IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

The Wares - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Hardware

This is the stuff comprised of things listed in the Periodic Table of the Elements. It includes copper, aluminum, iron, silicon and other elements which have been artfully arranged into artifacts, most of which you could carry by hand if for some reason, an occasion to do so were to arise.

Firmware

This is also hardware, but this subset of that category is arranged in keeping with the thoughts of technically trained personnel in accordance with intellectual property which is not intended to be changed in the course of normal usage. It can be revised by deliberate choice at some later time, but in normal usage, it may be considered invariant.

Software

This is intellectual property which has been devised to satisfy computational goals which may vary from time to time, from moment to moment and even from mood swing to mood swing. It may reside in a wide variety of media such as hard drives, thumb drives, floppy disks , in the "cloud" or elsewhere.

Vaporware

This is planned-for intellectual property which may or may not ever actually come into obtainable existence. It usually resides in someone's pipedreams.

Malware

This is intellectual property which has been devised to thwart your computational goals and/or to implement malicious computational goals of someone other than you yourself. It may reside wherever software may reside.

Trashware

This is intellectual property which has been released to market and which, when I myself try to use it, it does not work. Two examples of such attempted usage are seen as follows:

Beware

Good advice.

The Witch of Agnesi - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This word "witch" has nothing to do with witchcraft or sorcery. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary at: 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/witch%20of%20Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi †1799 Italian mathematician; witch, translation of Italian versiera cubic curve (influenced by Italian versiera female demon).

There is a whole discourse about this geometric entity at:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_of_Agnesi

To understand the derivation of the Witch of Agnesi curve, we have the following:

We begin by drawing a circle centered symmetrically about the y-axis and tangent to the x-axis.

To find an individual point on the curve, we draw a chord from the origin where x=0 and y=0 and extend that chord until it crosses the horizontal line that is tangent to the circle at the very top where y equals twice the circle's radius.  

From where the chord crosses the circle, we draw a horizontal line going away from the y-axis and where the chord intersects the upper horizontal line, we draw a vertical line downward toward the x-axis. Where these two lines meet is a point on our curve. In the above sketch, we show that several times with a little red dot placed where each point is found to be.

You can see a bell curve taking shape from this.

If we draw lots and lots of chords, we get lots and lots of points from which (no pun intended) we can trace out the curve itself as follows:

This curve is tangent to the top of the starting circle and asymptotically approaches tangency as the "x" value goes to infinity in each direction.

The highlighted equation for "x" as a function of "y" can be algebraically reversed to find "y" as a function of "x" for which we get:   y = 2 * rad / ( 1 + ( 0.5 * x / rad )^2 )

If we integrate the curve to get the total area under the curve for "x" going from minus infinity to plus infinity, that area is four times the area of the starting circle. Therefore, if the radius of the starting circle is rad = sqrt ( 0.25 / pi ), the area under the curve is unity and this curve describes a non-Gaussian probability distribution function.

Please see the Wikipedia URL for further information.

Gin Mill Crowd - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I spotted this crowd just outside of a local gin mill, mixing and mingling at close range, one man carrying a small boy perhaps two years old and nobody wearing a mask.

The little boy's danger is overt and the added sadness is that there is a reasonable chance that someone in this crowd will be dead within the next few weeks from having contracted the COVID-19 virus during this gathering.

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

It is insanity to ascribe any aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic to whoever you happen to hate.

As pandemic details continue to be discovered, as new facts are developed by medical personnel, you only need to know the following.

1)         The COVID-19 virus exists.

2)         Your opinions about COVID-19 change nothing.

3)         The COVID-19 virus is transmissible.

4)         Some COVID-19 victims have died.

5)         You need to protect yourself.

6)         You're "freedoms" mean nothing.

In London during The Blitz of World War II, if anyone had asserted their personal "freedoms" during the London blackouts by turning on a light, many more lives would have been lost. It didn't happen. Not then.

Sadly, it is happening now. Lives are being needlessly lost from personal assertions of "freedoms".

Never mind listening to some pontificating jackass on the radio with foolish doubts, bad advice and spouting conspiracies.

In public, wear a mask and wear it properly.

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

Science does not suddenly produce full and complete, totally, one hundred percent accurate explanations of worldy phenomena. Thought experiments lead to reasoning processes which lead to physical experiments which lead to observed results which lead to new questions which lead to new reasoning processes which lead to new physical experiments which lead to new observed results and so on and so on.

In ancient Greece, during the 5th century BCE, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus put forth their idea that matter was made up of "atoms". It took centuries, but in 1913, Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford described atoms in terms of a nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. As the twentieth century moved on, quantum mechanics re-described atomic structure.  Sub-atomic particle physics became a new study area and that work is still going on. Think of CERN.

At no time has any of that work ever been wrong. It was, and still is, merely incomplete. The same points hold for other sciences as well such as astronomy, oceanography, seismology, etc.

