Power Grid Quotes

Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.

Well, you missed out on some important protocol, Ella. You can't stand between a Texan and his power tools. We like them. Big ones that drain the national grid. We also like truck-stop breakfasts, large moving objects, Monday night football, and the missionary position. We don't drink light beer, drive Smart cars, or admit to knowing the names of more than about five or six colors. And we don't wax our chests, ever.

By being grateful, appreciating all we have instead of focusing on what is lacking, we allow more of the same to flow toward us.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat.

The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.

Apathy's just a front. People offer it when there's something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.

Even ducks need warmth in sub-zero weather. Here's a winter tip for you for the next time the power grid gets intentionally knocked offline: Wooden furniture is just decorative firewood.

Jeff sighed. “Henry. You know as well as I do that any one of us could do a great deal of damage if we set our minds to it. Demi is the human equivalent of a nuclear bomb. I could cripple the power grid for this entire coast. You could—” “Rally the squirrels of the world to my defense,” I finished sourly.

This week in live current events: your eyes. All power can be dangerous: Direct or alternating, you, socket to me. Plugged in and the grid is humming, this electricity, molecule-deep desire: particular friction, a charge strong enough to stop a heart or start it again; volt, re-volt-- I shudder, I stutter, I start to life. I've got my ion you, copper-top, so watch how you conduct yourself. Here's today's newsflash: a battery of rolling blackouts in California, sudden, like lightning kisses: sudden, whitehot darkness and you're here, fumbling for that small switch with an urgent surge strong enough to kill lesser machines. Static makes hair raise, makes things cling, makes things rise like a gathering storm charging outside our darkened house and here I am: tempest, pouring out mouthfulls of tsunami on the ground, I've got that rain-soaked kite, that drenched key. You know what it's for, circuit-breaker, you know how to kiss until it's hertz.

America does not run on gas, oil, or coal any more than we may one day run on wind, solar, or tidal power. America runs on electricity.

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water.

There's an emergency link to the defence grid, but that's only for use in the direst emergencies." "And of course a mile-long unknown intruder approaching your main source of power isn't an emergency?" Karan hesitated, his chins wobbling slightly with their own momentum. "It'll take time, but I could access the defence grid's sensor logs for that sector..." "I won't tell if you don't.

Dallas didn't have the luxury of keeping them all cozy anymore. “Shut them down. Start with the power grid. Let's see how those fancy motherfuckers like the dark.

As hot as the blood is the missing of her. God, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It’s completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself — my blood flowing through another heart — touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm.

fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Love that does not consume the energy between us like a vacuum but serves as a power grid to redistribute our gifts throughout our community and world. A love that gives us the energy to serve a higher purpose.

There’s not much electricity here in the slums, but the king generously spared us a few lampposts. Thanks to the Volts and Scholars using their abilities to create a sustained power grid, I have to work exceptionally hard to stay in the shadows.

No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

In Egypt, construction is male geometry, a glorification of the visible. The first clarity of intelligible form appears in Egypt, the basis of Greek Apollonianism in art and thought. Egypt discovers four-square architecture, a rigid grid laid against mother nature's melting ovals. Social order becomes a visible aesthetic, countering nature's chthonian invisibilities. Pharaonic construction is the perfection of matter in art. Fascist political power, grandiose and self-divinising, creates the hierarchical, categorical superstructure of western mind.

Thereafter were the stars persuaded to depict compasses and quadrants, stripped of their names, given numbers, all but regimented into a grid, before they had had enough and reverted to their old subjects: dogs, dragons, herdsmen, bears. Take heed, worldly fashion—someone may trust you up to a point, but if you push him too far you will lose all the power you ever had over him and he will blaze up and turn into a bear.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)

Um.." This conversation was probably the worst idea I'd ever had in my life. I was able to picture everything Jordy described, in freaking 3D. And it was turning me on- like plugging into a power grid sort of turning me on. I felt hot all over and my dick was starting to throb. (Owen)

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity.

As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody. She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety. How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job. It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes. Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

I thought of something from Nietzsche: “How little suffices for happiness!

You might be able to stage out of Alaska and Hawaii,” Burton said. “They’re on different grids and probably wouldn’t be hit.

Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the grid without which state power hands in the void and becomes inoperative.

A person with a biblical worldview experiences, interprets, and response to reality in light of the Bible's principles. What Scripture teaches is the primary grid for making decisions and interacting with the world. For the purposes of our research, we investigate a biblical worldview based on eight elements. A person with a biblical worldview believes that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life, God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and he still rules it today, salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned, Satan is real, a Christian has a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people, the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches, unchanging moral truth exists, and such moral truth is defined by the Bible. In our research, we have found that people who embraced these eight components we have a substantially different faith from other Americans – indeed, from other believers.

Here's the plan: We do everything, all the traditions, and we do it grander than anyone ever dreamed! Here are the houselights, which will require extra generators so we don't smash the power grid, the holiday music CDs that will need waterproof outdoor concert speakers, the train set with extra boxes of tracks to connect all the rooms of the house, the toys where we forget the batteries, several gingerbread house kits we'll combine to form a mansion, DVDs of all the classic Christmas specials to run nonstop, mistletoe for all the doorways, the manger scene with a little Jesus that glows in the dark to emphasize the Holy Spirit third of the Trinity because he's the shy one who gets the least press, and all the presents we'll wrap together and give each other as Secret Santas.

From 1998 to 2008 the world’s rainforests have disappeared at a rate of an acre every two minutes, approximately 1 percent a year. At this rate, in forty years we will have destroyed the last of them.

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

Like a vast, random experiment targeting the environment with health doomed to be collateral damage, chemicals have been released into the air, soil, and water since nineteenth-century industrialism. While some may shrug that the aerial release of chemical nanoparticles and nano-sensors, microprocessors, and biologicals under the classified Project Cloverleaf is just more of the same, nanoparticles able to breach the blood-brain barrier make it uniquely diabolical, as does the global conspiracy of power to turn the entire planet into an electromagnetic grid and plug everyone into it. War has gone corporate and all of life reframed as a battlespace of disposable noncombatants (civilians) redefined as potential “terrorists.” The military is no longer a protector but partnered with giant transnational corporations and wealthy dynastic cartels like that of Big Pharma and Big Oil.

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you’ll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.

The most terrifying thing about writing this book was how little I had to make up. Between actual historical power outages, government assessments of power grid vulnerabilities, and official estimates of the casualties that a long-term outage would generate, much of the book wrote itself. Having said that, things like the details of how attacks would best be carried out and specific locations of critical infrastructure have been purposely obscured or fictionalized.

What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it.

Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters—which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem—and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don’t want to be standing at ground zero when that happens.

Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.

I hold in my hands the ability to bring about a darkness unheard of since before the dawn of the industrial revolution. Imagine a time after the total collapse of society, a time when there are no longer arguments about the benefits of going off the grid, a time when all men become equal in the struggle to survive a world without order, without law, without hope. Then, and only then, would you and the rest of mankind truly understand the power I wield. —Fortis Lombardi to Prof. Richard Halberstram (from the third installment of the Dark Angel Trilogy)

The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.

