That's pretty standard for the era, including the mimic board of the core.[1]
If you like control board designs, probably the most elegant control boards ever built were the ones for the Panama Canal locks.[2] All that chrome and brass! Those towers are water level indicators. The long polished stone slabs represent the two lock lanes. The black diagonals across them represent the lock gates, and those follow the movements of the real gates. The "faucet handles" control the gate valves. The chromed things that look like jukebox stations show the positions of the gate valves.
Everything is mechanically interlocked. Water levels have to match before a gate can be opened. There's an elaborate system of constraints, using mechanical railroad interlocking technology.
That control system was in active use for almost a century. It was only replaced a few years ago, as part of a modernization that included replacing the valve and gate drive systems.
> For some reason, though, the plant’s owner, Northern States Power, never got around to informing the residents of the neighboring Prairie Island Indian Community that something had gone wrong.
When I was a kid, my parents took me on a tour of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. The thing that impressed me the most was the control room. I just couldn’t fathom how anybody could know what all the different buttons and dials did.
Growing up and watching Homer in his role of safety inspector on the Simpsons only further reinforced that feeling.
Now I’m a computer programmer and I feel like some of the projects I have worked on could make a nuclear reactor feel simple by comparison. I also have had many an occasion where I have felt like Homer Simpson.
Don Norman once had a picture, in an early edition of The Design of Everyday Things, that showed an innovative tactic that reactor engineers used to differentiate control handles: https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg
Reminds me of the classic April 1979 Saturday Night Live "Pepsi Syndrome" aka "The Amazing Colossal President" skit, where Jimmy Carter gets irradiated, and Rodney Dangerfield tells how big he is.
In my opinion, it's one of the funniest, most memorable old school SNL episodes of all time, including Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Richard Benjamin, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radner.
I'm sorry for the Facebook link, but for whatever reason it's impossible to find on youtube, and not included in the SNL archives. My theory is the Pepsi company got pissed off about it, and threatens anyone who publishes it with legal action.
>Dr. Edna Casey: It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [ camera zooms in on Dr. Edna Casey ] The Amazing Colossal President.
>Rosalynn Carter: Well how big is he?
>Dr. Edna Casey: Well Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?
Wow that’s an impressive array of buttons and dials. I’ve gotta say though I was listening to a 90’s hits playlist yesterday, which I think was probably the peak production budget era, and the differences in production quality from one recording to the next was stunning. All that expensive equipment in the hands of an expert must be good for something!
The ones that stood out most as being good were some Red Hot Chili Peppers songs produced by Rick Rubin. A lot of other 90’s Alternative recordings were dreadful by comparison.
This is a typical setup at an average venue. Note this guy is not running the sound that the audience hears. This is the monitor mixing station. He is mixing the sound that the band hears on stage in thier earpieces. There is a whole other rig in a separate space mixing to the front of house speakers. The total number of audio channels for a typical stage show is staggering.
Dumb question: Shouldn't he be wearing headphones? Otherwise, how would he know what the band hears?
Dumb question 2: I thought each band member typically gets their own mix emphasizing their instruments so they can adjust better?
Dumb question 3: How many of these knobs would actually be touched over the course of a performance? I'm assuming the overall process is something like:
* Phase 1: Initial default calibration for the specific genre/band
* Phase 2: Fine-tuning during practice/sound-check
* Phase 3: Some additional adjustments during the first song to account for...i dunno last minute changes?
* Phase 4: Changes during every song?? This is the part that I'm curious about.
I only have a little bit of experience doing monitor mix for some small college shows, but:
Headphones probably aren't necessary, as you're usually just making small adjustments at the request of the talent. For a large show, I would imagine everything would be thoroughly pre-planned and tested.
The knobs in the center horizontal stripe of the mixing console are generally "aux sends". Each vertical column is an input channel, and each horizontal row is an aux bus. The knob adjusts how much of each channel gets sent to each aux bus. There are other things that can be tweaked, like toggling whether the aux sends are pre-eq or post-eq, as well as pre-main-fader or post-main-fader. Those little banks of 2 x 4 buttons at the bottom of the sends knobs bank usually control those settings. Each band member will get their own monitor send with the appropriate mix of instruments for each. It's also possible for other types of things to be mixed in, for example a click track, or a producer or director's microphone to give instructions or information to the performers.
I would expect that most of the settings would stay static over the course of a show. The engineer might do some muting/unmuting during instrument changes, or if some performers are using in-ear monitors, and there may be some scripted adjustments if some songs are wildly different in terms of instrumentation or volume. It's also good just to have someone available to correct things quickly if there's a problem. The monitor mix console is generally pretty close to the stage, so they could, for example, hear if there was some feedback occurring and quickly drop or mute a channel to kill it.
Looking at the picture, I expect the guy closest to the camera on the analogue console is actually mixing FOH and the guy on the digital mixer in the background (clearly wearing in-ear monitors) is mixing monitors.
You can't really mix monitors on a big analogue desk very easily, they're not set up for the number of output channels (sends) you need. Usually every main performer of a band has their own separate stereo mix.
