Ladder Diagram?

     It's incredibly geeky, and (at least in part) out of date: what's a "ladder diagram" or a "control ladder," anyway?

     To make matters worse, in the ones I know best, they laid the "ladder" on its side.

     But it's not intentionally arcane: in the days when all the control and logic in electronic devices was done with relays, a convention arose of drawing the schematic diagram of it with the power supply (AC or DC, one side grounded or not) as a pair of lines at the right and left, with all the "stuff" in between: switches, relay coils, relay contacts, lights and buzzers, electrical motors or controlled equipment, looking something like strange rungs of a ladder, with the power supply lines as the rails.*  The order of operations generally ran from top to bottom, and left to right for each "rung."

     It makes for simple, clear diagrams, or as simple and clear as they get for that sort of thing, and over time, it evolved its own specialized set of symbols, which came to be used interchangeably with the more usual set in some applications.†  RCA tended to rotate the diagrams, so the rails were at the top and bottom of a long blueprint and the order of the "rungs" ran from left to right -- this is a better fit to a long drawing table.  By the 1970s, it was starting to run up against advances in technology: the fifteen foot drawing I mentioned yesterday had a gap in it, with dotted lines leading to a box marked "Solid State Logic."  A card cage tucked behind a meter panel held eight or ten plug-in cards, loaded with early optical isolators, solid-state relays, and logic gates built with discrete resistors, diodes and transistors‡ (2N4401 and 2N4402, if memory serves, an NPN/PNP pair) -- and those circuits were not at all friendly to ladder-type diagrams.  They had their own set of drawings.  It was the beginning of the end -- and the start of twisty, hard-to-follow multi-page schematics that were drawn as a guide to manufacturing and passed along to the techs who had to service the equipment with little thought given to clarity. 

     You'll still find ladder logic in industrial controls, and ladder-type diagrams are used as a kind of programming language to set up the workflow for programmable logic controllers; but in my line of work, it's a lost art, as dusty as Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.    
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* One of several convergent uses of the term "rail" in connection with power supply.  The primary source of this is probably the live third rail of an electric train -- but any power bus in electrical or electronic applications can be casually referred to as a "rail," and the people who work with it will know the meaning.
 
† This, in turn, eventually resulted in a change to the general set of electronic symbols: prior to WW II, capacitors were represented by a pair of parallel lines with connections coming off the sides, -||-.  Ladder logic used a similar symbol for normally-open relay contacts: -| |-.   Context was usually sufficient to tell them apart -- until wartime needs meant a huge number of workers and techs had to learn in a hurry!  After the war, capacitors were given a curved line for one side: -|(-.  Since many of them are round in one dimension or another, it made sense.  And just to make things interesting, there's an entirely different set of symbols for relay contacts in general electronics, which have been used all along.
 
‡ Troubleshooting in the solid state logic was difficult -- a clamp-on card extender would let you move one card at a time to an easier-to-reach position, but it was awkward and didn't always make good electrical contact.  I started adding "state monitor" LEDs to the cards as I worked on them and eventually, opening up the cover and looking at the little red lights would localize problems to one card -- or eliminate them as the cause and point to any of the several dozen relays in the control ladder.

Two Days, And Longer

     I have spent the past two days closely focused on the replacement for a highly configurable widget that doesn't work.  The replacement doesn't work, either, in the very same way.

     It is literally configured by the book and confirmed by factory technicians, looking at photographs and talking me through it.  The manufacturer's installation crew, hired contractors who have worked for them before and who I found clueful, did the initial setup and testing, and pronounced themselves stumped.  But they were confident the factory techs would sort it out. 

     This has not happened.

     One complication: I admit that I have been lazy.  This particular company -- we've bought major items from them for years -- has some of the worst habits I have ever encountered when it comes to drawing schematic diagrams.  They rarely manage to get all of one function on one page, and their continued-on-page-n jumps are hard to follow and often fragmentary; most of something happens on one page, the circuit goes to another page and wends through a series of connectors and jumpers, splits, does minor things on two other pages, and dead-ends.  You backtrack and find a tiny note that directs you elsewhere, and so on.  And on and on. 

