IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Leave Your Sense of Justice At Home - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

First, some background info.

I have survived four heart attacks. This past Tuesday, I got to bed late, sometime around 1 AM, and found I couldn't get to sleep. Then very suddenly at 2:30 AM, I got hit with a severe chest pain that felt just like what had happened with heart attack number four. My wife called 911 and in short order I was taken to the hospital.

There was no available hospital bed for me so I had to be put on a gurney that was placed in a hallway where the first of many electrocardiograms was taken, where blood samples were taken and so forth. The cardiac enzyme test came back negative, the cardiogram looked okay and that was calming to be told.

After sixteen hours of lying on that gurney, a room became available to which I was conveyed. Additional tests were performed and the final conclusion was, happily, that I had not had a fifth heart attack. Something had certainly happened and I will be following up on that for sure, but the good news was that I hadn't had heart attack number five.   

Now, the main point.

I was not the only patient on a gurney in that hallway. There were others there too including this one man who had arrived several hours after I did and who was enraged at his circumstance.

He had arrived in keeping with a planned surgery and because it had been planned, he was protesting that a bed was not available for himself. He insisted that the hospital, knowing he was coming, should have had a waiting bed reserved for him.

Picture an outraged sense of justice and the wasted consumption of a doctor's precious time trying to explain matters to someone refusing to accept any explanation. Having envisioned that, study the following facts which came to my attention in one way or the other during my own experience.

1)         A man who only spoke Russian was a patient a few rooms away for whom they tried to find an interpreter. There were four persons on staff who had some familiarity with that language, but none of them were really able to serve the purpose. Meanwhile, this man's medical issue was that when he tried to eat, each time he tried to swallow, the food would go into his lungs.  

2)         During the time I was on the gurney, and later placed in a hospital bed, there were at least two "code blue" alerts and one "code red" alert over the public address system.

3)         Although the number of Covid patients had drastically declined versus the patient load during the past several months, the load was still extremely large anyway and not for any obvious reason. It looked like I had simply arrived at an "end of the bell curve" situation. Staffers were really hard pressed to keep up with their work responsibilities and none of them were laggards. There were only admirable levels of professionalism.

Although I was on a gurney for an extended period of time which should not have been the case and although Mr. Malcontent was on a gurney too which should not have been the case, there was no fault, in my view, with staff performance. Circumstances were coming and going at a breakneck pace and our gurney experiences were just one outcome of that.

My advice to Mr. Malcontent, if I'd had the opportunity to present it, would have been to SHUT UP and just accept the situation. Gracefully accept the triage. Leave any sense of outrage behind you and act your age like a mature adult.

You and everyone else will be better off.

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

There is a decorative water fountain at the center of the Walled Garden at Old Westbury Gardens where one day, I noticed a bee that had inadvertently set down on the surface of the water and from which it could not rise again.

I took a small piece of cardboard which for some reason I happened to have in my hip pocket and used it to lift the bee out of the water. I then placed that bee on the flat upper surface of the fountain's wall and stood back to watch.

It was a bright, sunny and very hot day so after a few minutes, the sun evaporated the residual water that been coating the bee and it took off and flew away as peacefully and placidly as you may very well please.

A minor incident to be sure, but that bee had no idea whatever of its benefactor which set me to thinking about how often do we humans get rescued from this or that situation by some anonymous benefactor.

I have no idea really, but the question still occurs to me every now and then.

Check Signature Line - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I came across this puzzle answer in a Will Shortz puzzle item:

I put a blank check on my scanner and set it to 9600 DPI (dots per inch). Normally I use 300 DPI but I wanted to get as much magnification as I could. I then scanned a segment of the signature line and this is what came out:

Sure enough.

Although I can't see the wording even with a strong magnifying glass, it really is there.

Do you remember when paper checks used to come back to you with each monthly checking account statement? I never discarded any of those so I took some old checks and 9600 DPI scanned their signature lines.

The hidden text started appearing in 1997. Checks from 1996 and earlier were simply lined with no hidden letters.

Very, Very, S - L - O - W E-mail, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Some time ago, I wrote about excruciatingly slow e-mail operation. Please see:

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2019/11/very-very-s-l-o-w-e-mail-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

This problem had persisted with nobody offering any suggestion about how to deal with it, but then just the other day, something happened. Take a look at this altered image from the above essay:

That little picture of two letter envelopes never attracted my attention, but at one tiny moment, that image was replaced by a small black square within which were white characters reading "34%". When I slid the cursor over that black square, it reverted back to the dual envelopes image and up came a message reading: "Microsoft Outlook is synchronizing folders." That dual envelopes icon always vanished when the whole process would finally finish itself.

Synchronizing what to what??? I had, and I have, no idea what's being synchronized to what but it led me to discover something.