During the show, for FOH it's usually just riding faders (adjusting volume of each channel) and making little effect/EQ changes if something sounds off, most of that stuff should be pretty well set up beforehand.
Not really. Each of those strips has basic eq (low/mid/high) and effects (reverb etc). Routing is handled by the pushbuttons right above/below the level slider. Here is a vid of the basic process as applied to MJ's Beat It.
Not really. On a large console like that there are generally lots of submixes and aux sends (like at least 8 each), and a significant number of the knobs at the top of any of the channel strips will be for routing sound to those from the channel. Also, on a live sound board like this you're not going to have the effects actually parametrized on the channel, there's either an external processor (more likely) or a built-in effects unit which has internal sends from the channel. The push-buttons are likely pre/post eq/fader toggles, along with things like mute and solo. The linked video of studio mastering is a very different task than live reinforcement and especially monitor engineering. The boards are pretty different as well.
Finally and most nit-picky, the parametric eq on this board is almost certainly more than 3 bands. Likely something in the 5/7 band range, and with assignable mids.
Edit: note how a large number of the pairs of pots in the middle of the channel strip have the same color as the faders in the center of the board; those will be (stereo) submix assignment and overall level, respectively.
My mates were playing DJ in a bar one time. I fiddled with some of the knobs and buttons. Could barely make out the difference.I imagine randomly doing that with a nuclear reactor might be somewhat different.
"Now I’m a computer programmer and I feel like some of the projects I have worked on could make a nuclear reactor feel simple by comparison."
So you are faced with a certain amount of complexity. Do you really have any idea just how complicated a nuclear reactor (and associated engineering is)? Let's start off with a simple problem: You need a shit load of concrete in structures like this. At what sort of volumes does concrete curing become dangerous? It's exothermic and there is a danger of fire (yes fire) in a concrete structure that is poured too quickly. This is one small worry in the Civil Engineering bit. Geotechnics - ground stability across a large structure is a whopping set of problems. The sheer size of the thing will move the topsoil, subsoil, strata around. The distribution of water will change too. Now you have the Structural Engineers diving in. Some of the structures involved are huge and involve multiple materials. Nuclear plants are often near the sea for the water cooling benefits but you also get additional corrosion to think about, including concrete cancer and what salts do to steel and other metals. Also you generally get extra weather to worry about.
I have not even scratched the surface of the complexities involved in designing, building and operating a nuclear power plant. Those two engineering disciplines I mentioned alone are at least three years at Uni for a degree and a good 5-10 years time served before you do anything close to critical.
Building and running are two different levels - a very complex setup to build can be very simple to actually use.
Likely a large amount of complexity in these control setups is the lack of efficient screens for displaying data - compare a modern airliner to a 1960s.
freetime2 is a self described programmer and not an end user. I was responding to a "builder".
I felt they were comparing themselves to a huge multi disciplined stack of actually Chartered Engineers, let alone all the rest of the technicians and staff of a nuclear power station. I thought a little change of perspective was in order.
Just another small example of the complexity involved, without even involving the nuclear bit - the equations involved when worrying about the forces on a simply supported beam are up to fourth order differential equations. OK there are tables of standard stuff but when the structure gets complicated then it gets ... complicated.
The electrical requirements are staggering and so are the hydraulics. The logistics. Simply feeding the staff on site at all points of a plant's life is a hard problem with multiple sub problems.
My intent was to compare the number of number of variables and processes that I need to understand to do my job with that of an operator in a nuclear power plant. And I was thinking more about how something can appear so bewildering at first, but though years of study it can become second nature. Human capacity to understand complex problems is amazing… but sometimes that complexity still gets the better of us.
I’m perfectly happy to concede that I don’t know anything about operating a nuclear power plant and that my comparison may just be the Dunning Kruger effect speaking.
But if you want to go into all the various engineering disciplines that go into building a nuclear power plant, I think it’s only fair to go into all the disciplines that allow my applications to run. Microprocessors, the Internet, etc. The apps that we interact with daily for communication, shopping, etc. are miracles of collective human engineering every bit on par with nuclear energy.
That's an interesting point, but it's worth noting that coding benefits from being vastly easier to package and share.
The architects of a plant would have to interact a lot more with a concrete specialist than you have to with the TCP spec to spin up an Http server. Because our industry demands a packaged product, we are quite good at it.
I do however believe you are wrong. Biased from the perspective of a SE, I'd think a whilst a simple banking app involves more agreed protocols and touch points, it is less complicated than a nuclear reactor.
I wonder, between the two, how many specs and manuals would you have to read to design either.
I’ll avoid saying more about the complexity of nuclear power specifically vs. web apps because, as I said above, I hardly know anything about nuclear power.
One thing that I will say is that I think our team’s “velocity” is governed primarily by our ability to process complexity. Basically we are operating at the maximum rate that we are able to take in new information and incorporate it into our product. Sometimes we even go beyond that maximum rate and bad things happen.
