IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Dying Fish - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

In the early spring of 2021, we were walking along the Connetquot River in Bayard Cutting Arboretum in Great River, NY when we noticed that many fish in the river were in death throes all along the river bank.

Not too much later, what we'd seen in the river was the topic of a newspaper article as follows:

We didn't see anything like that happen in 2022, but if you ever take that walk or one similar and happen to notice this occurring again, please contact your state Department of Environmental Conservation and report your observation.

About Apostrophes - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Some time ago, our area highway administrators made a decision to remove all punctuation marks from street signs and highway signs. On the disturbing yet possibly plausible premise that people aren't smart enough to deal with punctuations, the old "Seaman's Neck Road" is now "Seamans Neck Road". There are other examples as well.

The proper use of an apostrophe can be discerned from this Google result:

The highlighting is my doing. Those are the two key uses of the punctuation mark.

Now check out these two images:

It looks like someone has trees and shrubs that own something. Perhaps they own the leaf in the sign's (note the apostrophe) lower left corner. Also, it seems that a multitude of "Kullens" are involved with selling meats. That must be quite a family.

The absurdities are laughable except that they are WRONG in their apostrophe usage and omission.

It used to be okay to say to elementary school children that they can learn how to write correctly by observing examples of correct writing in their general world, but with adult blunders like these hanging around, that is no longer a useful suggestion.

Employee of the Month - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The idea of designating an "Employee of the Month" is supposed to instill motivation and esprit de corps in a company's staff, but it can work the other way too. For the sake of brevity, let's just call this form of recognition "EOM".

At one company where I worked and an EOM policy was in effect, there was a twofold EOM reward.

One reward was having the privilege of parking one's automobile right up close to the employee entrance. The top executives each had a reserved parking stall right near that entrance and sharing that perk at least for one month was one benefit. The other was to have a large, framed portrait photograph of the EOM mounted prominently on the wall in the employee cafeteria for all to admire.

So one day, this one particular engineer was cited as EOM and sure enough, his image was up there on the wall for everyone to see. However, shortly afterward, that engineer quit and although he was known to have resigned and left the company, his picture was never removed. This EOM image stayed there for multiple months, never being taken down.

You can imagine the effect on employee attitudes with everyone knowing that to be the case.

The other day, I had to visit a rather large store in a Long Island shopping mall and as I parked my car and walked over to the customer entrance, I saw this: 

Where'd he go???

Aside from my reflex chauvinistic assumption that the designated EOM was a "he", that reserved parking space was vacant.

Did that actually mean anything? Maybe not. Maybe that EOM was just absent from work that day, but my unavoidable gut reaction was that another EOM plan may have gone awry too.

Incidental images (sometimes called "optics"), rightly or wrongly, do have impact. They do affect thought processes. They do count.

Bat Houses and Bird Houses - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

In the comic Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is given a school assignment to write a report about bats. Doing no research whatsoever about bats (to Hobbes' dismay), Calvin's writes that "Bats are bugs." for which the grade consequences via his teacher, Miss Wormwood, are quite stern.

Bats aren't birds either as was quite evident while taking a recent walk through a botanical garden where houses made for bats and houses made for birds were both provided.

They differed:

Bats are mammals while birds are aves. Although they both fly and they both feed on insects, their house preferences are quite different.

Ain't nature grand?

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

For many years, for decades really and even going back to Ebenezer Scrooge, there has been a stereotypical "bad boss" persona that is very deeply engrained in popular culture.

Examples abound. Please consider a few comic characters you may or may not recall.

In the comic Dotty Dripple, the husband Horace Dripple reported to his boss who was named Mr. Jerkimer. In the comic There Oughta Be A Law, all of the office staff reported to a boss named Jupiter P. Bulgebottom, later Jupiter P. Bumble. In the comic Blondie, the husband Dagwood Bumstead reports to his boss named J.C. Dithers. Finally, we have Dilbert who reports to The Pointy Haired Boss.

All of those boss characters evoke negative traits. Why is this so?

I think that part of this derives from vivid personal experiences of the cartoonists themselves which are similar to, and familiar to, those of their many readers. Such things tend to imprint themselves in long term memories. Case in point, please read my own example in the following:

https://www.edn.com/liquidated-damages/

All of that liquidated damages stuff occurred decades ago but the memory is still fresh and vivid. I can very easily equate "Hal" to any of the comic boss characters above.

I think it also derives from a regrettable but commonplace knee-jerk reader cynicism arising out of our frequent exposures to publicly espoused disinformation, arising out of our frequent exposures to blatant lies and arising out of frequently inappropriate official justifications of bad decisions.   

As a side note, my personal awareness of the term "disinformation" came about from hearing that concept being explained and justified as an executive necessity in a speech by Richard Nixon after some of his own falsehoods came to light.

That was shortly prior to Nixon's departure from office following Watergate.

A Kited Check - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This recently came through via a community bulletin board:

Here is one lesson I take away from this: Don't leave any blank leading spaces.

Nothing is foolproof, but at least make it less easy.

Getting Away from Lithium Ion Battery Fires - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A search on Google using the term "electric school bus" yielded among other things, the following:

The prospect of a lithium ion battery fire immolating a busload of youngsters is truly horrifying. I think about my three grandsons aboard such a vehicle and it feels like my body temperature drops.

 

The variety of lithium ion battery that has been so widely reported in connection with fires is lithium ion cobalt. The danger presented by this particular composition is well known. There are other lithium ion chemistries however which reportedly do not present the same combustion hazard.

Although fire hazards are not mentioned (liability issues, I imagine), we read (reformatted to fit this screen) from the following URL:

https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-batteries-in-half-new-cars-produced/

In drag car racing on racetracks, one reads of using nitroglycerin as an automotive fuel in internal combustion engines, but not on the streets. The so-called "nitro funny cars" get extreme acceleration from using a fuel which would not be street legal. You cannot go to your local Gulf station and fill up your tank with nitroglycerin. As much more power as "nitro" might offer, having explosions going off all over the place is not an acceptable price.

By the same token, lithium ion cobalt batteries should not be legal for street use vehicles either. Tesla has already begun moving away from that usage. If the transition away from lithium ion cobalt can be achieved, we need not have fires going off all over the place either.