There are broader harms here too. According to The Washington Post, AI consumes so much energy that it risks exhausting the power grid. A ChatGPT-powered search on Google, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost ten times the amount of electricity as a traditional search. A single data-center complex owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent energy of seven million laptops running eight hours every day. The impact of this is immense: it has driven an expansion of fossil-fuel use at the moment when we are most desperately in need of divesting from fossil fuels and has even led to delays in the planned retirement of some coal-fired plants.70 Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men. This is not abstract. You can draw a straight line between the creating and sharing of millions of abusive deepfake videos of unsuspecting, nonconsenting women on the internet and the burning of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. It is obscene that our world functions in this way and that everybody acts as though it is just the way things are and will always be.

The distributed nature of solar energy is a problem only if you are thinking like a utility, trying to produce all of your power in one place. But it can be a good thing if you think about making every building into its own energy source, about making whole cities into their own grid, about bringing power to the billions who are not hooked up to the grid at all. Just thinking about a space-based solar power system highlights (pun intended) that solar power’s weaknesses from an old-style industrial perspective may be its strength in the Next Great Generation’s point of view.

But it was a necessary rite. Because the firstlight grid’s power was generated by the pure, undiluted light each Vanir emitted while making the Drop. And it was only during the Drop that the flash of firstlight appeared—raw, unfiltered magic. It could heal and destroy and do everything in between.

This spells opportunity for all sorts of communities: those off-grid Indian villages with their 300 million electricity-poor residents; sovereign indigenous communities such as Native Americans in the United States or Aboriginals in Australia who seek energy independence; or farmers and other users in low-density rural areas who are cursed by their low level of community demand and for whom the cost of installing transmission lines and relay stations can be extremely burdensome. In many of these cases, power delivery has been subsidized by governments, in effect by taxing urban users with higher tariffs than they would otherwise pay.

If you were to note every manmade item within your field of vision, chances are that nearly every last gadget and trinket was invented by a white man. According to Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, whites have historically dominated the fields of physics, math, chemistry, medicine, biology, and technology. What’s grossly ironic is the specter of people using white computers hooked up to white electricity sent across white power grids to criticize the very white people who made their whining possible. Even worse is the ubiquity of white people pejoratively using the term “white people” as if it somehow doesn’t apply to them. That right there is a collective mental illness for the ages.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.

To the extent a grid is committed to using solar and wind, whenever sunlight or wind increases, the grid has to cycle down controllable power plants, and whenever sunlight or wind decreases or disappears, it has to cycle up controllable power plants. Rapidly cycling power plants up and down is an efficiency killer, just as stop-and-go-traffic kills your car’s fuel efficiency.

In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero.

When discussing relatively “poorer” countries, we need to make a clear, explicit distinction between people living in a state of material destitution and people living healthy subsistence lifestyles. Terms like poverty and Third World mask this distinction and give license for modern professionals — of whom I’ve long been one — to undervalue, denigrate, and interfere with sustainable ways of life.

Connecting is vital for any person who wants to achieve success. It is essential for anyone who wants to build great relationships. You will only be able to reach your potential—regardless of your profession or chosen path—when you learn to connect with other people. Otherwise, you’ll be like a nuclear power plant disconnected from the grid. You’ll have incredible resources and potential, but you will never be able to put them to use.

The real force that pushed history to breakneck velocity […] was not the share market. Share markets were simply not liquid enough to bankroll Edison-sized ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century […] neither the banks nor the share markets could raise the kind of money needed to build all those power stations, grids, factories and distribution networks. To get those vast projects off the ground, what was required was an equivalently-sized network of credit. Hand-in-hand, shareholding and technology led to the creation of shareholder-owned mega banks, willing to lend to the new mega firms by generating a new kind of mega debt. This took the form of vast overdraft facilities for the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. Of course, the money they were lent did not actually exist… yet. Rather, it was as if they were borrowing the future profits of their mega firms in order to fund those mega firms’ construction.

And all that connectivity makes us more vulnerable to malware and spyware,” I say. “We understand that. But I’m not so concerned, right at the moment, about whether Siri will tell me the weather in Buenos Aires or whether some foreign nation is spying on me through my toaster.” Augie moves about the room, as if lecturing on a large stage to an audience of thousands. “No, no—but I have digressed. More to the point, nearly every sophisticated form of automation, nearly every transaction in the modern world, relies on the Internet. Let me say it like this: we depend on the power grid for electricity, do we not?” “Of course.” “And without electricity? It would be chaos. Why?” He looks at each of us, awaiting an answer. “Because there’s no substitute for electricity,” I say. “Not really.” He points at me. “Correct. Because we are so reliant on something that has no substitute.” “And the same is now true of the Internet,” says Noya, as much to herself as to anyone else.

The principal concern of a nuclear reactor - particularly an RBMK reactor, because of its graphite moderator - is that cooling water continuously flows into the core. Without it there could be an explosion or meltdown. Even if the reactor is shut down, the fuel within will still be generating decay heat, which would damage the core without further cooling. Pumps driving the flow of water rely on electricity generated by the plant’s own turbines, but in the event of a blackout the electrical supply can be switched to the national grid. If that fails, diesel generators on site will automatically start up to power the water pumps, but these take about 50 seconds to gather enough energy to operate the massive pumps. There are six emergency tanks containing a combined 250 tons of pressurised water which can be injected into the core within 3.5 seconds, but an RBMK reactor needs around 37,000 tons of water per hour - 10 tons-per-second - so 250 tons does not cover the 50 second gap.92

The lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grass-roots protests (as we have seen in Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with elaborated political visions) are enough - we also need a narrow, striking force of dedicated 'engineers' (hackers, whistle-blowers...) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to 'take over' the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of the corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it.

But I want to make a further claim, one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

For electric vehicles, the power plant generators alimenting the electrical grind will then produce the GHGs, not the car engine itself. Concerns for GHG emissions would then shift to the source of electric power generation and away from car manufacturers. Currently, there is a wide difference in GHGs emissions in various electrical grids, depending on the source of energy fueling the generators. The low emissions from Swedish and French grids are explained by a combination of nuclear and hydroelectric generation, while the high emissions of the Polish and US grids stem from the use of coal as a fuel in some generators. However, the emissions from the Californian grid are nearly half those of the IS average! The regional differences in emissions in the US grid are also explained by the differences in fuels used for electricity generation: California has a high proportion of hydroelectricity and nuclear plants, while in Michigan generation plants the dominant production fuels are coal and crude oil. Anybody concerned with GHG emissions should certainly switch to electric cars in Sweden, France, and California, but should use gasoline when driving in Michigan or Poland!

course, among the interesting things about Edison is that he did not invent either the light bulb or the motion picture camera. In both cases, Edison worked with collaborators to build upon existing inventions, which is one of the human superpowers. What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it. But who wants to hear a story about slow progress made through iterative change over many decades? Well, you, hopefully.