     RCA was plagued by this, back when RCA was a big company that made every single item in the path from, say, the camera and microphone on a TV reporter in the studio to the TV set in your living room, and they (eventually!) came up with two answers: absolutely enormous blueprints for complex subsystems (one showing the "control ladder" for a 1970s TV transmitter was a yard high and over fifteen feet long!) and summaries or "one-line diagrams" that identified and followed critical functions.  Between the two, you could get from Point A to Point Z and have a good understanding of every intermediate step.  But the giant drawings relied on long-gone technology (not to mention workspace with a lot of open floor area!) and the one-lines took the careful attention of engineers who knew the whole system, inside and out.  Degreed-engineer time is too expensive for that these days, and by the time the product is in the hands of low-level people like me, they're six projects further on, and probably working for a different company.

     All of my older drawing-package books for this company's products have a Bobbi-added extensive array of color-coded tabs with drawing numbers and titles, careful highlighting and plenty of on-page notations (they're inconsistent about telling you where to look for continuations).  I haven't done that with these yet, and I need to.  I'm going to have to grit my teeth and trace this thing out fully, and try to understand why one of the most common configurations of this gadget is not working for us.  It's probably something simple, some detail that may be known to a few field techs by word-of-mouth but hasn't been written down.

     It's happened before.  The cause of an ugly and expensive fire at my work almost exactly thirty years ago came down to not relocating three large components that run very hot from an enclosed cabinet to an open-air mounting.  I'd seen it done at a different installation of a similar device, and no one there ever said why; they might not have known.*  The factory field-installation techs started doing it after the product had been on the market a few years, but they apparently never told the factory engineers.  No factory change notice was ever issued, no memo or bulletin, and the factory support engineers don't appear to have known it was being done.  But it was -- only it wasn't done in ours, and one Fall evening, at least one of them caught fire and cost my employer a small fortune.  Or small for them; I could have retired on what it cost, and lived in luxury.  The equipment was over twenty years old at the time.

     I don't think this is quite as bad an oversight but there's a piece missing from this puzzle, and someone knows what it is.  But so far, I don't know, and neither does the factory tech trying to help me troubleshoot it from hundreds of miles away. 
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* Sola constant-voltage transformers, for readers who know what those things are.  They run hot and often loud; this gadget had three of them, each slightly smaller than a footlocker.  The place where I saw them mounted on a wall even had fans blowing air across them.

Too Far Out

      As nearly as I can figure, the President of the United States is waging low-grade war on some parts of the United States.

     I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.  I'm pretty sure "Nacht und Nebel" was never U.S. domestic policy.  Or at least it didn't used to be.

     But I'm so old-fashioned and out of touch that I didn't think Presidents could suspend freedom of speech, so what do I know?

     I'm working on a short story.  Fiction.  The fascts, er, facts are too darned hard to look at for very long at a time.

Utter Nutjobbery

     In a piece of propaganda better suited to Joe McCarthy's Red Scare or worse, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is vowing to go after "Leftist terrorists" in a news release almost too unhinged to be believed.  But it's as real as any of Stalin's purges, and you do have to wonder just how far he and men like him are willing to go.

     Here in the real world, almost every one of these political assassins and mass killers are lone wolves,* most of them espousing incoherent notions that barely fit any category of political ideology.  In recent years, a preponderance have leaned more Right than Left, but in either direction, their notions are a far cry from any Republican or Democrat platform.  Their ideas are generally, well, unhinged.  And if AG Paxton was merely one nut chasing after a whole sackful of them, I'd ignore his release as unworthy of adult attention; but he's got the entire might and credence of the state of Texas behind him, and woe betide any loudmouthed fools who come to his attention.

     This is going to come to blood, by and by, and I think the forces of Trumpism, of American authoritarianism, are longing for it.  It does not take two willing participants for that particular tango and so here we are, with the Sword of Damocles one hand of a steadily ticking clock.