Definitely we make it harder on ourselves than necessary. We’ve switched hosting providers 5 times in the history of our app - each time with a non-trivial amount of effort involved. There’s a non-trivial amount of effort involved in making sure that all of our package dependencies, many of which were hastily chosen, are up to date and free of security vulnerabilities. Things like the TCP spec may not get a lot of thought when launching a new webapp, but when you’re dealing with some obscure bug it certainly can be something that requires consideration. We don’t even really read specs - we read stack overflow - because we have an endless backlog of feature requests and the focus is on delivering things ASAP. Maybe we suck at engineering and the complexity is self-imposed, but it’s complexity none-the-less and I’ve worked at enough companies to know we’re not alone here.
And my assumption is that progress in a lot of creative endeavors is likewise limited by humans’ capacity to process complexity.
I like how these old control panels often lay out the switches and gauges on a schematic representation of the physical system. Makes it easier to visualize the electrical or fluid flows that are being controlled and monitored, and helps the operators think about which valves or switches need to be opened or closed to change the state of the system.
For a counterpoint, check out this collection of guages and dials and ails from texture.com. My favorite texture and visual reference site. Some of them are wonderfully decayed.
These seem to be a hardware version of what we now have in user interfaces on a screen.
Does anyone know of the likelihood of faults with hardware compared to software bugs?
Many years ago I watched a documentary where it was said that pale mint green was often chosen for control panels because it was deemed it had a calming effect on the operators.
Design aesthetics change for different reason. The chemical plant I work at, we had a colorful control system but are switching to a duller color one that looks gray scale and colors are reserved for alarms. The theory behind it, color on a grey scale screen will capture attention, but if everything has color, the uniqueness of flashing red for alarms is drowned out and doesn't draw the attention as well. It stands out better.
There was a lot of UX research that went into colour selection, including for airplanes. It's unfortunately hard to track the papers, but usually things like base colours went into norms and requirements so even if people didn't know why, they followed the results of the research.
In a related note, the Soviet Union had commercials on domestic TV to induce demand, just like everywhere else, but due to the different business-incentives in the Soviet system the end result are downright weird:
Some pictures have computer screens on them, one even has relatively modern tft monitors, which looks weird combined with the 50s atomic tech. It would not surprise me if these control rooms have never been updated and are still looking like this.
There was purported present-day footage on tiktok of the control room of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine that has just been captured by Russian forces. It looks like this.
All components eventually fail.
To maintain a system operational, one needs to be able to fix or replace failed components.
Replacing a high-tech component made 50+ years ago (like a vacuum tube) can be prohibitively expensive even for military.
At some point, it becomes cost efficient to replace the complete system, or at least large components, with modern equivalents.
The thing is you might be hard pushed to find some uniquely Nazi design people would consider worth fawning over, I think they were very backwards-looking and I imagine they weren't particularly interested in developing some bold new design or architectural style. Only thing I can think of is their famous Hugo Boss uniforms, but that's inextricably linked to their military and the genocide they committed so thankfully I don't think the public at large are very interested in fawning over that even if neo-Nazis get a kick out of it.
I guess if we include the symbols, in Europe the swastika is gonna be taboo for my lifetime at least given that it is effectively THE symbol of genocidal hatred. Hammer and sickle is a little more complex - it is connected to a broader international workers movement so I think it’s less tainted in many places.
It doesn't help that Nazism was almost single-mindedly focussed on white supremacy and domination, it was their entire thing during their existence. The Soviet Union had its own atrocities and repression, but these weren't the single guiding principle behind the project overall. That's no comfort for the victims of the USSR (I don't think the Hammer & Sickle will be popular in Czech Republic, for example) but there it is.
It also depends what you mean by "kitsch" - if we broaden it a bit to include interest in engineering like guns, tanks and planes then this is not taboo (see Ian McCollum aka "Forgotten Weapons" on YouTube who has covered a few Nazi weapons over the years).
"History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes" – Mark Twain.
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Maybe it’s actually a good idea for intelligent people to be curious about Russian ideas, design and history. Especially now. Seems like a treating the curiosity as “bad taste” could lead to unhealthy deliberate ignorance.
I think it’s a fair question. Russia has put much of the world on edge right now, and has turned life into a waking nightmare for millions of Ukrainians. I could see how this romanticization of Soviet tech could be upsetting to some people.
On the other hand, I think it’s healthy to take a step back and remember that even in dark times and people that you may hate, there are positive qualities. And even things like this that can be strangely beautiful.
I dunno, I come from an era where at the moment we were destroying Afghanistan, or Iraq, the BBC would be publishing articles about the various missiles we were using, marvelling at their technological sophistication. In one article it was said that "we mustn't forget that, above all, this is a JDAM war." Which is strange, cos I felt that, above all, it was a criminal and savage war of aggression with a tremendous human cost.
I guess we don't all have the same sort of humanitarian feelings. Or a lot of us can quite easily put them aside. Which is fair enough, it is stressful to think about that after all.
In the middle of all that is going on in bad taste right now (eg. Condoleeza Rice doing an overnight 180 and deciding wars of aggression are bad), this seems to hardly even register.
