IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Vanity Plates - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Folks expressing their personal philosophies in eight letters or less:

This side by side pair was especially interesting:

One Man's Junk .... - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Someone sent these photos to me today knowing that all this stuff is antique electrical and electronic artifacts.

A few of the items look familiar, but most of them don't. Still, it's kinda cool that a couple of the tube checkers have multiple tubes sitting in their tube sockets and that there appears to be the proper layer of dust.

It almost reminds me of what I used to see on Cortland Street (radio row) in lower Manhattan in New York City back in the early 1960s.

The target market is collectors, I guess.

More of Noticing Things - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

If one keeps looking around, there are all kinds of odd things waiting to be noticed.

A bent water glass at a local restaurant:

A bent but healthy tree at a local arboretum:

Another bent tree that looks like a third order polynomial:

A clock face where the number four is shown as IIII instead of IV:

(This is not a rarity. I've seen the like many times before, even on my own wristwatch dial.)

A free light show from sunlight being reflected onto a wall by the sheet metal of a nearby roof:

This leaf print is not a fossil. I noticed this in someone's driveway where an oak leaf outline had formed, apparently when a leaf had fallen onto then freshly laid cement.

Here is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work at the Old Westbury Garden rose arbor. A rose of unknown name was introduced at an unknown time and was planted in the arbor at an unknown time. It wasn't in bloom at that moment, but I'm sure it must look quite nice when flowering:

Here are three double-yolk eggs in one frying pan. The last time this happened was back in 1995 when I discovered that all twelve eggs in one egg carton were double yolkers:

Here is a package I saw lying on a shelf in the lobby of the local post office:

These chandeliers look like upside down portrayals of the Chrysler Building but with one fixture having apparently lost the middle piece of its image:

 

Self-Doctoring - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We read lately of persons improperly self administering a livestock medication, a de-wormer called Ivermectin, as a supposed Covid-19 preventative or remedy. Poison control centers and the FDA report terrible consequences of such medical misconduct.

Please see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/mississippi-ivermectin-covid-surge-livestock/

However, with Covid-19 aside, I have seen other examples of people doctoring themselves and I've wondered about those persons' well being as a result.

Case 1:

I met this fellow who was working as a cashier at a local grocery store and in the short times we'd speak together, he told me he was under treatment for heart issues. Having had four heart attacks of my own, I took special notice. His doctor had put him on a medication called lisinopril which I myself had once been on at my own cardiologist's direction.

This fellow told me one day just as I was just ready to leave with my groceries and another customer was loading the conveyer belt, that he was thinking of not taking his lisinopril because he wasn't feeling any better with it than when he'd begun taking it. Then he turned to address that next customer and I never got the chance to speak up.

That also happened to be the last time I ever saw him. He seemed to no longer be employed at that store. My concern for his medical welfare remains to this very day.

Case 2:

I was at a meeting of an IEEE affinity group. Just imagine a room full of highly educated, highly trained, highly knowledgeable, pleasant and affable  people possessed of many virtues and with admirable open willingness to share their experiences and information. It was an ideal place for anyone to find oneself and just absorb all kinds of information. Think very carefully about where THAT was.

Then I heard something.

One person announced that he'd decided to stop taking a statin medication which his doctor had prescribed for his cholesterol issues. It seemed that this fellow had done some reading on some reputable medical websites and concluded that he'd be better off without that medication than with it. Disregarding his doctor, he'd made that decision for himself.

This was someone with much engineering training but no medical training at all. Then three other people announced their own intentions to do the same thing. There was hearty agreement among this group of their collective wisdom with none of them having any medical training what so ever.

Case 3:

Think now about the utter rubbish regarding the COVID-19 pandemic as was spewn forth at the behest of Donald Trump by radiologist Dr. Scott Atlas who had no training at all in epidemiology.

Summary:

In each of these cases, life-critical advice was being offered and life-critical decisions were being made by persons who were not qualified to make them and having then been made, that advice and those decisions were acted upon at great peril to the affected persons, both as peril to themselves and as peril to others.

Thinking further of Linus Pauling extolling megadoses of vitamin-C for disease prevention and of William Shockley's bell curve representations of intelligence versus race, the tendency to pontificate outside of one's own areas of training and expertise seems to be a fairly common phenomenon.