     I wish I had not been born into such times.
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* I have written about this before: murderous madmen have an advantage.  Most people who struggle with sanity are harmless; most of the violently-inclined are more dangerous to themselves than anyone else. But the sober, serious men and women who work to protect at-risk individuals and society as a whole are focused on predictable threats, not someone who kills over harsh words, perceived slights or because they got up on the wrong side of the bed.  And while all conspiracies leak, an individual acting alone is difficult to spot before they strike.

Three Kinds Of Chaos In A Trenchcoat

     The thing about Americans -- the people of the United States, at least -- is that we're essentially ungovernable.  Left, Right and Center, "You're not the boss of me!" has many fans in this country.

     Nevertheless, the Founders and Framers managed to cobble together a framework that forms a country, a federation of states under a -- hey! -- Federal government, the states themselves composed of counties, parishes, boroughs, townships, cities, towns: lots of little government, to argue over, protest, vote out, vote in and complain about.  We write letters to the Editor, go on local cable or global podcasts, call in to radio shows and generally raise hell, and for most of us -- for the overwhelming majority -- it's enough.

     We're not good at getting into line en masse behind a leader or a specific party line; the Bill of Rights has long been as close to a shared ideal as we have, and it's a list of things government is supposed to not mess with or is obliged to protect -- and we argue over the meaning and enforcement of even it.

     Two massive World Wars brought us about as close as we've come to unity, and there was plenty of pushback, both personal and in groups.

     That's our national character: taken as a whole, we're a disorganized rabble.  The results of our most recent national elections bear that out: the House and Senate are within a sneeze of being evenly divided; a bad flu season might tip the majority back and forth, depending who's been hanging out together and if they got their shots.  The popular vote for the Presidency was even closer, with a margin of  victory less than 1.5 percent.

     We don't march in step.  We've got a Constitution and a body of law that protects our chaotic nature.  So the Trump administration's present efforts to quell dissent, going after critics of the President and prominent Democrat-supporting people and institutions, is not only unlawful but a huge mistake.  Rolling Stone's got a great article about it, but the article is at least partially paywalled.

     Attempts to beat this country into line with any single set of narrow notions are doomed.  Usually, such efforts fizzle out.  Sometimes they fester, explode into violence, and then fade away.  And once -- just once! -- we had widespread conventional war.

     Mr. Trump, and especially his inner circle, appear to long for war; they've targeted Portland (the one in Oregon) and Chicago (the one in Illinois, if you were wondering) for the deployment of Federalized National Guard troops and the President is toying with involving the Insurrection Act.  Portland, OR is pretty reliably Left-leaning and had a long run of telegenic violence (arguably in reaction) during the first Trump administration; Chicago is the dominant city of Illinois, a state under popular Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, a prominent Administration critic and likely 2028 Presidential candidate.  They're likely places to start trouble, and sending in the National Guard appears to be intended as provocation: neither city is in a particular crisis at this time.

     I'm not seeing any serving generals lining up to wage war on this nation's cities, even after the President's speech to them calling for just that.

     Americans thrive on chaos.  As a group, we don't like to pushed around.  We don't like being told what to do, what to think, what to believe, how to worship or even if we ought to be religious at all.  Tell us it's a crime to burn the flag (it's not) and you've guaranteed the appearance of public flag-burners.  Oh, most people won't approve of it -- but most people will also disapprove of arresting and charging the flag-burners, as well.

     This kind of thing will be the downfall of the incumbent Republicans.  The only question is how long it will take, and how big a mess it will make.  --And the end result won't be Democrat dominance, but a return to our normal level of chaos and disagreement.  We're a fractious lot, but that's how it works here. 

It's Here

     It's here, it's in -- and I had not realized that "Normal" really is a setting on a washing machine, all by itself.  This one has a weird array of settings, including "Delicates," "Casuals," "Quick Wash," "Normal," "Whites," "Colors" and "Spin and Drain." There's another setting for water temperature, which does not include separate wash and rinse temps.  But it's got two different cold settings, plus "Cool."