Current events are, arguably, a refutation of soviet ideals (for all that they were often broken) and even practice - Putin explicitly talks in points related to Tsarist Imperial Russia, and a core argument of his invasion is that Ukrainians aren't a separate nation with separate language, and Ukraine "isn't a real country".
Things that, for all the oppression, were accepted and obvious part of USSR - there was Ukrainian SSR, not Ukraine as region of Greater Russia. Even with effective forcing of Russian language for all technical uses, even Stalin at his worst dealt with USSR as union of many nations, even if some artificially created from displaced people (in order to create single-nation autonomous regions).
Could you please elaborate more on what was good about Soviet Union? Especially from local citizen’s perspective without having dollars in the pocked. Space program made them proud once in a while, but half empty shelves in grocery store were way more common.
Roscosmos, the space program that's still flying the exact same equipment that it did in the 60s and has made no efforts to improve since then? Yes, that one. Buran+Energia was a generational leap forward, and it all fell apart when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Considering that I described territorial conquest as "bad", I think we can safely say I did not mean Afghanistan.
I agree. I don’t want to overstate it. But I guess im also squeamish about people into Ww2 merch too(it’s a thing in the uk… people dress up in 40s dresses and pretend the war is on). It seems a weird period to be rosy tinted about.
Fixed buttons are usually a bad UI though. Better to use modern screens that show context, so you know which buttons are relevant at every moment in time.
Tactile is not really relevant in most control rooms, where you want people to look at what they are doing anyway.
Also, screen-based interfaces have more advantages, such as the ability to show documentation that is 1 hover/click away. And showing warnings with precise information, right where you are looking (rather than have a red light somewhere turning on, and you have to find it).
I think it's reasonable to at least partially overlap criticism; regardless of whether it's implemented in a touch screen, dynamically moving information, and doubly so controls, means that the user has to figure out where things are every time they use the interface. That's fine in some cases, but it's definitely a downside.
In this case the operator needs access to all of the controls all the time. I'm imagining a harried technician trying to keep #3 from melting down and being confounded by a touch screen that just says "Split atoms? Y/N".
Use light-up buttons, and boom, problem solved. I think instead of "showing context" you actually mean the (infuriating) idea that buttons should be hidden sometimes.
The physical control panels were arranged to keep contextually related controls together, then trained so you knew by heart how to move around the control room.
That's pretty standard for the era, including the mimic board of the core.[1]
If you like control board designs, probably the most elegant control boards ever built were the ones for the Panama Canal locks.[2] All that chrome and brass! Those towers are water level indicators. The long polished stone slabs represent the two lock lanes. The black diagonals across them represent the lock gates, and those follow the movements of the real gates. The "faucet handles" control the gate valves. The chromed things that look like jukebox stations show the positions of the gate valves.
Everything is mechanically interlocked. Water levels have to match before a gate can be opened. There's an elaborate system of constraints, using mechanical railroad interlocking technology.
That control system was in active use for almost a century. It was only replaced a few years ago, as part of a modernization that included replacing the valve and gate drive systems.
[1] https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/a...
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/jundai/6525675045
Is that a dosimeter on that guy in the scrubs? He looks like a doc with an oldschool hospital pager.
From [2]
> For some reason, though, the plant’s owner, Northern States Power, never got around to informing the residents of the neighboring Prairie Island Indian Community that something had gone wrong.
Oof. Thank god it turned out ok in the end.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/03/archives/reactor-spews-ra...
Yeah, max dose at site boundary was 0.1 millirem. Sounds like it was a relatively minor release.
Or the weather was just right to spread it out across a wide enough area. Maybe with still air it might have been more concentrated.
Any idea what the color round array of lights is at the center of [1]?
I'm pretty sure that's the mimic board. It's supposed to show the status of each control rod in the reactor.
Thanks for that I've always been curious myself. I love the design of these.
Would be interesting to compare failure rates or problems before and after. Active use for almost a century is pretty good going.
To be fair, US reactors control rooms of that Era don't look too much different. https://mn70s.tumblr.com/post/32703269620/prairie-island-nuc...
When I was a kid, my parents took me on a tour of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. The thing that impressed me the most was the control room. I just couldn’t fathom how anybody could know what all the different buttons and dials did.
Growing up and watching Homer in his role of safety inspector on the Simpsons only further reinforced that feeling.
Now I’m a computer programmer and I feel like some of the projects I have worked on could make a nuclear reactor feel simple by comparison. I also have had many an occasion where I have felt like Homer Simpson.
Don Norman once had a picture, in an early edition of The Design of Everyday Things, that showed an innovative tactic that reactor engineers used to differentiate control handles: https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg
Reminds me of the classic April 1979 Saturday Night Live "Pepsi Syndrome" aka "The Amazing Colossal President" skit, where Jimmy Carter gets irradiated, and Rodney Dangerfield tells how big he is.
In my opinion, it's one of the funniest, most memorable old school SNL episodes of all time, including Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Richard Benjamin, Tom Davis, Al Franken, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radner.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=533858710873763
I'm sorry for the Facebook link, but for whatever reason it's impossible to find on youtube, and not included in the SNL archives. My theory is the Pepsi company got pissed off about it, and threatens anyone who publishes it with legal action.
