IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Karen Carpenter's Needless Tragedy - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

You may remember singer Karen Carpenter who died in 1983 just shy of her 33rd birthday from the effects of anorexia when she succumbed to heart failure while trying to repair a sink drain.

There is a telling 1981 interview of her which is viewable at   Karen Carpenter Interview  where a British interviewer says at 1:10 in the video, "...down to about six stone in weight ..." to which Karen deflects the inquiry by replying that she has no idea what a stone is".

A stone is fourteen pounds. Six stone = 14 x 6 = 84 pounds. She denied that (There's that word again.), but for someone of Karen Carpenter's height to have weighed anywhere near eighty-four pounds should have been cause for extreme alarm. Look closely at how gaunt she was at that interview. She was clearly and obviously into a medical crisis and into denial of that medical crisis, a behavior pattern that has been well documented in association with anorexia.

Today, I see that same kind of denial behavior in connection with Covid-19. The crisis is upon us and there are those who deny it, thereby risking not only their own lives a'la Karen Carpenter, but risking yours and mine as well.

Karen Carpenter lost her one and only life because of her own behavior, but nobody else died along with her. Covid-19 carriers however, especially those who are unvaccinated and in denial, are doing far worse, asymptomatic or not, by causing multitudes of other people to lose their lives.

Remember that line:  "Thou shalt not kill"?

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

Recent separate headlines:

1) A California couple with five children died of COVID-19 before they could name their youngest

2) 4-Year-Old Texas Girl Dies of COVID After Unvaccinated Mom Contracts Virus: 'She Was Beautiful'

3) Conservative radio host who swore off Covid-19 vaccine dies after contracting virus, co- host says

4) Anti-Vaccine Activist Who Said 'There's No Epidemic' Dies of COVID

5a) Bob Enyart, anti-vaccination pastor and right-wing 'fanatic,' dies of COVID

5b) Conservative Radio (Bob Enyart) Host Dies of Covid After Claiming Vaccines Were Tested on Aborted Fetuses

6) A YouTuber with 1.6 million followers urged fans to get vaccinated before dying of COVID-19 complications

7) Alabama heart patient dies after being denied bed in 43 ICU's overrun by Covid

8) Nicki Minaj tweets coronavirus vaccine conspiracy, spotlighting struggle against misinformation

9) Vladimir Putin is quarantining after several Covid-19 cases in his entourage

With all kinds of headlines like these coming to us each day and demonstrating that lives are being lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is inconceivable that anyone would be unwilling to take self protective measures.

Also, why does an entertainer like Nicki Minaj with no medical credentials whatever to my knowledge deserve any credence by those who don't "trust" sources who are medically trained and knowledgeable?

I also fail to understand the seemingly endless stream of falsehoods being generated about the pandemic itself and about vaccinations. The required level of imagination defies rational explanation. Are such persons imisinformed? Are such persons maladjusted? Are such persons misanthropic? Are such persons malicious? Are such persons mad?

I simply do NOT know.

Maybe the issue is better clarified by a couple of cartoons I came across. Please see:

https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2021/08/27

https://www.gocomics.com/herman/2021/09/07

Tattered Patriotism - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

During the last several months in this area, dozens and dozens of American flags have been mounted on utility poles. If you looked down a festooned street, you would see stretches of red, white and blue colors all the way to the street's end.

This display of patriotic symbolism has been left in place unmonitored and unattended in any way. There have been storms with heavy rain and high winds, there has been exposure to strong sunlight and so forth which have caused much wear and tear on those flags, some of which now look like the following: 

This doesn't invoke much patriotic sentiment, does it.

Most if not all of these flags have been placed too high to be reached by anyone standing on the pavement which I suppose was to protect against vandalism. The result is that formerly presentable displays have become eyesores.

I have e-mailed the above to our Town Supervisor's inbox but in general, how is this to be remedied?

A Recycling Note - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Our local town recycling program is presented at the following URL from which an excerpt is shown with a particular note regarding caps and lids:

https://hempsteadny.gov/sanitation-department/recycling-information

Caps and lids are not made of #1 or #2 plastic. Caps and lids are not recyclable so the instruction is to remove them. However, let's look a little closer at that situation via a milk bottle.

When a milk bottle is first opened, twisting off the cap still leaves behind a plastic ring made of the same non-recyclable material as the cap. When the contents are used up, recycling the bottle itself still means putting non-recyclable plastic where it does not belong.

For this kid, the remedy is very simple.

I just reach into the kitchen drawer next to me, take out a paring knife, slip it under the ring and lift. The ring gets cut, it falls away and is ready for its own disposal. The bottle which is made of #2 material goes into the recycling.

A small point perhaps, (Sorry about the pun.) but certainly not an inconvenience.

At least I don't think so.

Five Decades Ago, A Fire and A Restoration - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Back in 1968, I lived in the town of Manchester, NH. One day a few years ago, just on a whim, I took a look at my old address there (84 Ash Street) using Google Maps. What I found was awful.

There had been a fire there on February 4, 2011 of which I found some very dramatic photographs. The above Google image dates from July of that year.