     The installers and I had about fifty percent of a language in common.  We got by.  I guess I'm supposed to be all up in arms about that, but I'm not.  They did a good job, didn't faff around, and cleaned up what little mess they made.  The lead guy had a very strong accent, but he was patient and willing to slow way down.  They took the old washer out and brought the new one in using a wide two-man lifting strap, rearranging it for the stairs and level walking.  It's effective and gets through narrow spaces -- but you need a couple of men built about like Li'l Abner to make it work.

Uh-Oh, Marco

     There's a chance that a breakfast plate hit the wall in the White House this morning.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio is making the rounds of the Sunday morning political shows* to flog the tentative peace agreement for Gaza.  It's a good thing, though years and lives late in coming, and who knows if it'll actually go through, but it's as close as we've seen so far.

     On ABC's This Week, Secretary Rubio praised President Trump for arranging the agreement -- and then went on to give equal or nearly equal credit to a long list of Muslim-majority countries which have been pressing Hamas, facilitating talks, and providing insight and locations.  He looked a little furtive in the doing; he knows it's not what his boss wants to hear, not with a Nobel almost within scent, but I suppose there's a vestige of spine that prompts him to give credit where it's due.  Look for some kind of ritual humiliation from above to follow.
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* He's scheduled for This Week, Meet the Press and Face the Nation.  Sure hope he ate his Wheaties this morning!

It Stopped Making Noise

      No noise is good news when the washing machine is running, right?  I replaced the last wobbly block under it a couple of weeks ago and it's been a lot happier.

     Until today, when I finished vacuuming and went downstairs to load the dryer...only to discover the washer had filled for the rinse cycle and just sat.

     The motor-driven sequencer isn't running, and refuses to run at any point in the cycle.  The machine has already got two broken vanes on the agitator, and I know from looking it up when I was working on the dryer that parts availability for these thirty-plus-year-old Amana units is very limited.  I've ordered a replacement (a Maytag), which will be here Monday between -- get this -- "8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m."  Beats trying to carry it home myself, even at that.

     I took the load of work slacks out and they're soaking in the tub.  A round of hand-wringing* and rinsing will follow after dinner.  It was easy to siphon most of the water out (the trick, of course, is to fill the hose first) and the old Shop-Vac should get most of the rest.

     This is what happens when you try to make things better.  After replacing the last bad block (old mortar was stuck to it!  I thought I had removed all of those last year), I'd added a hanger rod over the dryer to hold unused clothes hangers within easy reach.  Make too many improvements and Murphy notices.
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* But not handwringing.

     

Potato Shortcut

      It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of this blog that I like potatoes.  I like 'em baked and French fried, I like 'em diced and in wedges, I like 'em mashed and as hash browns.  I like 'em spiral-cut and broiled.  I like potato chips, both home-cooked and store-bought.  I like latkes and I like potato pancakes.

     Many of these require some amount of preparation.  Potato pancakes, the kind I make, start with leftover mashed potatoes and here's the thing: much as like potatoes, I try to limit my intake.  I only make mashed potatoes once or twice a year, and I make them from scratch.

     But grocers sell instant mashed potatoes, and they've gotten better and better.  Used to be, you only kept them around for a Sunday-dinner stopgap, when you'd run out of fresh or the supply had unexpectedly turned, but these days, they're pretty hard to tell from fresh.  The texture's right and the flavor's good; not great, mine are better, but it'll do.

     And if you have mashed potatoes, you can make potato pancakes.  There's nothing too odd in the instant version so--  Will they work?

     Readers, I give you Exhibit A:

     This is the second batch of three, after I'd upped the temperature a bit.  They brown fine, and they taste just fine, too, a nice accompaniment for a strip of bacon and a fried egg.  I put ketchup on mine and they're good.  Sure, they're not quite the same as scratch (and I didn't add a beaten egg to this batch, which would help), but they'll do.