Script and screen snapshots:
https://tmi.papost.org/the-pepsi-syndrome-saturday-night-liv...
>Dr. Edna Casey: It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [ camera zooms in on Dr. Edna Casey ] The Amazing Colossal President.
>Rosalynn Carter: Well how big is he?
>Dr. Edna Casey: Well Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?
I hope they incorporated that into their jargon as well. “Increasing Heineken flow rate to 50%. Michelob readings are nominal”.
Fighter jet cockpits since ww2 have had the same elements of design, Everything feels different so you know what you're grabbing from color and feel.
Thanks! I have a later edition of this book which doesn't contain this picture. It will come in handy for a presentation I'll be doing next week.
Go to any recording studio, or large concert. I'd bet those mixing boards have more switches and dials than a nuclear reactor.
https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/media/2019/05/060119-insyn...
There's a lot of copy-paste on a mixing board though... only so many unique functions.
Wow that’s an impressive array of buttons and dials. I’ve gotta say though I was listening to a 90’s hits playlist yesterday, which I think was probably the peak production budget era, and the differences in production quality from one recording to the next was stunning. All that expensive equipment in the hands of an expert must be good for something!
The ones that stood out most as being good were some Red Hot Chili Peppers songs produced by Rick Rubin. A lot of other 90’s Alternative recordings were dreadful by comparison.
https://soundgirls.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/20160919_2...
This is a typical setup at an average venue. Note this guy is not running the sound that the audience hears. This is the monitor mixing station. He is mixing the sound that the band hears on stage in thier earpieces. There is a whole other rig in a separate space mixing to the front of house speakers. The total number of audio channels for a typical stage show is staggering.
Dumb question: Shouldn't he be wearing headphones? Otherwise, how would he know what the band hears?
Dumb question 2: I thought each band member typically gets their own mix emphasizing their instruments so they can adjust better?
Dumb question 3: How many of these knobs would actually be touched over the course of a performance? I'm assuming the overall process is something like:
* Phase 1: Initial default calibration for the specific genre/band
* Phase 2: Fine-tuning during practice/sound-check
* Phase 3: Some additional adjustments during the first song to account for...i dunno last minute changes?
* Phase 4: Changes during every song?? This is the part that I'm curious about.
I only have a little bit of experience doing monitor mix for some small college shows, but:
Headphones probably aren't necessary, as you're usually just making small adjustments at the request of the talent. For a large show, I would imagine everything would be thoroughly pre-planned and tested.
The knobs in the center horizontal stripe of the mixing console are generally "aux sends". Each vertical column is an input channel, and each horizontal row is an aux bus. The knob adjusts how much of each channel gets sent to each aux bus. There are other things that can be tweaked, like toggling whether the aux sends are pre-eq or post-eq, as well as pre-main-fader or post-main-fader. Those little banks of 2 x 4 buttons at the bottom of the sends knobs bank usually control those settings. Each band member will get their own monitor send with the appropriate mix of instruments for each. It's also possible for other types of things to be mixed in, for example a click track, or a producer or director's microphone to give instructions or information to the performers.
I would expect that most of the settings would stay static over the course of a show. The engineer might do some muting/unmuting during instrument changes, or if some performers are using in-ear monitors, and there may be some scripted adjustments if some songs are wildly different in terms of instrumentation or volume. It's also good just to have someone available to correct things quickly if there's a problem. The monitor mix console is generally pretty close to the stage, so they could, for example, hear if there was some feedback occurring and quickly drop or mute a channel to kill it.
Looking at the picture, I expect the guy closest to the camera on the analogue console is actually mixing FOH and the guy on the digital mixer in the background (clearly wearing in-ear monitors) is mixing monitors.
You can't really mix monitors on a big analogue desk very easily, they're not set up for the number of output channels (sends) you need. Usually every main performer of a band has their own separate stereo mix.
During the show, for FOH it's usually just riding faders (adjusting volume of each channel) and making little effect/EQ changes if something sounds off, most of that stuff should be pretty well set up beforehand.
What you see in that picture is mostly routing. Effects, eq are handled on separate devices, for each channel/group of channels.
Not really. Each of those strips has basic eq (low/mid/high) and effects (reverb etc). Routing is handled by the pushbuttons right above/below the level slider. Here is a vid of the basic process as applied to MJ's Beat It.
https://youtu.be/fGSTEBwxSbo
Not really. On a large console like that there are generally lots of submixes and aux sends (like at least 8 each), and a significant number of the knobs at the top of any of the channel strips will be for routing sound to those from the channel. Also, on a live sound board like this you're not going to have the effects actually parametrized on the channel, there's either an external processor (more likely) or a built-in effects unit which has internal sends from the channel. The push-buttons are likely pre/post eq/fader toggles, along with things like mute and solo. The linked video of studio mastering is a very different task than live reinforcement and especially monitor engineering. The boards are pretty different as well.
Finally and most nit-picky, the parametric eq on this board is almost certainly more than 3 bands. Likely something in the 5/7 band range, and with assignable mids.