Let me break something down for you, sweetie. Safety is an illusion.” He didn’t look at me as we hurried over the snow, but I knew he listened as I spoke. “We thought we were safe in our apartments and in our SUVs. We thought our smartphones and our laptops meant we could cocoon ourselves away from the big bad world. But we’re never safe, no matter how long the grace period. You can try to fight it with all your might, but unless you’re some all-powerful being and forgot to tell us, you can’t stop every bad thing from happening. You’re doing your best, and everyone loves you for it. That’s all you can ask of yourself.” As

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

Now imagine if, instead of accidentally leaving open a loophole, the hackers behind WannaCry had designed the program to systematically learn about its own vulnerabilities and repeatedly patch them. Imagine if, as it attacked, the program evolved to exploit further weaknesses. Imagine that it then started moving through every hospital, every office, every home, constantly mutating, learning. It could hit life-support systems, military infrastructure, transport signaling, the energy grid, financial databases. As it spread, imagine the program learning to detect and stop further attempts to shut it down. A weapon like this is on the

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention. It needs new rules of the road,” Smith said, intoning the words slowly for emphasis. “What we need is an approach that governments will adopt that says they will not attack civilians in times of peace, they will not attack hospitals, they will not attack the electrical grid, they will not attack the political processes of other countries.

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating.

On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*

In the course of this book I will be setting out a case, developed from my experience as a manager and consultant, that many of the management approaches that are taken for granted in organisations, and which are taught on management courses and replicated by management consultants, actually get in the way of doing good work and hinder rather than help. They promise what they cannot deliver because they are predicated on ideas of predictability and control and imply powers of intervention on the part of managers and consultants which they cannot possess. People in organisations do not fit into two-by-two grids, and are not parts of wholes. The interweaving of intentions, hopes, aspirations and behaviour of people who are both inside and outside organisations, who behave both rationally and irrationally, will bring about outcomes which no one has predicted and which no one has planned.

Finally, Tononi argues that the neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain resembles a grid-like structure. One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is how visual, auditory, and touch perceptual spaces map in a topographic manner onto visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices. Most excitatory pyramidal cells and inhibitory interneurons have local axons strongly connected to their immediate neighbours, with the connections probability decreasing with distance. Topographically organized cortical tissue, whether it develops naturally inside the skull or is engineered out of stem cells and grown in dishes, will have high intrinsic causal power. This tissue will feel like something, even if our intuition revels at the thought that cortical carpets, disconnected from all their inputs and outputs, can experience anything. But this is precisely what happens to each one of us when we close our eyes, go to sleep, and dream. We create a world that feels as real as the awake one, while devoid of sensory input and unable to move. Cerebral organoids or grid-like substances will not be conscious of love or hate, but of space.; of up, down, close by and far away and other spatial phenomenology distinctions. But unless provided with sophisticated motor outputs, they will be unable to do anything.

APRIL 7 Corporate worship is designed to confront you with a view of life that has at its center a dead man’s cross and a living man’s empty tomb. There are two themes that I have repeated in writing and speaking again and again. I will repeat them here: Human beings made in the image of God do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts. Whether you know it or not, you have been designed by God to be a meaning maker. You are a rational human being (even if you don’t always show it), and you have a constant desire for life to make sense. So you are constantly thinking and constantly interpreting. You don’t actually respond to what is going on around you; you respond to the sense you have made of what is going on around you. This means that there is always some kind of interpretive grid that you are carrying around with you that helps you to make sense out of your life. Everybody believes something. Everybody assumes that certain things are true. Everybody brings some system of “wisdom” to their lives to help them to explain and understand. No one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more than you do. We never stop talking to ourselves. We are in a constant conversation with ourselves about God, others, ourselves, meaning and purpose, identity, and such. The things you say to you about you, God, and life are profoundly important because they form and shape the way you then respond to the things that God has put on your plate. You see, you are always preaching to yourself some kind of worldview, some kind of “gospel,” if you will. The question is, in your private moment-by-moment conversation, what are you saying to you? Paul argues very powerfully that the “dead man’s cross, live man’s empty tomb” gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, which the world sees as utter foolishness, is in fact the wisest of wisdom. It is the only way to make sense out of life. It is the only lens through which you can see life accurately. It is the only kind of wisdom that really does give a final and reliable answer to the fundamental questions of life that every person asks. And at the center of this message of wisdom is not a set of ideas but a person who, in his life and death, offers you not only answers, but every grace you need to be what you were created to be and to do what you have been called to do.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- Xerox(tm) it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallelparked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

overgrown foliage is the number one cause of power outages in America in the twenty-first century.

Jakubowski and his collaborators have since launched the Open Building Institute, which aims to make open-source designs for ecological, off-grid, affordable housing available to all.81 ‘Our goal is decentralized production,’ he explains. ‘I’m talking about a business case for efficient enterprise where the traditional concept of scale becomes irrelevant. Our new concept of scale is about distributing economic power far and wide.

as soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. it just makes more sense. and that's what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing. bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term.

Natural resources, Mike.  That’s where our power grid comes from.  Whether people think about it or not, the way we fuel our machines is deeply connected to the way life exists on this planet.

Deep learning can detect cracks in water pipes, manage traffic flow, model fusion reactions for a new source of clean energy, optimize shipping routes, and aid in the design of more sustainable and versatile building materials. It’s being used to drive cars, trucks, and tractors, potentially creating a safer and more efficient transportation infrastructure. It’s used in electrical grids and water systems to efficiently manage scarce resources at a time of growing stress.

She hated them. Almost as much as she hated the Asteri and the world they’d built. For three years, Ophion had dangled Emile’s whereabouts above her, promising to find him, to help her free him, if she could do one more mission. Pippa and Silver might believe in the cause, though they differed in their methods of how to fight for it, but Emile had always been Sofie’s cause. A free world would be wonderful. But what did it matter if she had no family to share it with? So many times, for those rebels, she had drawn up power from the grid, from lights and machines, and killed and killed, until her soul lay in tatters. She’d often debated going rogue and finding her brother herself, but she was no spy. She had no network. So she’d stayed, and covertly built up her own bait to dangle before Ophion. Made sure they knew the importance of what she’d gleaned before she entered Kavalla.

The crystal of the Dead Gate began to glow white. Not from her touch, but as if— The Reapers were chanting. Awakening the Dead Gate, somehow. During the attack on the city, it had channeled her magic against the demons, but today … today it would siphon off her power. Her soul. The Gates sucked magic from whoever touched them, and stored it. She’d inherited her power from that very force. But this one fed that power right back into the power grid. Like some fucked-up rechargeable battery. Somehow, she’d become food. Was that what she’d traded away? A few centuries here, thinking she’d found eternal rest—and then meeting this end? Instead, she’d face a trip straight into the meat grinder of souls immediately when she died. Which seemed likely to be soon. There was a good chance that she could draw from the Gate as well, she supposed. But what if the Dead Gate was somehow different? What if she went to summon power, only to lose all of hers? She couldn’t risk it.

