IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Prevailing Westerlies - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I got into a heap of trouble back in sixth grade when during a science lesson, I asked my teacher a question during a demonstration she was presenting concerning the “prevailing westerlies” of the earth, the tendency of winds to blow from the west and toward the east. That childhood trauma is described at the following URL: 

The Science Lesson 

All these years later, the topic still haunts me a little so I made a very, very simplistic sketch of what I think might explain the observation:

Figure 1                 The Earth As Seen From the South Pole

If incoming sunlight imparts thermal energy to the atmosphere and thereby raises its temperature, that air in view of the sun would tend to be less dense than cooler air on the far side of the globe away from the sun.

At sunrise, cooler air coming into view of the sun would start to heat up and expand. The direction of that warming air’s expansion would favor air movement toward the lower density east. Conversely, at sunset, warmer air moving out of view of the sun would begin to contract thus drawing further warm air from behind itself and also favoring air movement toward the east.

No, I haven’t checked this out with weather forecaster “Mister G” nor against any other possible source of enlightenment.  This is nothing more than speculation on my part. However, comments anyone??

Early, Early Learning - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When one of my grandsons, Jamie, was very little and just starting to talk, my wife and I had not been with him for perhaps a month or so and in that time, he had forgotten about us. My having played with him when he was even littler was a lost memory.

When we did visit on this one particular day, I sat down on the living room sofa while he was seated nearby on Mommy’s lap. He was afraid of me and he kept his face turned away. I spoke his name, but there was no response.

I took out my cell phone in which there were dozens and dozens of pictures, I opened the Gallery app and pulled up his picture. “Look, this is a picture of you. You were sitting on the back steps of the house!” and he looked at that screen. I slid my finger across the screen to bring up another picture. “Oh, look. There’s Mommy and there’s Artie.” Again, he looked intently at that screen.

After several cycles like that, I came to another picture of Jamie by himself and said: “Oh, look. Who is that?” to which Jamie replied “You”. It took Daddy to explain to me that Jamie had mistakenly deduced that his own name was “You”.

Try coming up with an effective explanation of that error at the language level of such a youngster. By then, Jamie had warmed up to me and we were good pals, but even so, I couldn’t do it.

By the time of our next visit, the misunderstanding had been remedied and Jamie knew his real name with no error, but exactly how that misconception got corrected I didn’t know and there was no way to ask. What’s more, by the time Jamie would be old enough to understand the question, he would have long since have forgotten the situation.

Sometimes miracles don’t need to be understood.

Egg Coddlers - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There are all sorts of ways to prepare eggs for breakfast. Think of fried, scrambled, poached, soft boiled, hard boiled, sunny side up, over easy and maybe you know of still more. However, there is a somewhat uncommon way of egg preparation, coddled.

To coddle an egg, one needs a coddler such as this:

A ceramic cup is fitted with a threaded cover. We actually have two sizes of this device, a size for preparing one egg and a size for preparing two eggs.

To use one, we would first rub a thin layer of butter around the inside surface of the cup and around the threads on the cup’s open end to ensure an eventual seal there, break an egg into the open cup, firmly thread the cover onto the cup, immerse the cup into a pot of room temperature water just deep enough for the water to come up to the bottom of the cover’s ring and then light the stove to bring the water up to a steady boil.

The boiling duration can be varied as suits the chef’s desired result. A longer boiling will cook the egg more thoroughly the way a hard boiled egg would be cooked more thoroughly. Personally, I would use ten minutes of a steady boil. When the boiling time has elapsed, we open the lid and enjoy the coddled egg contents.

You can do other things as well. Before coddling, you could add bits of chopped ham, or bits of a favorite cheese, or seasonings to suit or perhaps some olive oil. Let your imagination run free.

There is one caution though, a problem we had with a store supplying these cooking utensils. The lid and threads of the coddler absolutely MUST be made of stainless steel as you see above. Having bought such coddlers shortly after our marriage, we sought to purchase a few more and were sold some whose threaded materials were non-metallic. Those coddlers did not withstand the above cooking procedure. They broke down and leaked. They were useless.

When I went to bring them back for return, the store tried to give me a song and dance that the non-metallic parts were standard, had always been standard, that I didn’t know what I was talking about ……..    You get the picture. I did not relent so the clerk I was talking to left to go speak to the store manager.

While I waited, another customer saw what I was holding and asked me what it was. I explained what it was and its basic use for cooking and how one might elaborate on the cooking and shortly, I was in the center of a whole crowd of interested onlookers explaining all of the above to the entire group, including the non-metallic problem. I saw that clerk appear for just a moment as I was describing adding the bits of ham.

Another short interval went by and with the whole crowd around me, the clerk offered me a full refund for the clearly defective coddlers. 

The store itself closed up some years later. I looked that up and discovered that its company became inactive in 1993. Still, these things can be found and cooking instructions have been published, sometimes with contradictions to my own presentation, but then food preparation can be an inexact science.

Halogen Lamps - John Dunn, Consultant Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I found a crossword puzzle in the newspaper with a clue and its answer as follows:

I hadn't been following the news about lighting standards but finding this crossword item caught me by surprise. I decided to look things up and came across this URL:

https://www.gelighting.com/inform/halogen-and-incandescent-light-bulb-ban-explained

We read the following excerpt:

I recall reading some years ago that halogen lamps above a particular wattage were considered to be a fire hazard. There was mention of one case where window curtains had come in contact with an operating halogen lamp and the curtains had been ignited.

Scary!