This computer dates way, way back. I had been saving old e-mail messages in an archive for possible later access and I often used my archive in just that way. However, dating back to 2009, I had allowed more than ten-thousand messages to accumulate in there. Yeah!! Ten thousand.

I decided to delete everything older than one year and since having done so, these long time intervals have stopped happening.

Now, when sending or receiving e-mails, that dual envelope icon still appears but it vanishes pretty quickly and the messaging process completes itself quickly as well. If I'm quick, I can move the icon over that image and still see the synchronization message, but the crippling slowness seems to have come to an end.

Persistent Malware - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This malware indication recently arose. It does not get removed by any of several anti-malware tools. Doing a "Clean All" as in this image yields a message of success and congratulations, but immediately running the scan again shows the same issue, unresolved.

Does anyone know what this is and how to get rid of it?

Water Bottle Vacuum - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I happened to come across rather a curio, a bottle of water that had been sitting on a pantry shelf for heaven only knows how long (I can't find any date on it.) and which seems to have developed a vacuum.

The question arises, if someone had happened to absent mindedly have taken this bottle out and without paying any particular attention, drank its contents, would this have been safe?

Thoughts?

Vaccination Refusal, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Vaccination "hesitancy" is merely a euphemism for vaccination refusal. The rationalizations of those who refuse vaccinations are appalling.

1)         The vaccines were developed too quickly.

The first genome to be successfully sequenced was of an influenza virus, Haemophilus influenzae, back in 1995. That first success took weeks to accomplish while modern genome sequencing of corona viruses has been orders of magnitude faster. Speedier vaccine developments are a modern blessing, not a threat.

2)         Waiting to see to see how people's reactions to vaccination turn out.

So far, two-hundred and thirty million US citizens have been vaccinated. Never mind "trial" results, the vaccinations themselves have been a hugely successful trial that has demonstrated protective effectiveness with harmful side effects occurring at rates comparable to rates arising in the general population without vaccinations.   

3)         Personal rights, rugged self reliance and independent individualism.

During the Second World War, blackouts were imposed to make attackers less able to locate bombing targets. If anyone asserted their rugged individualism to have lights on, bombs could be directed accurately to inhabited targets leading to massive damage and lost lives. Today, assertions of individualism in refusing vaccination leads to new infections from which new infection dispersals arise leading to new losses of life.

4)         Distrust of the medical establishment.

The atrocity of the Tuskegee Study of syphilis was just that, an atrocity. Likewise, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was an atrocity. Ethnic targets were abused way above and beyond any possible justifications. We do not have that situation with today's vaccines. Global efforts are under global scrutiny and monitoring which ensure that no ulterior motives apply. Trust in vaccination integrity is fully warranted. Distrust is not.

Never mind the glib verbiage you hear and see being bandied about. Suppression of the scourge requires willingness of everyone to take ALL of protective measures which includes the acceptance of vaccination.

Corona viruses have shown that they can quickly traverse the planet. Therefore, vaccination refusal is not just an act entailing personal risks and consequences. It is an act that threatens the lives of everyone else as well, the lives of persons in one's nearby vicinity as well as the lives of persons everywhere else in the entire world.

Refusal is a threat to me.

Refusal is a threat to you.

Pauling, Teller and Shockley - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A false statement was recently put forward to me with the back-up assertion that it was the work product of experts at MIT. Would I dare to refute that statement?

Linus Pauling, 1901-1994, was one of the world's greatest physical chemists. Having published more than 1200 papers and books, his credentials were impeccable. However, he went off-the-wall wrong when he put out that massive doses of Vitamin-C would be preventative of disease, particularly preventative of colds.

Edward Teller, 1908-2003, was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists. Although he disliked the phrase referring to him as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", his credentials were impeccable.  However, he went off-the-wall wrong when he put out that satellite deployable x-ray lasers would be imminently available for the Ronald Reagan administration's Star Wars program.

William Shockley, 1910-1989, was one of the world's greatest physicists and inventors. Having partnered in the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, his credentials were impeccable. However, he went off-the-wall wrong when he put out that intelligence of members of various races could be cataloged in bell curves whose central averages were demonstrably higher or lower versus the races of the subjects themselves.

The underlying pattern seems clear. There can be a human tendency in which someone who has succeeded magnificently in some particular field, someone who has extraordinary knowledge of and expertise in that particular field, becomes convinced of their own personal attributes that can be analytically applied to some other field in which they either have little experience or in which they have some unadmitted motive.  

It is as if their successes produce an intoxicating aura of unassailable intellectual prowess, above and beyond the mental processes of those of us in the common herd.

When someone tells you something like "Experts say that ......" and wants you to respond or refute what is often sophistry, don't fall for it. It's all too easy for someone, especially certain politicians having an unscrupulous agenda I'm sad to note, to shop around and find some well credentialed expert somewhere to back up and confirm just about anything.

Please be careful.