2011, I led the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review to develop strategies for government support of emerging clean energy technologies. In one town hall meeting, I faced advocates for four different vehicle technologies—internal combustion engines powered by biofuels, compressed natural gas, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and battery-powered plug-ins. Each of them believed that their technology was the optimal vision for the future, and that all the government had to do was support the development of the appropriate fueling infrastructure. When I reminded them that the country could probably deploy no more than two new fueling technologies at scale, a squabble ensued. There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.

To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same.

We’re using our incredible technology, even our connectivity technology, to create ever more friction-free lives. So much of our brain power and investment are going into technology to help us achieve that goal, but our two-by-two grid shows us that this is actually the opposite of what Churchill believed would save the world. Churchill told us we need to seek special relationships. We must go up and to the right.

The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.

Directed dabbling is what led me to Bre Pettis, a former art teacher from Seattle who started NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn maker space, and also launched the 3-D printing company MakerBot next door. I had been tracking Bre as part of our digital development effort. I e-mailed Bre to ask if I could simply hang out and watch what he was doing: “I want to understand the new wave of micro-manufacturing, and especially what you are doing with 3-D printing.” Resistor was a higgledy-piggledy series of rooms on the fourth floor of a run-down factory. There Bre introduced me to his “makers” as we walked between workbenches covered with bits of sheet metal and wires and boxes of odds and ends. I saw people making a miniature wind turbine and a portable water purification system. That is, GE kinds of things. One guy was building his own miniature gas turbine, because, well, he could. “Why not?” he said. “People want to live off the grid.” “We could use this ingenuity inside GE,” I said out loud. After NYC Resistor and MakerBot, I met with Shapeways, in Queens, an advanced contract manufacturer where people submitted designs to be 3-D printed for a fee. As we toured the space and talked about the jewelry they made, I

Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.

The U.S. grid consists of over seven hundred electric power facilities, over seven hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, fifty-six thousand substations, and over six and a half million miles of local lines.

the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development, military expansion, and Beijing-controlled institutions’.132 And, it should be stressed, for the control of critical infrastructure. After 40 per cent of the Philippines’ national electricity network was sold to the giant state-owned State Grid Corporation of China, the head of the national transmission corporation conceded that the Philippines’ entire power supply could be shut down by the flick of a switch in Nanjing, the location of the monitoring and control system.133 State Grid also owns a large share of the electricity networks in the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia.134 Its bid for the New South Wales grid was rejected on national security grounds.

on September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison would turn on the generators at Pearl Street Station, in Lower Manhattan, activating America's first power grid. Human beings were on the path to total electrical addiction.

Smalley’s vision was that electricity should become the ubiquitous fuel of the twenty-first century, based on a decentralized, local energy storage model where everyone on the grid would have a personal storage appliance that could ensure delivery of uninterrupted power. This distributed system would be supplemented by rewiring the electric grid with superconductors that could enable cross-continent and even worldwide electrical transmission, taking advantage of time zones, climate variations, and large-scale sources of power such as nuclear energy. Smalley was ahead of his time.

Numbers like that terrified the utilities and the Koch network, and so they set to work. An industry trade group warned that utilities faced “a death spiral.” As customers began to generate more of their own electricity from solar panels on their roofs, utility revenues would begin to decline, and the remaining customers would have to pay more for the poles and wires that keep the grid alive, increasing the incentive for the remaining customers to leave. Instead of figuring out (like some California and New York utilities) how to profit from that transition by brokering energy efficiency, Arizona utilities mustered their political power to simply block change.

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it’s only natural, isn’t it—all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command.

Humans going into altered states of consciousness all react the same way, no matter where they come from. It is part of the way the human brain is wired. There are three stages of altered consciousness that have been recognised by laboratory experiment (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989: 60–67). In the first stage, people see zig-zags, dots and whorls. In the second stage this develops into a deeper trance experience, and the subjects see and feel a world more familiar to them, and can hear water, experience thirst, etc. The third stage is the deepest, and people in deep trance talk about entering a hole in the ground and seeing ‘real world’ imagery of animals and people. These different stages have been recognised in the rock art: stage one with grids, zig-zags, mesh shapes (such as nets); stage two with nested ‘U’ shapes and buzzing (interpreted as beehives); stage three with snakes coming out of the rock face, people with animal heads, etc. This last stage accompanies visual images of trancers in the dance, which include the ‘bent-over posture’ assumed by the shaman when dancing, and bleeding from the nose, which would occur when the shaman was physically under stress when entering the spirit world (Figure 4.4). Interviews with shamans have reported that at the moment of the climax, the power shoots up the spine and out of the top of the head. This, among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of Nyae Nyae, is called kia (Katz 1982), as we have seen in Chapter 3.

As more zero-emissions power surges through energy grids around the world, an even greater challenge looms. The 27,000 terawatt-hours of electricity generated by the world today will soon fall well short of our needs. By 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we’ll need at least 50,000 terawatt-hours of capacity for tens of millions of additional electric cars, among other things. Once solar panels are powering homes, as Elon Musk and Lynn Jurich understood from the start, people’s garages will become their gas stations.

The One of My Heart (The Sonnet) I see the one of my heart, In every direction, in every face. Yet I won't say a word, In silence I'll bear all coldness. You may throw me out of your heart, But you can't oust yourself from mine. You are in every pore of my being, You are my only lifeline. You are the one that runs in my nerves, As the power-grid of my mind. The pain of being a one-sided lover, Is sweeter to me than a thousand goldmines. Cuss me, mock me, hurt me all you like. All I care about is to be an aid in your life.

The idea of status isn’t nearly as simple as it appears. Consider, for those you seek to serve, their external status (how they are seen by their chosen community) and their internal status (who they see when they look in the mirror). Next, work through how they maintain or seek to change that status. Do they belittle others? Seek approval? Help in selfless ways? Drive themselves to achieve more? What sort of wins and losses do they track? Consider the following two XY grids. People in the top-right quadrant (a) are rare indeed. This space belongs to people who are seen as powerful and who also see themselves as able to handle it. I’d put Oprah Winfrey in this category. This is the person who is able to choose, not the one who is waiting to be chosen. The top-left quadrant (d) is more common, since people who end up with high status often doubt themselves. This can turn them into divas.

In 2011, a stretch of high-voltage lines outside Missoula, Montana, were shorted out by the carcass of a deer freshly killed by a juvenile bald eagle, who then picked it up and attempted to fly away only to discover (much to his chagrin) that a deer is too heavy for an eagle to carry. Down that deer came, accompanied by a hail of sparks, and once again, the power was out.

Cyberattacks are a threat to infrastructure. A cyberattack on Ukraine's power grid Iin 2015 left 700,000 people without electricity for hours. In 2013, Iranian hackers attacked a dam outside New York City. In 2016, a U.S. court convicted a Russian of attacks that caused more than $169 million in losses to 3,700 financial institutions.