The COVID-19 virus seems to be a recent development. Its underlying bio-chemistry is very complex. Virology is a very demanding field of study with a great deal that is admittedly unknown. New discoveries are arising day by day by day including discoveries about various mechanisms of viral transmission.

A couple of months ago, I was reading articles about viral transmission via surfaces. How long would this new virus remain dangerous on a metal surface, a plastic surface, a wood surface, a stone surface, a cloth surface and so forth. I kept seeing new estimates of those times being written up but how accurate those estimates were or were not I could never really deduce.

The next thing I noticed were descriptions of virus transmission by way of droplets being expelled in the breaths of virus positive persons. This seemed to be the primary virus transmission mechanism. Experiments seemed to show droplet dispersals to a distance of approximately three feet so the recommendation was publicized to keep at least six feet away from other people. However, later work added some new information.

In some cases, not all cases but some, much smaller droplets than those already studied could also carry active virus from person to person and do so over distances much greater than six feet by so called airborne transmission. This micro-droplet (my wording) effect is not the primary virus transmission mechanism, but it does seem to occur in some cases and should therefore be guarded against as well. To me, paying attention to this new information calls for nothing more than simple common sense and yet I see this too being disregarded.

As time goes on, more and more things are being learned. Therefore, at any specific time, advice is offered in keeping with the level of knowledge that has been gained up until that time. Because the knowledge base changes, sometimes the advice changes too.

The unfortunate response to that simple reality is some folks saying: "Last month you told me AAAA and then two weeks ago you told me BBBB and now you're telling me CCCC. What you say keeps changing so I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about and I am not going to listen to you!"

The results of such disregard for scientific information are being seen now in some states where Intensive Care Units have been filled up to their maximum capacities with COVID-19 victims and the number of victims is still skyrocketing upward.

Just from today's CNN website alone, look at these headlines:

Shakespeare himself couldn't have come up with worse tragedies.

Clock Puzzle - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The question at hand is:

During the course of one twenty-four hour day, for an analog clock, how many times each day do the hour hand and the minute hand point in the same direction?

Think about that for a minute or two before reading on.

During each half day, the minute hand traverses its path around the dial twelve times, once for each hour. During that same half day, the hour hand traverses is own path just once. That means that the minute hand overtakes the hour hand eleven times during each half day at which moments the minute hand and the hour hand are pointing in the same direction.

Since all movement is smooth and regular, the eleven moments divide the twelve hour time span into twelve-minus-one-equals-eleven equally spaced time intervals of one and one-eleventh hour each. That comes out to one hour, five minutes and twenty-seven and three-eleventh seconds.

Since these eleven moments occur during a half day, the number of moments for a full day is twice that or twenty-two times per day that the hour hand and the minute hand point in the same direction.

Government Regulations - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I saw a news item about a maskless woman at a 7-11 who when asked to put on a mask, proceeded to spit on the store's counter. I saw another news item about a maskless man who tried unsuccessfully to muscle his way into a Wal-Mart. I saw still another news item about someone deliberately coughing on a baby. More and more such incidents keep showing up in the news and all of them seem born of malice and spite.

There is a piece of contrarian foolishness circulating out there that being required by government regulations to wear a face mask or to cooperate with contact tracers during the pandemic are unconstitutional denials of personal freedoms and improper government violations of personal "rights".

The cartoonist Walt Kelley would have put it as by the "gummint".

It's lucky that most people have the good sense to willingly comply, but it is also a public tragedy that there are persons who won't and don't. After all, it can take merely one suicidal maniac on a parkway to do one stupid thing to cause a ten car pile-up and kill a dozen innocent people.

I was once told by a co-worker that government regulations were improper regarding automobiles. His thesis was that automotive inspection requirements should be eliminated because he knew how to take proper care of his car without having anyone else watching over his actions.

I told him that if there were no government regulations with inspection requirements, someone would decide that they didn't need any headlights and would say "I don't need lights to drive at night. I can see in the dark. I have eyes like a cat."

His response was "Oh, nobody would do that!" to which I said "Oh no? Someplace out there, sometime, somehow, there would be some da......d idiot who would do exactly that and I wouldn't want to be anywhere nearby when that happened."

In some parts of the country, mask wearing is mandated. In other places, it isn't. In either case, how many maskless, da......d idiots have you seen today?

No Reparations - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Every day lately I see articles and essays posted on line, I see newspaper items and television documentaries about "systemic racism" and accusations, sometimes overt and sometimes veiled, that I, the Caucasian target of these presentations, should be burdened with guilt.

The horrors of US slavery are a challenge to fully grasp. However, two family visits we made to the Colonial Williamsburg restoration in Virginia back in 1995 and 1996 helped put that into perspective. I recommend the experience. Just get a good grip on your stomach. 

Does "systemic racism" exist and does it need correction?

I say yes.  

Is there any justification for monetary transfers to modern descendants for abuses against ancestors which took place centuries ago?

I say no.