Please do not fall prey to such. Please be sure to examine the credentials of whoever has something advisory to offer before taking that advice to heart and don't just act on something of your own like that first fellow I mentioned with the lisinopril.

I hope to live long enough to one day meet you in person. I want you to be alive, healthy and well enough to be there too.

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

Imagine getting a R(Really) O(Obtrusive) B(Bull-loney) O(Obnoxious) telephone call from an exiled prince who has fled from his home country with twenty million dollars that need to be protected, who is now working for the IRS or for Social Security but who has urgently taken time to remind you about the importance of extending the warranty on your car.

This stretched out load of inanity isn't all that far removed from a composite of the bogus telephone calls that have been coming people's way for a very long time. Clearly, there must be some level of successful fraud being accomplished to make continuation of these bogus calls monetarily worth it to someone.

What really gets me though is that these bogus calls, as cheap as they undoubtedly are to automatically make, are not free to the caller. There has to be some incurred cost involved. A quick look at some numbers may tell us something.

A typical incoming call gets responded to by my answering machine. When the greeting message kicks in, many of those calls terminate right away. There is apparently an ability to detect that a live person has not come on the line. That detection can take as little as maybe three seconds. Allowing for the telephone ringing time which is typically twenty-five seconds on my phone, the entire process of calling, of detecting that a human being has not responded and then hanging up might come to thirty seconds. If the next call is initiated automatically and immediately, the rate of unsuccessful outgoing calls would be two calls per minute or 120 calls per hour.

The time of day for calling would probably be when intended victims are awake. A call made at 4 AM would not likely be productive. Perhaps 9 AM to 9 PM would be the time frame. Therefore, in twelve hours, at a rate of two calls per minute, the tally of calls would come to 120 x 12 = 1440 calls per day.

I have no idea what the cost per call would be, but if it were even one cent per call, the calling cost would be $14.40 per day which for a thirty day month would be $432 per month per robocaller which would be a substantial monthly phone bill. That amount would be money regularly going straight into phone company coffers. That money would be steady revenue to the phone companies.

I find myself in some measure of doubt that any phone company would be harmed in any way by receiving such a revenue stream. I further find it difficult to imagine that phone companies are truly motivated by such circumstances to eliminating robocalling abuses.

I am left with the very strong sense that each bogus phone call I receive is the handiwork of two perpetrators, not just one.

Are you listening, Senator?

Lethal Skepticism - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We read of the death of radio personality Phil Valentine at the following URL:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/phil-valentine-anti-vax-and-anti-mask-radio-host-dies-at-61-of-covid-complications/ar-AANA2n2?ocid=oie9fvrt&li=BBnb7Kz

The headline of this item is as follows:

The biology of the pandemic is above and beyond any rational dispute. Those who decline vaccination are risking their lives and the lives of whomever they are near.

This man did exactly that and now he is gone.

Misleading Claims and Symbology - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I came across this article about radioactive cosmetics. It will be unsettling, but the article is worth spending a few minutes to read:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/when-beauty-products-were-radioactive/index.html

One of the products the article mentions was sold under the name "Radithor".

I first read about Radithor in a book entitled "100,000,000 Guinea Pigs : Dangers In Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics". The number in the title, one-hundred-million, was the population of The United States at the time of the book's publication in 1933.

The book describes in gruesome and merciless detail the medical horrors and the death of someone who had used that stuff. The book also describes the profits being made and the lives being lost but I never saw any mention of legal consequences, if any, that the makers of Radithor might have later faced.

Back then, the word "radiation" had a magical appeal to the general and unfortunately gullible, public. Today, that word stirs up feelings of alarm, justifiably or not, whether in reference to nuclear waste or to 5G cell phones or to microwave ovens or to x-rays or to ultra-violet. (How is your stock of sunscreen?)

Although radioactive cosmetics are no longer in vogue, other words have come to have gained similar public panache.

During my childhood for example, the phrase "atomic energy" had great appeal for the undefined but presumably sublime miracles it was going to bring about. Predictions were made of having atomic powered airplanes. Frequent use of the word "atomic" and cartoonish drawings of atoms could be found everywhere. Here and there, you can still find such imagery.

