IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

A Surprise Spoof - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Some postings on a neighborhood bulletin board hold a lesson that might not be immediately obvious.

Specifically, when the writer had a dispute with a ticket vendor, she looked up that vendor's phone number on Google and instead of acquiring the ticket vendor's correct phone number, she found a false phone number that had been planted on-line. She then called that false number thinking it was legitimate.

Please take special note of the first reply posted by Carol D.

The rest of the story speaks for itself: Be careful about what information you accept and choose to act on.

The Year Was 1955

All of the following are courtesy of and with thanks to:

THE YEAR WAS 1955.. (If I hadn't lived through it…)

Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging 7 cents just to mail a letter?   

If they raise the minimum wage to $1.00, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store.    

When I first started driving, who  would have thought gas would someday  cost 25 cents a gallon?  Guess we'd be better off leaving  the car in the garage.   

Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $50,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn't surprise me if someday they'll be making more than the  President.    

I never thought I'd see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. They're even making electric typewriters now.   

 It's too bad things are so tough nowadays. I see where a few married women are having to  work to make ends meet.   

It won't be long before young couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work.

I'm afraid the Volkswagen car is going to open the door to a  whole lot of foreign business.    

Thank goodness I won't live to see the day when the government takes half our income in taxes.  I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to  government.    

The fast food restaurant is convenient for a quick meal,  but I seriously doubt they  will ever catch on.    

There is no sense going on short trips any more for a weekend.  It costs nearly $2.00 a night to stay in a hotel .    

No one can afford to be sick anymore. At $15.00 a day in the hospital, it's too rich for  my blood.    

If they think I'll pay 30 cents for a haircut, forget it.   

Know any friends who would get a kick out of these, pass this on!  Be sure and send it to your kids and grandkids, too!

Digital Neighborhood - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There was a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about Intel's introduction of their first microprocessor back in 1971. That device was the 4004. Please see:  First Microprocessor

Myself, I've always felt more inclined to analog circuitry than digital, but lately I've noticed some "signs" that I might unknowingly be living in a digital neighborhood:

The James Webb Space Telescope - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E.

The successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provoked a few odd thoughts, and I do mean odd.

1)         First

The JWST has been placed in orbit around the second of five LaGrange points (L2) from where it is best shielded from thermal effects of the sun, the earth and the moon. Its Arianne rocket served so well that the JWST placement took less fuel than had been anticipated which means that a twenty-year service life expectancy has been extended by a greater than planned fuel reserve to a service life expectancy of thirty years.

Still, the fuel will eventually be consumed and when that time approaches, what will happen? Will the last of the JWST fuel be used to propel the telescope away from L2 in order to vacate the L2 point for a successor observation tool?

2)         Second

Imagine the JWST intercepting infrared photons from thirteen billion light years away. Picture one single photon having been generated that far away and having then avoided annihilation by dust, by stars, by planets, by moons, by galaxies, by galactic lensing, by who knows what else and after having survived all of those perils, suddenly:

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssSSSSSSSSS........THUP!!!  

It gets caught in and annihilated by the JWST.  

There's some small part of my sense of justice which suggests that just ain't fair.

It's going to happen anyway though and with several decades of such future events, we're going to learn a lot.

3)         Third

Wouldn't it be a hoot if an accumulated image from that far away showed a collection of stars positioned to spell out the message "Hi"?

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

I had just begun doing design work on an audio power amplifier for a military aircraft intercom system. A mechanical engineer had devised a chassis structure which was essentially an aluminum box with a sheet metal plate that ran horizontally from one side of the box to the other along which an array of power semiconductors would be positioned. The power chips were to be arrayed along a metal strip that ran from vertical wall to vertical wall.

Unfortunately, when I did a thermal analysis for those chips, it very quickly became obvious that there would be severe overheating issues. I presented the situation to the mechanical engineer who very quickly grasped everything I presented and acknowledged the issues, but who then resigned from the company only a few days later.