According to newspaper archives, the fire was thought to have begun on a third floor hallway which would have been just outside of my old apartment. That and the apartment across the hall where a neighboring family I had gotten to know had been living look like they were indeed the heart and center of that fire.

I found the following in the Manchester Union Leader newspaper archives:

Nineteen people had been rendered homeless. One resident, a custodian at a nearby elementary school, had lost everything including two pet cats. As long ago as this fire was and despite those intervening years, this was still very disturbing news to have come across.

Recently, again just on a whim, I took another look at that address using Google Maps and something different came up:

The building had been restored. The brick chimney got replaced and one window shutter had gone missing from the front, but the building is apparently occupied again and there is even a "For Rent" sign.

I had absolutely nothing to do with any of the subject events, but I still felt glad to learn of the building's restoration.

No, I do not plan to move back.

Eye Dilation Revisited - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Back in October 2020, I measured the progress of eye pupil post-dilation restoration following an eye exam and described the experience at this URL:

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2020/10/eye-dilation-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe.html

Using the same technique after another eye exam here in September 2021, I repeated the measurements. The two sets of results are as follows:

I then tried to compare these two sets of measurements to each other by plotting them in Excel with the following results:

Trying to compare these two charts was a problem. Both the vertical and horizontal axis scales are different because Excel automatically assigns that scaling depending on the numerical ranges of the subject data. Those were different both in the number of elapsed hours and the numerical ranges of the ratios.

Since I don't know of any way to force Excel to scale its charts to my wishes, I had to achieve the desired scaling in a different way and yes, it was a bit laborious.

I added some false data (green above) to each end of the valid data so that the two sets of data shared the same maximum values of the vertical axis ratio values and the same maximum values of the horizontal axis elapsed hours values. Then I ran Excel plots on these altered sets:

Note the identical vertical and horizontal scalings. The next step was to remove the green areas of these two graphs to make them representative of only the valid data:

With these two graphs now sharing the same vertical and horizontal scaling, I overlaid one chart on top of the other:

Now I had my comparison and yeah, I guess they roughly do approximate each other.

The basic conclusion is still the same as it was though. My eye recovery from ophthalmic dilation takes on the order of eight hours which suggests a similar fact would be true for you as well.

I would suggest that you don't drive or do anything else critical until that much time has passed following an eye examination.

Covid-19 and Typhoid Fever - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

"My body, my choice!!" goes the chant of the Covid -19 anti-vaxxer.

That line is absolute rubbish. If someone refuses vaccination, that someone can become, and many do become, a carrier of the Covid-19 organisms in the same way that a lady named Mary Mallon once became an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.

She became known as "Typhoid Mary". If you don't know about her, educate yourself right now.

There are many websites that discuss the harm she did and the many people who died because she asserted her "freedom" to choose what she chose to do.

For one example, please see:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/

At that URL, we read the following about Mary Mallon:

            Keywords: Typhoid fever, salmonella, Mary Mallon, carrier, New York

            "That year, about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak."

The effects of someone refusing vaccination in defense of their "freedoms" or to preserve their so-called right of "choice" are profound. Such a person can readily become a new "Typhoid Mary" and spread deadly infection to other persons. That misconduct is an open and overt threat to the health and lives of those whom I hold dear, to those whom you hold dear and to the entire population.

Such self centeredness is NEVER justified. It states in the above article that "She evidently found consolation in her religion and she was then at perfect peace in the bosom of the church to which she gave the last years her faith and loyalty."

How many of the people to whom she brought death were also that fortunate?

Superman's Eyeglasses - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The big secret that Kal-El, aka Superman, has kept since the Smallville days is his secret identity as Clark Kent, now a mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, etc, etc.

Part of keeping the secret has been the wearing of eyeglasses when in the Clark Kent persona which raises a question: What eyeglass prescription does he wear?

Consider my own eyeglasses:

When I meet someone else who wears glasses too, I often notice the optical distortions through their lenses. My own eyeglasses impart such distortions.

If I were to meet Clark Kent, I would very likely notice any lack of distortion through Clark's glasses if they were simply flat glass planes and that would be puzzling to me. Puzzlement would pique my curiosity and bring my attention to a key part of keeping the big secret. For Kal-El, that sounds like an invitation to a problem.

Therefore, are Clark's glasses made with some prescription? Being Superman, I would guess he could easily cope with the visual distortions that he himself would encounter.

Right?

Krebiozen and Ivermectin - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Krebiozen was once touted as an effective anti-cancer medication. Please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebiozen

Today, an animal medication called Ivermectin is being touted as an effective anti-Covid medication.

By all of the writings I have come across to which I feel I can assert credibility, neither of these claims bear any relation to truth.

Distrust of anything from "the government" and distrust of the "medical establishment" when combined with an open willingness to trust "alternative" medical pundits has caused additional suffering and tragedy which might easily have been avoided.

A news item:

Man With COVID Overdoses on Ivermectin As Doctors Warn It's 'Ineffective and Not Safe'

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/man-with-covid-overdoses-on-ivermectin-as-doctors-warn-its-ineffective-and-not-safe/ar-AAO1wzH?ocid=uxbndlbing

From Winston Churchill in 1948 in a speech to the House of Commons:

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."