IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Smoke is Fuel - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was listening to a storyteller on The Moth Radio Hour yesterday who was speaking about his experiences as a fire fighter. In the course of telling his tale, he spoke of the phrase "smoke is fuel" which very much caught my attention. I entered that phrase into Google.

The URL for the search result was probably the longest URL you can imagine but at the head of it all was the following text:

There is plenty more reading material waiting for you at that search result.

Because smoke generation is a process of incomplete combustion, that smoke is capable of sustaining further combustion. Smoke itself can ignite. If ignition happens while someone is enveloped in that smoke, that person can be immolated.

That person can be immediately burned to death.

Smoke inhalation is a widely known, a widely recognized cause of fire fatalities, but smoke immolation is I think less well understood by the general public.

If, heaven forbid, you are ever involved in a house fire or a workplace fire or any other fire disaster, please remember this and get yourself OUT of the area.

Your life will be at stake.

Amazing People - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

As a teenager into amateur radio (ham radio to some), I met some extraordinary people. I'd like to share a little of that.

Ginger was an older man whose apartment was in a four story walk-up building. He never spoke of it but I couldn't help but notice the facial scarring from his once having survived a terrible explosion that destroyed both of his eyes. His ham radio transmitter was "home-brew" using a pair of 6146 beam power tetrodes for the final power amplifier stage. Although a pair of 6146s could be safely operated at 100 watts of RF output, those tubes were only delivering 15 watts so that they would last virtually forever. With that transmitter and what I think was a Hammarlund HQ-129 receiver, he kept in contact with friends both locally and with one fellow in Shreveport, LA.

Bob was a man of middle age who was afflicted with extreme arthritis. He was quite rigid in a standing position throughout his whole body from his neck to his ankles. He had slight movement capability in his arms. His hands were functional. He ran a greeting card business from his apartment. The arthritis, he once told me, had developed gradually over time, mostly after graduation from college. His coping attitude was astonishing. He once said that in the far distant future when archaeologists were unearthing our present day civilizations and they found our skeletons, they would be really interested in his skeleton because of its arthritic structures but they wouldn't be the least bit interested in mine. He would be a unique find where I would be just another ordinary and uninteresting set of bones.

Sol was a podiatrist who also took super good care of my grandmother's feet. He also performed podiatric services free of charge as a volunteer at a nearby prison. The prisoners knew that when he came, he made their foot pains go away. Sol told me that many of the prisoners had long term and untreated foot conditions and that many of them were in nearly constant and often very severe pain from which he provided surcease and relief. Word got around in that facility and every single prisoner who came to him treated him with the utmost courtesy and respect. They knew.

I've always been grateful for the life lessons I learned from these three men. They often cross my mind to this very day.

No Online Financial Transactions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have often been exhorted to set up online access to banking and investment services in the name of convenience and speediness. I never accept. I always decline.

I will not do any financial transactions on line, not by "Online Access", not by "E-delivery" or whatever this or that feature may be called. Similarly, I do not pay medical, household or utility bills electronically. Every transaction in which I engage requires paper, ink and postage stamps.

It may be just my personal prejudice, but I have absolutely no faith whatever in ANY online security measures that ANY institution or business entity may now have in place supposedly for my protection, or may plan to put in place in the future, because such measures cannot address any vulnerabilities in the PC that sits right here at my desk.

Although I do have antimalware provisions installed, more than one actually, and I use them, such provisions seem to get automatically updated maybe once every few days or updated whenever I happen to initiate a download. Therefore, in my view, there is a reasonable likelihood that my admittedly modest antimalware measures can easily be breached.

Any such breach would totally negate whatever super-sophisticated security measures might happen to be in place anywhere else, including in “the cloud”.  

My pens have yet to be compromised or corrupted by malware although one of them did run dry the other day.

Fourth Dimension - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When we talk of dimensions, we think of three-dimensional space dimensions as in the x, y and z axis. To that we might add other situational dimensions such as time, temperature, illumination and so forth, but spatially, we find ourselves confined to just three.

Imagine then that you have a three dimensional cube which you can view from end-on and that your end-on view can be depicted in a two-dimensional sketch.

The two dimensional image on the left, one square within another square, can be thought of as a two dimensional representation of the three dimensional object, a cube, on the right.

Now consider having one cube within another cube and what that might represent.

Is it possible that the three dimensional object on the left might be a three dimensional representation of a four dimensional object on the right?

It's rather a brain teaser and I have no personal hope of finding an answer. However, I did once see this question posed in a science magazine article as food for thought.

Bon appétit.

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

The following diatribe is something I conjured up while pondering some of the aberrant nonsense I've been noticing during this pandemic:

This kind of wretched nonsense just seems to keep on coming.

What distresses me most is that all of it has actually come about either directly to me in person or via news items. Such thinking blocks out one's abilities to assimilate new information. New information is coming about almost every day and it is often being disregarded.

The hard boiled cynic over estimates his/her own intellectual prowess and his/her own ability to accurately assess the world that we all share in common. For that cynic, there is no room for uncertainty and there is no room for my own possibly different perspectives. There is only room for pessimism, confrontation and a high likelihood of personal medical calamity.

This is not new. I read one essay about the 1918 flu pandemic which stated that many people refused even then to take the most basic of sanitary precautions such as washing hands, keeping away from other people and using protective face masks.

Those simple rules were well known and well understood even in 1918 but were spurned by many people. The result was fifty-million deaths worldwide and 675,000 deaths in the US.

Cynicism, from whatever historical source(s), from whatever modern day punditry, is pushing us in that same direction.

Can we be less cynical? Our very survival is in jeopardy. Get the shots!