Edit: note how a large number of the pairs of pots in the middle of the channel strip have the same color as the faders in the center of the board; those will be (stereo) submix assignment and overall level, respectively.
My mates were playing DJ in a bar one time. I fiddled with some of the knobs and buttons. Could barely make out the difference.I imagine randomly doing that with a nuclear reactor might be somewhat different.
A DJ only has a handful of channels, with only a couple feeding the speakers at any one moment. You likely moved knobs that were not live at the time.
"Now I’m a computer programmer and I feel like some of the projects I have worked on could make a nuclear reactor feel simple by comparison."
So you are faced with a certain amount of complexity. Do you really have any idea just how complicated a nuclear reactor (and associated engineering is)? Let's start off with a simple problem: You need a shit load of concrete in structures like this. At what sort of volumes does concrete curing become dangerous? It's exothermic and there is a danger of fire (yes fire) in a concrete structure that is poured too quickly. This is one small worry in the Civil Engineering bit. Geotechnics - ground stability across a large structure is a whopping set of problems. The sheer size of the thing will move the topsoil, subsoil, strata around. The distribution of water will change too. Now you have the Structural Engineers diving in. Some of the structures involved are huge and involve multiple materials. Nuclear plants are often near the sea for the water cooling benefits but you also get additional corrosion to think about, including concrete cancer and what salts do to steel and other metals. Also you generally get extra weather to worry about.
I have not even scratched the surface of the complexities involved in designing, building and operating a nuclear power plant. Those two engineering disciplines I mentioned alone are at least three years at Uni for a degree and a good 5-10 years time served before you do anything close to critical.
Building and running are two different levels - a very complex setup to build can be very simple to actually use.
Likely a large amount of complexity in these control setups is the lack of efficient screens for displaying data - compare a modern airliner to a 1960s.
freetime2 is a self described programmer and not an end user. I was responding to a "builder".
I felt they were comparing themselves to a huge multi disciplined stack of actually Chartered Engineers, let alone all the rest of the technicians and staff of a nuclear power station. I thought a little change of perspective was in order.
Just another small example of the complexity involved, without even involving the nuclear bit - the equations involved when worrying about the forces on a simply supported beam are up to fourth order differential equations. OK there are tables of standard stuff but when the structure gets complicated then it gets ... complicated.
The electrical requirements are staggering and so are the hydraulics. The logistics. Simply feeding the staff on site at all points of a plant's life is a hard problem with multiple sub problems.
My intent was to compare the number of number of variables and processes that I need to understand to do my job with that of an operator in a nuclear power plant. And I was thinking more about how something can appear so bewildering at first, but though years of study it can become second nature. Human capacity to understand complex problems is amazing… but sometimes that complexity still gets the better of us.
I’m perfectly happy to concede that I don’t know anything about operating a nuclear power plant and that my comparison may just be the Dunning Kruger effect speaking.
But if you want to go into all the various engineering disciplines that go into building a nuclear power plant, I think it’s only fair to go into all the disciplines that allow my applications to run. Microprocessors, the Internet, etc. The apps that we interact with daily for communication, shopping, etc. are miracles of collective human engineering every bit on par with nuclear energy.
That's an interesting point, but it's worth noting that coding benefits from being vastly easier to package and share.
The architects of a plant would have to interact a lot more with a concrete specialist than you have to with the TCP spec to spin up an Http server. Because our industry demands a packaged product, we are quite good at it.
I do however believe you are wrong. Biased from the perspective of a SE, I'd think a whilst a simple banking app involves more agreed protocols and touch points, it is less complicated than a nuclear reactor.
I wonder, between the two, how many specs and manuals would you have to read to design either.
I’ll avoid saying more about the complexity of nuclear power specifically vs. web apps because, as I said above, I hardly know anything about nuclear power.
One thing that I will say is that I think our team’s “velocity” is governed primarily by our ability to process complexity. Basically we are operating at the maximum rate that we are able to take in new information and incorporate it into our product. Sometimes we even go beyond that maximum rate and bad things happen.
Definitely we make it harder on ourselves than necessary. We’ve switched hosting providers 5 times in the history of our app - each time with a non-trivial amount of effort involved. There’s a non-trivial amount of effort involved in making sure that all of our package dependencies, many of which were hastily chosen, are up to date and free of security vulnerabilities. Things like the TCP spec may not get a lot of thought when launching a new webapp, but when you’re dealing with some obscure bug it certainly can be something that requires consideration. We don’t even really read specs - we read stack overflow - because we have an endless backlog of feature requests and the focus is on delivering things ASAP. Maybe we suck at engineering and the complexity is self-imposed, but it’s complexity none-the-less and I’ve worked at enough companies to know we’re not alone here.
And my assumption is that progress in a lot of creative endeavors is likewise limited by humans’ capacity to process complexity.
Blogspam, here's the original url http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2
With and ad blocker, the new url is better formatted but man, the number of ads if you disable the ad blocker...
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Thanks, their site isn’t otherwise working.