To begin with, any benefits that might have once accrued to anyone's ancestors have long since been dissipated. Even the descendants of John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest men of his time and whose business ethics were not admirable (I had to reach for that last word.) now has descendants who have inherited his vast wealth but who are not independently wealthy because the original Rockefeller personal assets have become widely divided and thereby diluted over time.

During the years when slavery was happening in the US, my ancestors were living and suffering under different atrocities in their respective European locales. The United States Civil War ended in 1865 and as we know, abuses here did not halt. However, both horrid histories are undeniable and those histories cannot be changed.

My paternal grandparents arrived in the US from Ireland in 1895 as they fled from the "potato famine". There was nothing to eat. As Irish Catholics, they were openly confronted with abuses. Think of that classic photograph of a factory building employment sign that read "Irish Need Not Apply."

My maternal grandparents came later. They arrived in the US from Czarist Russia in 1904 as they fled harm from many sources. Once here, as Jews, they too suffered from many locally inflicted abuses.

All four of my grandparents, all of my aunts and uncles and my parents overcame hardships that I am not sure I myself could have successfully managed.

Whatever so-called benefits of "privilege" those of my ethnicity supposedly enjoyed or enjoy according to those presentations above, such benefits never accrued to anyone in my blood line. Myself, I personally had to struggle like h...l to achieve the education I finally obtained and I had to work the duration of my adolescent and adult lifetimes to now be able to sit modestly on my own living room sofa.

With all of this history as background, I am not receptive in any way whatsoever to any assertion that any of my personal and financial assets are grist for "reparations". Not to anyone.

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

I was three years and two months old when my baby sister was born. It was just after the record three-feet of snowfall of December 1947 during which I had been taken to my aunt's apartment in the same building where we lived. Going outside was out of the question so I was confined with all kinds of other kids in my aunt's living room. Nobody told me anything about what was going on. I wanted to go back to my own apartment but no, that couldn't happen and I had no idea why. The situation seemed to be endless.

Finally after I don't know how many days, I was told that now I could go back home and that there was something waiting for me there. Yes!! I had something new. I had a brand new sister. Of course, I had no idea what the word "sister" meant.

I was led to my apartment's front door and in there were people packed in like I'd never seen before. In that one apartment there was my parents, my aunt Minnie plus neighbors Edna Steuer, Bell Suskin, Dotty Fried, Rita Smith, Shirley and George Cohen plus other people I didn't even recognize, all of them talking up a storm, and there in the master bedroom was this new piece of furniture which I was told was a "crib".

"Look in there!" someone said to me and so with some effort, I managed to look over the crib's railing to see something lying on a sheet at the bottom of the compartment. Someone then said "That's your new baby sister!"

"That's mine??"

So by that, I learned to what the word referred but I still didn't understand the significance of all these adults everywhere with everyone all bright and cheerful and noisily chattering.

At that point, I was suddenly the object of nobody's attention. I was suddenly cast adrift in a sea of neighbors with no communication venue, essentially invisible and with not even a cookie.

Today, I am seventy-five, I and my sister have lived good lives and for that I am grateful. However, that one day, that singular moment of being so utterly alone now and then still haunts me.    

Got any kids on the way? Any grandkids?

Civic Obligations - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

As the pandemic continues to worsen worldwide and nationwide, I am seeing more and more news items and local neighborhood blog posts about people doing exactly the wrong things and doing the most damaging things.

Quoting Rockland County Health Commissioner Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert regarding contact tracing of party attendees, from the following URL:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/coronavirus-contact-tracing-subpoena/index.html

"Some people just don't maybe understand the importance of this, which, of course, with education we're trying to explain and have people understand the reason we need to find out who their contacts are, where they have been, when that was, so that we can continue to decrease the number of cases in New York.".

"Most people do cooperate with us, but for the smaller number that do not, they have hung up on us. (They have) given us very small amounts of information and then refused to give anything further. (They) have told us they do not want to nor need to provide information," Ruppert told CNN.

My outraged assessment is as follows:

The circumstances of any situation tend to degrade to that level dictated by the situation's least desirable participant.

The uncooperative persons to whom Dr. Ruppert refers strike me as being totally consumed by exaggerated senses of self worth made worse by having grown up in families who overly catered to them in efforts to preserve their fragile senses of self esteem.

Such individuals loudly proclaim their "rights" to do any d.... thing they choose at any time they d.... well please but who totally reject any notion of having to fulfill any obligations or civic responsibilities.

These are the sorts of people who obstruct the doorways of their commuter railroad cars when other passengers need to exit or enter, these are the sorts of people who suddenly push down the backs of their airline seats and who feel that whoever is sitting behind them should just shut up about it, these are the sorts of people who routinely ignore street traffic regulations (speeding, illegal turns, etc.) and these are the sorts of people who commit their offenses often simply to be spiteful of other people.

Their spiteful behavior, their antisocial behavior in my view, often endangers human lives under the best of circumstances, but with this pandemic, that behavior is now even more of a life threatening peril to the public at large.

Do you know anyone like that?