     You make the potatoes per the package directions, then slap a half to two-thirds of a cup blob on a hot, lightly-greased skillet or griddle, give it enough time to brown a bit, slip a spatula under, flip it, mash it down, and leave it to brown.  Flip it again and do the other side, and there you go.  Time and temperature interact and you'll have to find your way, and as mentioned above, if you let the potatoes cool a little and add a well-beaten egg, it will help them hold together and add to the flavor.

Government Shutdown, Reichstag Fire...

     It always amazes me that when the Federal government shuts down...it doesn't shut down.  Okay, I can see keeping the armed forces going, and DOJ (crime always ignores the shutdown memo, dammit!) and DHS (those passports aren't going to stamp themselves, nor will your carefully-folded underwear paw though itself at the airport); Congress has to stay on the job if they're going to even fake trying to resolve the impasse.*  But there's a whole list of optional stuff that Presidents get to pick and choose, and most of it is nonsense.  The current resident at 1600 Penna† has promised to set up the cuts for maximum partisan pain, which is pernicious nonsense: during a shutdown, the President -- any President -- needs to get the Cabinet working on limiting harm, not seeing what they can make even worse.‡  Other things have funding limitations.  I logged on to my doctor's website yesterday to discover this notice:
     "Medicare virtual visits currently not covered. Effective immediately, due to government shut down."
     Yes, Granny's got to make an in-person visit -- with a lead time measured in months for most appointments, as opposed to 24 hours or less for a virtual one.  Sure hope the old girl holds up!

     The Administration is using the shutdown as an opportunity to increase Executive Branch power and enact more of the dire promises of "Project 2025."  It's unAmerican.  It's contrary to our history and traditions.

     There's more and more revulsion to this trend:

     This page has a link to neat little booklet, Understanding Fascism.  It's designed to be printed out double-sided, cut and trimmed to pocket-size.  It includes the U. S. Army piece I quoted from and linked to recently.

     Then there's this article on a harm-reduction approach for reporters covering modern populists.  It's interesting reading, especially if you've looked into 20th Century U. S. history; Huey Long of Louisiana was one of that century's most successful populist politicians, playing the media with great skill, and  there's good, hands-on, nuts-and-bolts insight into how to avoid being used.  It also links to a clear and concise 32-page booklet, and an even shorter "toolkit."  The Press is far too easily made into a partisan megaphone by extremists and it's well past time they realized it again, and pushed back.  One thing caught my eye: several times, the writer calls for greater specificity in quotes and descriptions, and fewer blanket labels, even looking askance at the use of "populist" and other broad terms when covering politicians and events.  Details matter!  Facts matter!  Fuzzy reactions and handy-dandy us-vs-them labels often obfuscate rather than clarify. 
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* On the other hand, heating, ventilation and cooling for their offices and chambers?  Maybe not so much.  That nice cafeteria, coffee service, on-demand water carafes?  Surely a needless luxury!  Nose to the grindstone, Congressthings, a little more cloakroom dealmaking and a little less Ritual Grimacing.  We already know you're foursquare with whatever will get you re-elected but voters are increasingly wondering what it is you're actually going to do.
 
† I've seen pictures of what he's done to the place and he is not gonna get his security deposit back.  I don't think he quite understands that it's essentially a rental.
 
‡ Of all the Administrations I would not associate with "harm reduction," I would not associate this one the most.  They came in vowing to create trauma and they have.

"Blue Channels"

     Action, meet reaction.  The Committee for the First Amendment is getting a relaunch.  Considering how the first launch went, it's a little surprising: in 1947, a bunch of prominent Hollywood types banded together to speak out against McCarthyism -- and then found out some of their friends were, indeed, communists.