I like how these old control panels often lay out the switches and gauges on a schematic representation of the physical system. Makes it easier to visualize the electrical or fluid flows that are being controlled and monitored, and helps the operators think about which valves or switches need to be opened or closed to change the state of the system.
Control rooms/interfaces still do this, even if the schematics are now digitally represented on a screen. I've seen these at chemical plants
For a counterpoint, check out this collection of guages and dials and ails from texture.com. My favorite texture and visual reference site. Some of them are wonderfully decayed.
https://www.textures.com/browse/gauges/1731
past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 '20, 268
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15369999 '17, 67
These seem to be a hardware version of what we now have in user interfaces on a screen. Does anyone know of the likelihood of faults with hardware compared to software bugs?
Does anybody know why the color scheme of the Soviet era was so "pale"?
Many years ago I watched a documentary where it was said that pale mint green was often chosen for control panels because it was deemed it had a calming effect on the operators.
Everyone knows you gotta keep your peepers minty fresh
Design aesthetics change for different reason. The chemical plant I work at, we had a colorful control system but are switching to a duller color one that looks gray scale and colors are reserved for alarms. The theory behind it, color on a grey scale screen will capture attention, but if everything has color, the uniqueness of flashing red for alarms is drowned out and doesn't draw the attention as well. It stands out better.
There was a lot of UX research that went into colour selection, including for airplanes. It's unfortunately hard to track the papers, but usually things like base colours went into norms and requirements so even if people didn't know why, they followed the results of the research.
Because nobody had to sell anything to their superiors.
In a related note, the Soviet Union had commercials on domestic TV to induce demand, just like everywhere else, but due to the different business-incentives in the Soviet system the end result are downright weird:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LAVk1sHW8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzlzx8D4hYw
It's the uncanny-valley of media.
I am pretty sure the chicken one is meant to induce nightmares
There was no big choice of paint available to get. Soviets had other important spending like military back then. Who needs paint!?
How likely is that none of those has been modernized?
Some pictures have computer screens on them, one even has relatively modern tft monitors, which looks weird combined with the 50s atomic tech. It would not surprise me if these control rooms have never been updated and are still looking like this.
You mean replaced with some WP based site for the fist hacker to play with?
There was purported present-day footage on tiktok of the control room of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine that has just been captured by Russian forces. It looks like this.
They likely have computers in there now, but why mess with what works?
All components eventually fail. To maintain a system operational, one needs to be able to fix or replace failed components. Replacing a high-tech component made 50+ years ago (like a vacuum tube) can be prohibitively expensive even for military.
At some point, it becomes cost efficient to replace the complete system, or at least large components, with modern equivalents.
So that some manager can claim an "improvement" and get promoted
If Nazi kitsch is taboo, shouldn’t fawning over Soviet design be as well?
The thing is you might be hard pushed to find some uniquely Nazi design people would consider worth fawning over, I think they were very backwards-looking and I imagine they weren't particularly interested in developing some bold new design or architectural style. Only thing I can think of is their famous Hugo Boss uniforms, but that's inextricably linked to their military and the genocide they committed so thankfully I don't think the public at large are very interested in fawning over that even if neo-Nazis get a kick out of it.
I guess if we include the symbols, in Europe the swastika is gonna be taboo for my lifetime at least given that it is effectively THE symbol of genocidal hatred. Hammer and sickle is a little more complex - it is connected to a broader international workers movement so I think it’s less tainted in many places.
It doesn't help that Nazism was almost single-mindedly focussed on white supremacy and domination, it was their entire thing during their existence. The Soviet Union had its own atrocities and repression, but these weren't the single guiding principle behind the project overall. That's no comfort for the victims of the USSR (I don't think the Hammer & Sickle will be popular in Czech Republic, for example) but there it is.
It also depends what you mean by "kitsch" - if we broaden it a bit to include interest in engineering like guns, tanks and planes then this is not taboo (see Ian McCollum aka "Forgotten Weapons" on YouTube who has covered a few Nazi weapons over the years).
Communism was not built, as an ideology, on the hatred and total destruction of an ethnic group. Stop with the false analogies please.
The ukrainians would vehemently disagree.
You’re seem to me suggesting two things that are both quite wrong:
- you’re implying that communism === Soviet Union
- you are implying that the ideology behind communism was centred on the destruction of an ethnic group (the Ukrainians)
Is Nazi kitsch taboo? I've seen a few documentaries about it on public television throughout the years.
Let me know when you see a Nazi item on Antiques Roadshow, and its banned on EBay.
People love that sort of aesthetic sentimentality. Techno Kitsch and former glory.
"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains." Vladimir Putin
A reason he may have opted for the previous model.
---
https://culturemachine.net/vol-16-drone-cultures/the-control...
Have to study Carl Schmitt again about that unholy communion of sentimentality and inhumanness in the idea of the Reich. Putin is fond of it.
https://www.illiberalism.org/interview-with-david-lewis/
> People love that sort of aesthetic sentimentality. Techno Kitsch.
If I'm fully honest with myself, this is the main reason I'm spending way too much money on modular synthesizers
Oh, that's fine.
"History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes" – Mark Twain.