Do you remember being told that "computers never make mistakes"? That piece of drivel would be launched your way if a utility bill came in at several thousand dollars for a single month. The magic of the word "computer" faded somewhat when personal computers arrived and people started dealing one-on-one with DOS,  Windows and OS/2.

It still happens. These days, think about the word "laser".

Viral Rapidity - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Two morning news headlines seen this morning:

"The delta variant is putting America's hospitals back in crisis mode"

and

"Florida weighs removing school officials who imposed mask mandates"

The viral propensity to rapid propagation and the viral ability to rapidly mutate must be compared to human sluggishness and even non-responsiveness.

In addition to the basic hygienic and sanitary practices we learned in childhood, there are three components to pandemic protection. Each of them is vital even though the sum of the three does not offer 100% protection assurance.

Those three are: 1) vaccination, 2) the proper wearing of face masks and 3) keeping distances from other people.

Non-compliance to any of those three is irrational, irresponsible and inexcusable. The virus doesn't care what you think. The facts of its behavior are well documented in the morgues.

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

Many years back, we were looking for kitchen floor covering so we went into this one store in our neighborhood that dealt in that. Upon arriving, we discovered an irate customer arguing with two young store employees about a botched linoleum installation in that customer's kitchen.

Back then, that customer was a man of probably mid-seventies age, the same age then as I am today. As we came in, I heard him shouting "I know all the tricks!!!" which definitely perked our interest.

As we stood and listened, we learned that two large sheets of linoleum had been installed on his kitchen floor and that those sheets were misaligned so that the junction between them was pushed upward. That mismatch formed a raised seam straight across the center of the floor and constituted a tripping hazard. The store people were denying any responsibility for the misalignment and were refusing to offer any remedial steps.

Eventually the irate customer left the store and then the two employees started laughing with each other and making jokes about what they had just done.

"Did you hear that??  (ha-ha-ha)  He thinks we're going to come over there..... (Suddenly one of them noticed us standing there.) .....and that we're gonna ..... (The one gestured to the other that we'd been seeing this ugly scenario play out.) "

Suddenly there was silence as the one who'd noticed us and I briefly exchanged glances.

Without a word, we walked out and as we went to our car, I saw that irate customer standing on a nearby street corner, not moving, not looking around, just standing there scowling.

Pause for a little bit, soberly, to picture that moment.

Bad Medicine - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A live call-in radio show I was once listening to had a caller with a horrific story to tell.  Mind you, this was years before the pandemic came along.

This lady's daughter was a small child who had not been feeling well. There were a variety of complaints which had been presented to the family doctor who eventually decided that the symptoms were psychosomatic and therefore suggested that counseling might be of benefit.

Eventually, the caller said, and presumably through other medical venues, it was discovered that the family doctor had misdiagnosed the child and the result was life threatening. The actual illness was leukemia.

The fact that the doctor had not properly diagnosed his patient and the additional fact that the family was black meant, according to the caller, that the doctor was a racist. Presented with that thought, the radio host was in immediate agreement and went on with discussing how best to deal with racist doctors.

Mind you again, this was on live radio.

No consideration was given to any possible reasons why the diagnostic error itself had been made nor by what medical factors the doctor might have been misled. Instead, the unchallenged opinion of a medical lay person, the child's mother, was simply taken as an unquestionable truth on which basis the doctor was to be verbally condemned.

No mention was made about the child's eventual medical progress. I can only hope that with proper medical care, that matters worked out for the best.

I have listened to other such stories with descriptions of inferior medical care being afforded to black patients as compared to white patients and many have seemed quite believable. However, the immediate judgmental condemnation of the doctor in the above conversation, in my view and for lack of further information, was unwarranted.

Knee jerk assumptions of the kind that were exhibited by that radio host actually work to the detriment of the listening audience, black and white alike. Medical science is complex. Doctors are given many years of education and training before they can earn the title of "Doctor". To simply dismiss their actions as the result of a single alleged trait is to very likely lose sight of remedial resources, be they medical, psychological and/or social, which denial works to the harm of the patient whether pediatric, youthful, middle aged or geriatric and of whatever race.

Everybody deserves better than that.