IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Dog and Neighbor Abuse - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We once had a neighbor with a small walking mop of a dog called "Tuffy" that they often used to leave alone in the house, not just for one day, but for two or three days at a time. When left alone that way, that dog would whimper, cry, whine, howl and bark from sunup to sundown and those pitiful noises would carry all over the block. It drove us and our other neighbors absolutely NUTS to have to listen to that.

I spoke to Tuffy's owners and they absolutely refused to believe me. They told me they had left dishes of food and dishes of water right there in the kitchen and when they got home, Tuffy would greet them jumping all around and with its tail wagging like it was some kind of happy puppy. Clearly to them, the dog had been just fine.

That deliberately obtuse response was all that ever happened. As it happened, Tuffy was quite old and died after we'd endured perhaps two or three years of those experiences. Thank heavens Tuffy was never replaced with another dog.

Now we go fast forward twenty-plus years to today during which  from somewhere down the block, we could hear the sound of a dog barking. That barking began sometime this morning and persisted all day long until a little past sundown. The immediate neighbor of that dog's owner must have been put through hell today.

A dog is a pack animal. A dog doesn't want to be left alone. A frightened dog can't be told that its owner will be coming back. If you leave a dog to its own resources, don't assume that all is well because it won't be.

Stop torturing your dog and stop torturing your neighbors.

Make some kind of genuine provision for the dog's well being in your absence.

To borrow a line from Mr. Carson in the television series Downton Abbey: "Take steps, Mr. Mosley. Take steps!"

The Gostak (Some further commentary re. acronyms.) - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

If I may elaborate a bit regarding acronyms:

I see acronym meanings as key to understanding 5G related issues, but I sometimes have quite a problem trying to find what those acronyms mean.

In reviewing one particular paper on the topic of 5G, I had to look elsewhere on line for quite a few definitions. In doing that, I saw certain acronyms get used over and over again in paper after paper after paper but through all of that, I often could not find what those acronyms actually stood for. As a result, I found myself in much confusion.

That kind of situation was addressed many years ago by the author of a short story called "The Gostak and The Doshes". The story dates from the early 1920s and was published shortly after Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. The Gostak story was based on a popular misunderstanding of the term "relativity" but it went something like the following.

A very unhappy and disgruntled professor finds himself walking on his college's campus and trudging uphill while thinking to himself how awful the college administration policies are, especially with regard to himself, and wishing that he could change his position in the college relative (There's that special word!) to other staff members. Suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself walking downhill, not uphill (a relative shift of the campus sidewalk slope). He gradually notices too that all of the college campus buildings suddenly have different names, he discovers in the library that all of the great scientific discoveries were made by scientists with unfamiliar (to him) names, etc.

Exploring what seems to be a familiar but changed world, he learns that there is a major global crisis in the making. The fundamental tenet of everyone seems to be that "The Gostak distims the Doshes" but exactly what that means, he has no idea.

Since it appeared that European nations did not agree with that statement, the United States was about to launch a global war against them. He decides to attend a special meeting about that impending war where maybe he will be able to find out what has everyone so upset.

The college president presides over the meeting. He opens with a speech "The Gostak distims the Doshes. Could there be anything more clearly true, anything more clearly vital to the welfare of the entire world, anything more beautiful than......" and so on and so on he went. Each time he praises the phrase "The Gostak....", the crowd loudly cheers its approval but at no time could our hero find out what it all was supposed to mean!!

What was the Gostak? The Gostak was the Doshes' distimmer. What were the Doshes? They were what the Gostak was distimming. What was distimming? That was what the Doshes were having done to them by the Gostak.

That's what finding out about those 5G acronyms was like. I saw certain acronyms I acronyms in the paper I was reading  being used in paper after paper after paper but those papers' authors wrongly assumed that those acronyms were already familiar to the reader. In this reader's case, they were not.

Not only were they not familiar, trying to find their definitions spelled out somewhere was astonishingly difficult. I managed to find some of the definitions here and there, but the task was often quite frustrating until I decided to search for a 5G glossary and then finally found one.

No article on a subject like this should fall into that trap. Each article should stand alone and be as clear and as concise and as self contained as it can possibly be. Readers should not be propelled into the kind of search efforts and frustration that I was encountering.