That fellow's successor was not someone for whom I can offer any words of praise or respect. This new guy said there was nothing wrong and that no mechanical design revisions were going to be made.

One chip in particular had a published power dissipation derating curve  which had the usual downward corner at 25°C and which declined to zero watts at 125°C. My estimate for that chip's temperature was a rise to 125°C which is to say, a rise to a power dissipation capability of zero watts.

Yeah!! That thing was going to get cooked good and proper and 'program management' (ahem) did NOT want to hear that.

Someone of whom I otherwise held great respect made a comment that did not help matters at all: "Maybe we could do a Weibull analysis to justify a non-zero power dissipation at 125°C."

The name Weibull refers to a probability distribution function which I was later told is used by semiconductor manufacturers to determine non-zero but acceptable failure rates of their products in field service and that the chip's power derating curve is an outcome of that analysis.

Please see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weibull_distribution

I told the program manager (again, ahem) "You can't Weibull the Weibull!!" which I guess got taken as a flippant remark even though I meant it in all earnest.

I was only a "temp" at that company and not too much later, I was let go but about a year afterward, I heard through the grapevine that "Some changes were made."

I would guess so!!

Glass Ceilings - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Consider a standard deck of playing cards.

In a deck's fifty-two cards there are four suits which are clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds, within which there are thirteen cards, each of which rank in a hierarchy from Deuce, the lowest, to Ace, the highest. Within each suit, there are three "face cards" which are King, Queen and Jack where the Jack is sometimes called the Knave. Sometimes there are two more cards called Jokers, but we'll ignore those.

We all know this stuff. The ranking order of these cards is set, firm, fixed, invariant and absolute. Within that ranking order, we take note that the Queen ranks higher than the Jack but that the King ranks higher than the Queen.

In chess, the objective is to capture the King. The Queen is expendable and open to sacrifice if need be toward the goal of protecting the King. Of course, the Queen is the most powerful mover on the board. (The power behind the throne?)

In checkers, a game piece that makes it to the opposite side of the board gets "kinged".

Ocean going ships are sometimes referred to in the feminine as in "Aye, she's a good old vessel.".

In the frontier tales of Davy Crockett, he's said to have called his rifle "Old Betsy".

In Lewis Carroll's fantasies Alice's Adventures Underground and Through The Looking Glass, there are several female characters. The Queen of Hearts was utterly and totally dominant in her milieu.

You might recall that Peggy Lee sang "I'm a wo-man. W-O-M-A-N. I'll say it again." and Helen Reddy sang "I am woman, here me roar in numbers too big to ignore."  Do you enjoy these songs? Fine. Continue to listen to them as often as you like.

Hold all of the above thoughts.

In short, sex discrimination in language and culture is part and parcel of various icons, various games, various legends and various entertainments. It is a part of our history, it is a part of our literature, it is a part of our culture. The key observation is that one gender has often been held in higher rank above the other, sometimes admiringly and sometimes not.

This has been true for centuries and predates the birth dates of any person living today. Even modern day cartoonists exploit that aspect of society. Please see:

https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/bizarro/s-2626928

In consequence, gender neutral language is not built into this culture. The phrase "Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen." was spoken by Duke Ellington at the start of his every concert. The phrases "Ladies Night" and "Ladies First" are in common English usage and I'm sure you can come up with plenty more such examples.

However!!  Denials of privilege, denials of opportunity, denials of accommodation, metaphorically called "glass ceilings", that are based on who or what someone is, are never justified. The cultural entities above, and many more like them, are often presented as "straw men" (How's that for a gender distinction?) with regard to those denials. When used as examples of, or as references to, deplorable gender discrimination, they serve only to distract attention away from where genuine needs and issues really exist.

Such distractions can be seductive because of their cultural resonances but let's please keep our focus where it needs to be which is on modern life and not on games and legends.