**"Rise Above"** (Verse 1) Neon lights and pickup trucks, I'm moving fast, kicking up dust. Life's a game, sometimes it's rough, but I've got dreams, they're enough. (Pre-Chorus) They say I'm just a small-town kid, chasing stars, on the grid. But I've got fire in my soul, I'm on a roll, I'm in control. (Chorus) 'Cause I'm stronger than that, I'm the comeback kid, With every breakdown, I've got more to give. I'll turn the whispers into my soundtrack, Watch me shine, 'cause I'm stronger than that. (Verse 2) I've seen the highs, I've felt the lows, but here I stand, ready to go. With every word they throw my way, I'll build my castle, I'll make my play. (Pre-Chorus) So let 'em talk, let 'em spin their tales, I'm rising up, I will not fail. With every rumor, I'll just laugh, I'm unbreakable, I'm stronger than that. (Chorus) Yeah, I'm stronger than that, I've got the heart of a lion, Turning setbacks into moments to rely on. I'll light up the stage, no holding back, I'm the headline act, 'cause I'm stronger than that. (Bridge) Sometimes life's a storm, a relentless attack, But I'm the eye of the hurricane, I've got my own back. With a smile on my face, I'll tip my hat, I'm not just surviving, I'm stronger than that. (Chorus) I'm stronger than that, I'm the hero in my story, Turning pain into power, into glory. I'll take the stage, this is where I'm at, Singing loud and proud, I'm stronger than that. (Outro) So here's to the fighters, the dreamers in black, We're all in this together, we're on the right track. With every chord, we'll combat, The noise of the world, 'cause we're stronger than that.

To sum up, we lose the ability to transport copper because we don’t have access to the ceruloplasmin taxi, which feeds copper to the cells and to the mitochondria. If ceruloplasmin cannot get copper to the cells and their mitochondrial power grids, the result is a general breakdown of ATP production. And if enough copper is not available, we cannot regulate oxygen metabolism and cytochrome c oxidase is not going to be able to activate oxygen to create energy. If that happens, then we’re not going to be able to regulate iron metabolism. The end result is that our mitochondria are not able to make energy, and the body is not going to be able to make heme and iron sulfur clusters, which are created as a part of the mitochondrial actions. Given that iron is a terminal destination in the mitochondria, we’re going to have a serious problem because this iron will build up inside the ferritin storage proteins, both inside the mitochondria, as well as inside the cells. Then we’re going to lose the ability to regulate the reactive oxidative stress that takes place. And we’re not going to have enough antioxidant enzymes to break down the oxidative stress that’s building. This is why both copper and ceruloplasmin are so important for proper energy production that does not result in iron buildup and oxidative stress, particularly in Complex IV, but in all mitochondrial complexes of the ETC.

Cops often saw cybercrime as a benign act that didn’t really hurt anyone. There was nothing benign in stealing someone’s identity or destroying their credit rating. There was nothing benign in controlling the world’s power grids, banking systems, or economies. Control cyber-technology and you controlled the flow of information for most of the world’s population. And cyber-warfare had already begun. Just ask the Iranians about Stuxnet, or Estonia, Ukraine and Georgia about pissing off the Russians.

Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems Understanding Solar Energy Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Harnessing the power of the sun to generate clean and renewable energy has become increasingly essential in today's world. Solar rooftop systems offer a sustainable solution for both residential and commercial properties to reduce reliance on traditional grid electricity and lower carbon emissions. By understanding the fundamentals of solar energy and recognizing the significance of solar rooftop installations, individuals and businesses in Bangalore can pave the way towards a more environmentally conscious and cost-effective energy future. # Solar Rooftop in Bangalore - Sunease Solar ## Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems ### Understanding Solar Energy Solar energy is like the coolest kid on the block when it comes to renewable energy sources. It's basically sunlight transformed into electricity, which is pretty neat if you ask me. ### Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Solar rooftop systems are like the superheroes of the energy world - they harness the power of the sun right from your rooftop. They not only help you save money but also reduce your carbon footprint. Win-win! ## Benefits of Solar Rooftop Installations ### Financial Savings Imagine cutting down on those hefty electricity bills - that's what solar rooftop installations do. They help you save money in the long run while also increasing the value of your property . It resembles having your cake and eating it as well! ### Environmental Impact By switching to solar energy, you're basically giving Mother Earth a virtual high-five. Solar rooftop installations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help combat climate change. So, you're not just saving money, you're saving the planet. NBD. ### Energy Independence Who doesn't want to be a little more independent, am I right? Solar Rooftop in Bangaloreprovide you with a sense of self-sufficiency when it comes to energy. You're not at the mercy of fluctuating electricity prices anymore. It's like taking control of your energy destiny. ## Solar Rooftop Initiatives in Bangalore ### Government Policies and Incentives Bangalore is all about that solar love. The government has rolled out various policies and incentives to promote solar rooftop installations. It resembles they're saying, "Here's something special to do your change to sun oriented considerably better." ### Community Programs and Awareness Communities in Bangalore are coming together to spread the good word about solar energy. From awareness campaigns to collective installations, they're making sure everyone knows that solar is the way to go. It's like a solar revolution, but with a cool community twist. ## Sunease Solar: A Leader in Solar Rooftop Solutions ### Company Overview Sunease Solar is basically the Gandalf of solar rooftop solutions - wise, reliable, and always there when you need them. They're experts in the field, making the switch to solar as easy as pie (solar-powered pie, of course). ### Product Offerings From sleek solar panels to cutting-edge inverters, Sunease Solar has it all. They offer top-notch products that are not only efficient but also look pretty darn good on your rooftop. It's like having the Ferraris of solar installations. ### Customer Success Stories Customers love Sunease Solar, and for good reason. Their success stories speak volumes about the quality of service and satisfaction they provide. It's like a feel-good movie, but with solar panels instead of actors. 5. Key Features of Solar Rooftop Systems Panel Efficiency and Durability When it comes to Solar Rooftop in Bangalore, panel efficiency and durability are key factors to consider.

Putting the power grid online raises obvious cybersecurity concerns, but centralized control would only magnify these problems. The history of the Internet has shown that security through obscurity doesn’t work. Systems that have kept their inner workings a secret in the name of security have consistently proved more vulnerable than those that have allowed themselves to be examined—and challenged—by outsiders. The open protocols and programs used to protect Internet communications are the result of ongoing development and testing by a large expert community. Another historical lesson is that people, not technology, are the most common weakness when it comes to security. No matter how secure a system is, someone who has access to it can always be corrupted, wittingly or otherwise. Centralized control introduces a point of vulnerability that is not present in a distributed system.