     "It was a different time," as they say, and the Soviet Union had managed a remarkable degree of control over their public image in the U.S. (and the West generally) from the end of the Russian Civil War through the Spanish Civil War (though many volunteers, like George Orwell, came away disillusioned about the Soviets) and right up through the The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; when Hitler turned on Russia and they joined the Allies, it brought rehabilitation.  All kinds of political notions took root in the U.S. during the Great Depression, and communism developed a following among writers and actors.  Some of them were quite serious about it; others went to a rally or two and then moved on.  After WW II, HUAC, McCarthy et al went after all of 'em, inflating the numbers a few genuine Reds by adding in anyone who had ever admired the Soviets or spoke approvingly of Marx in public.  They painted with a very broad brush.

     1947's Committee for the First Amendment waved just as broad a brush back, with predictable results, like Humphrey Bogart's 1948 article, "I'm No Communist" explaining his involvement.  

     Defend freedom of speech, and you find yourself in the middle of a howling pack of people speaking freely, many of them espousing ideas you do not agree with.  That's how it works.  But it's not at all comfortable and it may be terrible PR.

     And perhaps that's something the 2025 Committee for the First Amendment understands.  Anyway, they're out there trying, and that's not nothing.  The current Administration is certainly flapping a broad brush around and they're overdue to get brushed back at.

     I'll leave the last word to the United States Army, in 1945's Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet/Number 64:
     "Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as 'communist' everyone who refuses to support them. [...] Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of 'super-patriotism' and  'super-Americanism.' Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that "sells." Huey Long is said to have remarked that if fascism came to America, it would be on a program of 'Americanism.'"

     Real Americanism knows the answer to speech you don't like isn't suppression but speaking up yourself, and that the marketplace of ideas only works when it is a free market.

Bad Management

      Congress has ground to a halt, as predicted.  Democrats blame Republicans; Republicans blame Democrats.  It's a dance we've seen before.

     Both sides admit they're far apart.  The GOP wanted a basic, nothing-changes continuing resolution to keep the wheels turning for a couple of months.  Dems, aware the funding was about out for some key health-care subsidies -- money that helps pay for insurance for lower-income Americans -- wanted concessions.  

     Either side could break the jam by giving the other guys what they want.  Both sides could break it by finding some middle ground that everyone would loathe.  Neither side could work out a compromise and so here we are.

     The shutdown comes with something we haven't seen before: the Executive Branch has decided to violate the Hatch Act.  Go the the website for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and (as I write this) you'll be greeted by both a banner and a pop-up reading, "The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need."  The second sentence is just their job.  The first sentence is inaccurate at best; see previous paragraph.*  It takes sixty votes to get a budget bill through the U. S. Senate.  The Republicans haven't got that many Senators and any Senator with five friends could add up the results† and see they were going to have to work something out.

     Nor do the violations stop there.  Set up to prevent abuses under the New Deal, the Hatch Act essentially prohibits any member of the Executive Branch except the President and Vice President from engaging in partisan politics.  Something like, say, sending official messages to everyone working for Federal agencies explicitly blaming Democrats for the shutdown would, in fact, be in violation of it.  So you'll never, ever guess what happened.  Not only illegal but, as explained above, untrue.

     As things stand, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid payments are unaffected.  The mail will still be delivered, the military remain at their posts, air traffic controllers and TSA agents are still at work -- and ICE and the the Border Patrol under DHS will keep on doing their thing.  The latter appears to be the Administration's top priority, so what do they care if the lights are off everywhere else?  The Executive Branch is threatening to use the shutdown as an excuse for further permanent reductions in the Federal workforce, a threat that would probably be more effective if it wasn't what they were already doing anyway.

     In the meantime, if you wanted to ask the FCC or the Social Security Administration (etc.) a question?  Tough luck, kid.  Planned vacation to a National Park?  Better research nearby State Parks.  Many are quite nice, though lacking the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful and so on.  And isn't there a hurricane or two headed for the Southeast?  Oops.
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* This appears to be telling us all Democratic Senators except for Catherine Cortez Masto and John Fetterman, along with independent Angus King, are members of "the Radical Left," as is Republican Rand Paul.  It will come as a surprise to many of them, especially Senator Paul.
 
† I am not going to explain this.