph to myself. Trying to "try again" simply did not work. The picture I wanted could not be sent. Period!

At other times, when I try to send certain photographs, I see this next unwelcome display:

When this "resizing" process is finished, my original photograph gets shrunken down to little more than a thumbnail sketch. As seen below for example, a resized image is on the left but a rescued image (I will discuss that rescuing process shortly because there is hope.) is on the right.

The image that I want can be partially rescued from resizing by using the cell phone's "Zoom" function and so can the unsendable image from before that is "too big".  

The process is to view the image you want to send, engage the "Zoom" function, press "In" just once and save the result. In the case above, doing that caused some loss of picture width with a resulting change of aspect ratio, but the bulk of the scene was preserved from extreme shrinkage.

Scientific Illiteracy - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

At this link, we find a video on MSN of a massive solar eruption that was recorded in 2012. Ejecta velocity was 900 miles per second, but look at what somebody wrote about it, not just once but twice:  Scientific Illiteracy

There are two places where the flare ejecta is declared to be traveling at a faster than light speed of 900 million miles per second. Einstein set our speed limit at only 186,200 miles per second so it would be bad enough for this 900 million miles per second blunder to have happened just once, but no!! It is repeated.

Three questions arise.

1) Is that author as scientifically ignorant as this video suggests? This isn't just a case of somebody making a typo. This writing is an appalling display of scientific illiteracy.

2) Are there people out there who are gullible enough to take this drivel as factual?

3) Do those people vote???

Fire Alarm Box - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I found this ruined work of art on a Brooklyn street corner the other day.

This now empty shell was once a very important municipal safety tool. It was an alarm box to be used for calling the Fire Department in case of a building or house fire. If you saw a fire, you would run to this thing and pull down a handle on the front panel and that was all. The fire trucks would soon be arriving.

The inner goodies that made it work are long gone of course. The cabinet that once held them is now just an empty box with only a small leftover metal shelf.

Just look at the artistry though. This thing wasn't assembled. It was sculpted. Just look at that beautifully formed torch at the very top. It was also painted a vivid red to make sure you would always remember exactly where to find it if or when you needed to.

It was twenty-some-odd  years ago in the same neighborhood where I witnessed an out of control automobile crash into another inactivated alarm box just like this one. The sidewalk at that other location still bears circular scarring where that other alarm box had stood until that final moment.

More modern technology has supplanted these things, but they really were something to admire, weren't they.