No action was taken on the commission’s recommendations for protecting the electric power grid. Two

I’ve been a passionate adventurer in the solar industry and the sustainability movement my whole life. I try hard to walk my talk. My wife, Nantzy, and I live in an off-the-grid home (see page 70) built of recycled and green materials, powered by solar (passive and active) and hydroelectric energy, with gorgeous biodynamic gardens and fruit orchards that provide most of our food, a 15-acre biodynamic olive orchard, an 8-acre biodynamic vineyard, and a dozen beehives. I’m fortunate to benefit from the fruits of all our collective labors. As the solar industry continues to grow and mature, and as our cultural consciousness evolves, I remain hopeful that, once and for all, we will get things right in

The ship’s electricity was produced by three turbo-drive 300 kW DC generators when at sea, but when ashore, for the most part, electricity came from either the Central Maine power grid or a generator in the Engineering Laboratory. The State of Maine was considered cold iron until her boilers were lit off, breathing life into her soul. This would be the first time the engineers fired up the boilers and cautiously brought up a head of steam close to her rated 450 psi at 759 degrees. At this temperature, a failure was not an option. The steam was so hot as to be invisible and could instantly cut a two by four in half. There have been recorded boiler and steam pipe failures resulting in the deaths of people in the engine room, so we were taking no chances! Out on the open deck the sky was sunny however the air was frigid. It was the kind of day you could expect in Maine this time of year and we were just happy that the sun was shining. Now it was up to deck force to let go of all but the forward spring lines. Slowly the ship pulled ahead and as the spring line tightened, our stern swung out into the channel. At the right moment the order was given and we backed away from the dock. It was the first time for our new TS State of Maine to get underway, and so far, everything functioned satisfactorily.

Russia, China, and Iran, among others, continue on an almost daily basis to demonstrate a range of cyber capabilities in espionage, denial-of-service attacks, and the planting of digital time bombs, capable of inflicting widespread damage on a U.S. power grid or other piece of critical infrastructure.

The backbone of the electrical grid is largely massive numbers of steam driven engines that turn electrical generators.

Doubts over security of the power grid cover a broad range, from that cautious “nothing is impossible” to the full-throated warning of “not if, but when.

None of these people has suggested that there is anything simple about sabotaging a grid; they say only that the capability exists, an opinion shared by specialists who have no financial interest in the field. When I asked Janet Napolitano, who is now president of the University of California, what she thinks the chances are that a nation-state or independent actor could knock out one of our power grids, she replied, “Very high—80 percent, 90 percent. You know, very, very high.

recent decades, American utility companies have spent relatively little on research and development. One industry report estimates that, in 2009, research-and-development investments made by all US electrical-power utilities amounted to at most $700 million, compared with $6.3 billion by IBM and $9.1 billion by Pfizer. In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across the United States, including many in areas that are prone to heat waves and hurricanes.

In successive State of the Union addresses President Obama has warned of the danger of cyberattacks on our infrastructure. Government is adapting to the “new normal” of daily hacking, and cyber specialists such as Richard Clarke and George Cotter, who held senior government posts, have explained that the Russians and the Chinese are almost certainly inside the grid, mapping its vulnerabilities. Keith Alexander and Howard Schmidt warn that independent actors will soon have the capability to damage the grid, if they don’t have it already. If nothing else, the United States demonstrated with Stuxnet what a carefully planned cyberattack can do to the most securely defended equipment. Still, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including the current secretary, treat the likelihood of a crippling attack on one of the nation’s power grids as nothing more than a speculative threat, and an unlikely one at that.

He is convinced that China and Russia have already penetrated the U.S. power grid, both for purposes of reconnaissance and, very likely, in order to plant cyber weapons that could be activated at some time in the future.

What about independent actors using cyberattacks to knock out one of our power grids? Are we at that point yet? “Simple answer,” said Schmidt, “yes.

This tension has resulted, in the electric power industry, in a high-stakes duel between corporations and government regulators, the consequences of which are cybersecurity regulations so patchwork and inadequate as to be one of the chief sources of the grid’s vulnerability. The

Not only would he and his ranch hands survive a cyberattack on the electric power grid that serves Wyoming, they would barely notice it. I

I’m just glad you planned to have your honeymoon away from the castle,” he replied as he smirked knowingly. “Gods know when you two go at it, the entire power grid and magical field around the castle is high voltage.” “You can feel it?” I gasped. “What did you expect, Flower? You’re a Goddess of Faery; your mother is a fertility Goddess. When you two fuck, even the flowers feel it. Last night, they bloomed. You know, the ones that only open once a year were awakened by the power you two gave off.

With adversaries’ malware in the National Grid, the nation has little or no chance of withstanding a major cyberattack on the North American electrical system. Incredibly weak cybersecurity standards with a wide-open communications and network fabric virtually guarantees success to major nation-states and competent hacktivists. This [electric power] industry is simply unrealistic in believing in the resiliency of this Grid subject to a sophisticated attack. When such an attack occurs, make no mistake, there will be major loss of life and serious crippling of National Security capabilities. [Emphasis added.]

There are, as previously noted, more than three thousand electric power companies in the United States. Many of the smaller electric companies lack the resources and often the motivation to provide their operations with the best cybersecurity. Computer access to any one of them can provide access along the network to the SCADA and EMS systems that calibrate supply and demand for the grid as a whole.

We need the implementation of the Smart Waterways Grid across India to harness 1,500 BCM of floodwater and connect the rivers and catchment areas as a single plane. The grid will receive 1,500 BCM of floodwater and act as a water grid so that water can be released to any deficient place and replenished during flood. It would act as a 15,000 kilometres-long national reservoir. It would be able to provide drinking water to 600 million people, irrigation to 150 million acres of land, and generate 60,000 MW of power. Due to ground water recharge, it would also save 4,000 MW of power. Each state can implement this mission with an outlay of approximately 50,000 crores with annual budgetary support, central government assistance, public-private consortia and with support from the World Bank in a BOOT (Build, Operate, Own and Transfer) based PPP model and this can be realized within 2020. Apart from this, an Integrated Water Resource Management system is also required to revive water bodies and tanks and build farm ponds and checkdams across India as well as increase irrigation infrastructure and groundwater potential, thereby enhancing the safe drinking water resources of the nation.

The Lowly Thermostat, Now Minter of Megawatts How Nest is turning its consumer hit into a service for utilities. Peter Fairley | 945 words • Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January put the Internet of things on the map. Everyone had vaguely understood that connecting everyday objects to the Internet could be a big deal. Here was an eye-popping price tag to prove it. Nest, founded by former Apple engineers in 2010, had managed to turn the humble thermostat into a slick, Internet-connected gadget. By this year, Nest was selling 100,000 of them a month, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley. At $249 a pop, that’s a nice business. But more interesting is what Nest has been up to since last May in Texas, where an Austin utility is paying Nest to remotely turn down people’s air conditioners in order to conserve power on hot summer days—just when electricity is most expensive. For utilities, this kind of “demand response” has long been seen as a killer app for a smart electrical grid, because if electricity use can be lowered just enough at peak times, utilities can avoid firing up costly (and dirty) backup plants. Demand response is a neat trick. The Nest thermostat manages it by combining two things that are typically separate—price information and control over demand. It’s consumers who control the air conditioners, electric heaters, and furnaces that dominate a home’s energy diet. But the actual cost of energy can vary widely, in ways that consumers only dimly appreciate and can’t influence. While utilities frequently carry out demand

To the electrical grid your house looks like a point where power vanishes and money comes out.

