IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

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

Listening to Public Broadcasting on station WNYC this morning, there was a news item "Largest Plague Of Locusts In A Quarter Century Hits Africa And Middle East" which is referenced at this URL:

https://www.wnyc.org/story/largest-plague-of-locusts-in-a-quarter-century-hits-africa-and-middle-east/

The person being interviewed made two statements. One, the number of locusts is increasing by forty-fold every three months and two, the number of locusts is increasing by ten-thousand-fold every nine months.

Given these two datums, one can derive the Nfold multiplication factor versus time in months as follows:

This result may help put the crisis in its proper perspective, a multiplication by approximately 2½ each month.

Dental Mirrors - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I recently had a little trouble at a dental checkup where a technician did some of the early work. I later wrote the following letter about what happened.

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Subsequently, my dentist thanked me for pointing out the mirror issue and said he'd ordered different mirrors.

Just a small suggestion you might follow as well.

That First Impression - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

It's a cliché that "first impressions count", but there's truth to that old saw.

I was listening to the very last few broadcasting moments when AM radio station WNBC, 660 kHz, New York City, went off the air. The last thing they intentionally broadcast was the National Anthem which was followed by a moment of silence and then an open microphone accidentally captured a man's voice saying "It's over."

WFAN immediately came on the air with Don Imus doing an announcement that he had decided to convert to Judaism. Why?? The owner of WFAN at the time was Emmis Communications and since the Hebrew word for truth is אֶמֶת (eh-MEHT), Imus reasoned that the new owners must be Jewish, their name must mean "truth" and therefore he'd better convert if he wanted to stay employed.

A little later, a sports call-in program came on, hosted by someone whose voice seemed nasal and aggressively loud like "Loudmouth Charley" of the old Jackie Gleason TV show. The host took an incoming call from a listener.

The caller tried to make some statement with which the host disagreed and the host's response to that caller seemed astonishingly rude. "It don't mean squat. It don't mean SQUAT. The money's on the table! It don't mean SKWATT!!" getting more and more antagonistic with each repetition at which point, I wrote off that station for future listening.

Is it still like that on WFAN? I have no idea but first impressions do count. To this day many years later, I still pay no attention to WFAN.

Freeport Building Demolition - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I first moved to Baldwin, NY on Long Island in January 1969.  Freeport, NY is adjacent to Baldwin and on Sunrise Highway in that neighboring town, there was a building which if my memory is working, housed a branch office of Long Island Trust bank. That bank closed not too much later and the building that had held the Freeport branch went vacant. The building then stood empty and vacant for almost fifty years.

About a year ago, I tried out of curiosity to look up that building on Google maps and although there was a street photograph of it, there was nothing to identify the building by name. It seemed to be orphaned.

Sometime this past autumn, I saw a newspaper article that the future of this building was under debate with one side advocating its preservation as the last art deco structure in the area and the other side advocating its demolition.

Here's what happened next:

All gone.

I now read that the location where this building had stood will next support a car dealership.

I never had anything to do with this building, I had no financial or business interest in it, I was never a Freeport resident, but I always thought I'd like to see the building be resurrected, to see this building be put back into service somehow, some way, someday.

Now that resurrection is guaranteed to not happen, I can't help but to feel a distinct sense of loss.

Hanging Plant Rack - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My wife and I attended a plant lecture a few days ago where the speaker had come in with samples of his artistry, some of which were hanging plants suspended from a frame he had constructed. That frame seemed quite clever to me so here's the gist of how he did it.

All of the materials are inexpensive and are readily found in hardware stores.

Coded Words - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I once saw this program on Public Broadcasting about ice cream. The program showed ice cream parlors all around the country, what they offered, how their businesses were run and so forth.

One particular ice cream shop had a secret code used by their male employees which was the phrase "Check Vanilla" which while it sounded like something related to their wares, was really meant to signal that a very pretty girl had just come in the door and all the guys should look up from whatever they were doing to see her.

I was in a local supermarket yesterday and I noticed this sign on a wall just outside the store's business office:

The next time you hear a store announcement that doesn't quite seem comprehensible, maybe that will be because it's coded.

Always Use All Four Digits - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I saw this admonition on line somewhere but when I went back to find it again, I couldn't find it. In any case though, it is worth repeating here.

If you are writing a date using slash bar shorthand, always use all four digits when putting down the year.

If you only write two digits to represent this year 2020, for whatever nefarious purposes, someone could add a "19" or a "21" and thereby change the apparent date.

Don't let that happen.