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
It maybe the other way round this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMoCM_FgLP8
Is it just me or is romanticising soviet era tech in weird if not actually bad taste just now?
Maybe it’s actually a good idea for intelligent people to be curious about Russian ideas, design and history. Especially now. Seems like a treating the curiosity as “bad taste” could lead to unhealthy deliberate ignorance.
I think it’s a fair question. Russia has put much of the world on edge right now, and has turned life into a waking nightmare for millions of Ukrainians. I could see how this romanticization of Soviet tech could be upsetting to some people.
On the other hand, I think it’s healthy to take a step back and remember that even in dark times and people that you may hate, there are positive qualities. And even things like this that can be strangely beautiful.
I dunno, I come from an era where at the moment we were destroying Afghanistan, or Iraq, the BBC would be publishing articles about the various missiles we were using, marvelling at their technological sophistication. In one article it was said that "we mustn't forget that, above all, this is a JDAM war." Which is strange, cos I felt that, above all, it was a criminal and savage war of aggression with a tremendous human cost.
I guess we don't all have the same sort of humanitarian feelings. Or a lot of us can quite easily put them aside. Which is fair enough, it is stressful to think about that after all.
In the middle of all that is going on in bad taste right now (eg. Condoleeza Rice doing an overnight 180 and deciding wars of aggression are bad), this seems to hardly even register.
Current events are, arguably, a refutation of soviet ideals (for all that they were often broken) and even practice - Putin explicitly talks in points related to Tsarist Imperial Russia, and a core argument of his invasion is that Ukrainians aren't a separate nation with separate language, and Ukraine "isn't a real country".
Things that, for all the oppression, were accepted and obvious part of USSR - there was Ukrainian SSR, not Ukraine as region of Greater Russia. Even with effective forcing of Russian language for all technical uses, even Stalin at his worst dealt with USSR as union of many nations, even if some artificially created from displaced people (in order to create single-nation autonomous regions).
Honestly it's too bad that Putin's obsession with the Soviet era isn't at all focused on the things that were good about the Soviet Union.
Things like this, or its space program. Instead, it's all the bad parts (territorial conquest) with none of the good.
Could you please elaborate more on what was good about Soviet Union? Especially from local citizen’s perspective without having dollars in the pocked. Space program made them proud once in a while, but half empty shelves in grocery store were way more common.
Free college for everyone who can pass the entry exam, even in the most prestigious institutions like MSU or MIPT.
The program which supplies the ISS and ferries US astronauts, uhh cosmonauts, you mean?
What about it? Or did you mean Afghanistan?
Roscosmos, the space program that's still flying the exact same equipment that it did in the 60s and has made no efforts to improve since then? Yes, that one. Buran+Energia was a generational leap forward, and it all fell apart when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Considering that I described territorial conquest as "bad", I think we can safely say I did not mean Afghanistan.
To be honest, Putin isn't much obsessed about Soviet era...
I'm guessing this was posted because of the video of the Ukrainians asking the Russians to stop shelling the plant... ;(
It looked exactly like this.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's not the control rooms' fault that Putin is a warmonger.
I agree. I don’t want to overstate it. But I guess im also squeamish about people into Ww2 merch too(it’s a thing in the uk… people dress up in 40s dresses and pretend the war is on). It seems a weird period to be rosy tinted about.
Hmm, I just saw “Red Dawn” last night, so this just balances things out.
Flagged: the site isn't responding to HTTP requests.
and someone already posted an archive link. please don't flag sites just because they are temporarily down (possibly because of HN traffic)
Well, at least those while not result in ad money flowing to Russia, where the domain is registered from.
Fixed buttons are usually a bad UI though. Better to use modern screens that show context, so you know which buttons are relevant at every moment in time.
I disagree. That is precisely how vehicle touch screens became a nightmare.
I didn't say they should be touch-screens.
Tactile is not really relevant in most control rooms, where you want people to look at what they are doing anyway.
Also, screen-based interfaces have more advantages, such as the ability to show documentation that is 1 hover/click away. And showing warnings with precise information, right where you are looking (rather than have a red light somewhere turning on, and you have to find it).
I think it's reasonable to at least partially overlap criticism; regardless of whether it's implemented in a touch screen, dynamically moving information, and doubly so controls, means that the user has to figure out where things are every time they use the interface. That's fine in some cases, but it's definitely a downside.
I get then point about context-sensitive help and alarms. But what about the loss of muscle memory?
And the Macbook Touch bar...
In this case the operator needs access to all of the controls all the time. I'm imagining a harried technician trying to keep #3 from melting down and being confounded by a touch screen that just says "Split atoms? Y/N".
“Reactors #1 and #2 are displayed on the Main Control View. To access #3 and #4, click on the hamburger menu at the upper left.”
Use light-up buttons, and boom, problem solved. I think instead of "showing context" you actually mean the (infuriating) idea that buttons should be hidden sometimes.
Not as reliable as physical buttons and you lose some tactile feedback.
They could even put ads on it to offset the cost of the reactor fuel!
The physical control panels were arranged to keep contextually related controls together, then trained so you knew by heart how to move around the control room.