Banks are like the economy’s circulatory system, as vital to its everyday functioning as the power grid.

blast could see the lethal, glowing plume from miles away. It was certainly seen on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, just ten miles away, and as the killer winds began to blow, death and destruction soon followed. It was only a matter of time. There would be no escape, and no place to hide. Surely first responders would emerge from surrounding states and communities, eager to help in any way they possibly could. But how would they get into the hot zones? How would they communicate? Where would they take the dead? Where would they take the dying? The power grid went down instantly. All communications went dark. The electromagnetic pulse set off by the warhead’s detonation had fried all electronic circuitry for miles. The electrical systems of most motor vehicles in Seattle—from fire trucks and ambulances to police cars and military Humvees, not to mention most helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft—were immobilized completely or, at the very least, severely damaged. Most cell phones, pagers, PDAs, TVs, and radios were rendered useless as well, as were even the backup power systems in hospitals and other emergency facilities throughout the blast radius. The same was true in Washington, D.C., and New

In Germany, a gas- or coal-fired power plant that might cost $1 billion to build, but that will no longer run at full capacity because of the onslaught of renewable energies into the grid, can only pay for itself on days when there is no wind or heavy cloud cover.

Meanwhile grid researchers are tackling the next set of challenges: How can we manage large, distributed infrastructures so that they deliver reliable service in the face of failures? How can we enable users to exploit the availability of on-demand resources and services? How must grid concepts and technologies evolve as the number and power of computers rise by orders of magnitude?

A detonation in space would generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which could knock out electrical circuits and power grids across a continent. America’s EMP Commission, a body assembled by Congress to study such a threat, reckoned in 2008 that two-thirds of Americans might perish in the first year of a societal collapse that would follow a nuclear blast in space above the central United States.

We've seen that the theories of the Core forces, each deeply based on symmetry, can be combined. The three separate Core symmetries can be realized as parts of a single, all-encompassing symmetry. Moreover, that encompassing symmetry brings unity and coherence to the clusters of the Core. From a motley six, we assemble the faultless Charge Account. We also discover that once we correct for the distorting effect of Grid fluctuations-and after upping the ante to include SUSY-the different powers of the Core forces derive from a common value at short distances. Even gravity, that hopelessly feeble misfit, comes into the field. To reach this clear and lofty perspective, we made some hopeful leaps of imagination. We assumed that the Grid-the entity that in everyday life we consider empty space-is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. We assumed that the world contains the extra quantum dimensions required to support super-symmetry. And we boldly took the laws of physics, supplemented with these two "super" assumptions, up to energies and down to distances far beyond where we've tested them directly. From the intellectual success so far achieved-from the clarity and coherence of this vision of unification-we are tempted to believe that our assumptions correspond to reality. But in science, Mother Nature is the ultimate judge. After the solar expedition of 1919 confirmed his prediction for the bending of light by the Sun, a reporter asked Albert Einstein what it would have meant if the result had been otherwise. He replied, "Then God would have missed a great opportunity." Nature doesn't miss such opportunities. I anticipated that Nature's verdicts in favor of our "super" ideas will inaugurate a new golden age in fundamental physics.

There are three power grids that generate and distribute electricity throughout the United States, and taking down all or any part of a grid would scatter millions of Americans in a desperate search for light, while those unable to travel would tumble back into something approximating the mid-nineteenth century.

In its 2008 report the EMP commission recommended that measures taken by the Defense Department to protect crucial military installations, including the installation of surge arrestors and Faraday cages, could usefully be applied to civilian infrastructure also. The commission estimated that protecting the national electric grid against an EMP attack would cost about $2 billion. Such estimates are easily made in the abstract, but reality is another matter. No action was taken on the commission’s recommendations for protecting the electric power grid.

1) We draw power for appliances, lights, and computers from the electric grid. The physical world of appearance draws its power, in general, from the Grid. 2) A great, developing project, driven in part by the needs of physics, is the technology to integrate many dispersed computers into functional units, whose total power can be accessed as needed from any point. That technology is known as Grid technology. It's hot, and it's cool. 3) Grid is short. 4) Grid is not Matrix. I'm sorry, but the sequels tarnished that candidate. And Grid is not Borg.

Both Sarah’s and Bryce’s desks were paired together, as were those of every other field and support agent team, but none of the field agents hated being stuck at their desk more than Sarah, which was a sore spot for Bryce, because he loved his desk. He loved his computer. He loved the fact that he had terabytes of processing power and that the room temperature was always a crisp seventy-one degrees. And he loved that he had the best piece of technology in the world at his fingertips. The GSF satellite that hovered in the atmosphere high above them had the capacity to see anything, or anyone, anywhere in the world. It was the epicenter for the entire agency, and it was Bryce’s pride and joy. However, not everyone was as appreciative of his accomplishments as he would have liked.

The current generation of solar and wind power systems generally introduce instability into the electrical utility grid system with their intermittent power generation characteristics and electronically generated harmonic energy.

Arguably, the era’s most disruptive technology is the solar panel. Its price has dropped ninety-nine per cent in the past four decades, and roughly seventy-five per cent in the past six years; it now produces power nearly as cheaply as coal or gas, a condition that energy experts refer to as “grid parity.

Batteries, too, have the potential to change the world—just as much as shale has, should the technology continue to improve. That’s because large-scale batteries, if used to store electricity for the grid, could unlock the potential of renewable power, which has been held back by its intermittent nature. Steve LeVine takes stock of the remarkable cost reductions and technological improvements in battery technology, driven in part by electric-car companies such as Tesla, and envisions what’s next.

In other words, sale of the commodity electricity (kilowatt-hours), formerly purchased only from your local utility, can now be purchased from any nonderegulated generator at whatever price the market has set. However, this power can only be delivered to you via the transmission grid and the lower-voltage local distribution system. Both of these remain fully regulated. Thus, even though the market sets the wholesale prices for power itself, the rates for delivering it over the transmission and distribution wires are set by federal and state regulators, respectively.

A dumb electric meter adds up all of the kWh used over the course of a month regardless of when that power was made and how much it cost to make. Some homes use a lot of power during the expensive mid-day period, while others use most of their power at night. If those two homes used the same monthly total number of kWh, and they had a dumb meter, the power company has to charge them the same amount for monthly service because it doesn’t know when each house was using power. An executive I know likens this to weighing your grocery cart when you check out at the supermarket and charging you per pound of groceries in the cart, without prices for any of the specific items you chose to buy that day, whether it be caviar or pet food.

From the engineering standpoint, there are three vertical stages of production—generation, transmission, and distribution. Generators make the power in power plants, high-voltage lines transmit the power to substations in your neighborhood, and the small wires and equipment on the poles leading to your home or office are the distribution system.

We owe the low price of electricity today to the power grid, the network that emerged through these pairwise connections, linking all producers and consumers into a single network. It allows cheaply produced power to be instantly transported anywhere. Electricity hence offers a wonderful example of the huge positive impact networks have on our life

In Isaiah 9:2 and Matthew 4;16, we are told that in the birth of Jesus, "the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." But, you may say, if Jesus is the light of the world, why when he came into the world did he not do something about the suffering and darkness? Children still die premature and horrible deaths. The poor are still downtrodden. Young fathers still die in accidents, leaving widows and orphans to fend for themselves. There are still wars and rumours of wars. Why didn't he stop it all? But what if when Jesus came to earth he had not died young but had come to put down injustice and end evil? What would the result have been for us? Remember Tolkien's dictum: "Always after a defeat and a respite...evil takes another shape and grows again." He's right. Consider the scientific and technological advances that have brought untold benefits in health care and communication. The communication revolution has even been credited with bringing down the Iron Curtain and ending the Cold War. Yet many well-informed people now are afraid that terrorists will use that technology to bring down whole sectors of the electronic grid and wipe out trillions in wealth and bring on a world-wide depression. Nuclear energy is also a great source of power when harnessed properly, yet we know the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. When a new development pushes back evil in one form, evil always finds a way to use that development to bring itself home to us in new shapes and forms. Why? It is because the evil and darkness of this world comes to a great degree from within us. Martin Luther taught that human nature is curved in on itself. We are so instinctively and profoundly self-centered that we don't believe we are. And this curved-in-ness is a source of a vast amount of the suffering and evil we experience, from the violence and genocides in the headlines down to the reason your marriage is so painful.

The logo for this growing professional community [Christian psychotherapy] was the word integration. Through articles and books the integrationist agenda was hammered out. Psychology and theology would mutually stimulate one another. Liberals had simply bowed to psychology as a superior authority. In contrast, integrationist evangelicals sought to interact with psychology in a sophisticated manner, hoping to weed out the tares of error form the wheat of truth. They sought to plunder psychological data and explanatory categories, utilizing a grid of general scriptural themes. The sought to profit from psychology's practices and institutional arrangements, under the guidance of general scriptural principles.

Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny. Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds. LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this." LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.] LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.

There is water, there are fish, there are laws, there are power lines with a finite capacity to transport electricity, and there is a market that just might not be big enough to use all the power they are being fed.

What is new with the Energy Policy Act is that these investors in electrical generation, large and small, don’t need to give much thought as to how the grid, in often very out-of-the-way places, might deal with the influx of unpredictable power. Nor do they need to care for how utility companies will manage the task of keeping people’s lights on when they are faced with the problem of too much power one instant, and too little the next.

In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society and determining what people held to be true and, consequently, how they spoke about it.

Florida has a very unreliable electrical utility power grid during hurricanes.

The last thing you want in a hurricane state is the electrical utility power grid above ground on tall poles!

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

Schmidt also echoed the assumption that China and Russia, encumbered by a network of interlocking interests with the United States, would likely be constrained from launching a full-scale cyberattack on an American power grid. Could they do it? Yes. Would they? Only in the context of an expanding crisis.

I never saw the Desoto Solar Farm produce 25 megawatts into the electrical grid during my time there. At the time, I thought the contractor was tampering with the electrical meter and I reported it to the company management team. I was later to discover many blown fuses at the power plant and lots of solar modules out of service.

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Postmodern Theory offered an opportunity to retain the same beliefs and predictions—male domination exists and serves itself at the expense of women—while redefining them in terms diffuse enough to be a matter of faith, requiring no evidence: social constructions, discourses, and socialization. The Foucauldian idea of a diffuse grid of power dynamics that constantly operates through everyone through their unwitting uses of language fit the bill perfectly.

Remember to store newspapers for this purpose.

We will eventually run out of natural resources but we have an unlimited supply of stupidity. We need to invent power grids that are fueled by bullshit.

Fujita's sorties were the last direct attacks, but the Japanese military fixed bombs to small hot air balloons and allowed the winds to carry them across the Pacific in late 1944 and 1945. Northwesters found more than 100 remnants, but most had no effect. One, however, came shockingly close to success. It hit power lines in central Washington, disrupted the power grid, and caused Hanford's reactors to shut down completely.

Let’s take a broader view for a moment. Visualize a power grid. This is the conception of human society that constitutes the postmodernist worldview. It posits that we are born and positioned by elements of our identity, such that we have different levels of access to power—privilege is like being plugged in to the network—and we learn to perform our position and thus “conduct” the power through ourselves as part of the system, often without ever knowing that the grid is there. This learning is achieved mostly by socialization into “hegemonic” identity roles constructed and accepted by society and is rarely intentional. By performing our roles, we uphold the social and cultural assumptions that grant and deny access to power. Furthermore, access to power has an automatically corrupting influence, which leads us to perform our roles, thus socializing ourselves and others into accepting the inequities of the system, justifying our own access, and rationalizing the exclusion of others. This is all done through discourses—ways we speak about things, including how we represent them in nonverbal media. As this conception of society, which originated in the obscure and complex language of the original postmodernists, has evolved, it has consolidated into a belief system. Thus, we frequently see Theorists state this explanation with the confidence of an objective belief—something that would not have been possible for the first postmodernists.

The Foucauldian idea of a diffuse grid of power dynamics that constantly operates through everyone through their unwitting uses of language fit the bill perfectly.

Russia was not waiting for rapprochement with the United States. They could see that Trump’s chaotic White House was creating numerous financial opportunities worldwide, and they were going to scoop them up. On December 5, 2018, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Russian state atomic energy company Rosatom went to Riyadh to meet with MBS. Its representative, Alexander Voronkov, said Russia would supply Generation 3+ VVER-1220 reactors for the kingdom, which he said were the most advanced ones Russia offered.26 It’s worth noting here that in 1994 Russia built the first nuclear reactor in Iran, also a VVER model. The reactors in Bushehr nuclear station were to be the same VVER-1220 as those Russia promised to Saudi Arabia.27 Even more interesting, Russian arms exporter Rosobornexport, a sanctioned arms company, sold S-300 air defense systems to Iran to protect Iran’s reactors, and one could imagine this could be part of the package to Saudi Arabia as well.28 The Russians were brilliantly offering regional parity and stability to both Iran and Saudi Arabia if the reactors were bought. It came with a tacit guarantee neither side could attack the other since they would have the same air defense system. On January 22, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) delivered a report on what Saudi Arabia needed to do to stay within international norms if it pursued a nuclear power program. Mikhail Chudakov, a former head of Russian nuclear programs and IAEA deputy director, delivered the report that gave the kingdom the green light to move forward.29 The following day, the kingdom received offers from five nations for construction of the project: the United States, Russia, France, South Korea, and China.30 The Saudis originally wanted sixteen reactors but have scaled that back to two as part of a larger effort to diversify its energy grid.31 The “tilt” seems to be toward the Russians, with the Russian IAEA official paving the way and the Rosatom folks working over the royal family. Like their arms sales, the Russians promised a fairly cheap but stable deal that comes with massive long-term costs. But it was Team Trump that started this game, trying to cheat, abuse ethics, and lie its way into potentially gaining billions of Arab sheikdom money under the guise of a major foreign policy initiative. In the end, they got played by Russia, who knew corruption at a master-class level. Trump was a piker. And Russia ate America’s lunch… again.

So many times, for those rebels, she had drawn up power from the grid, from lights and machines, and killed and killed, until her soul lay in tatters.

Sure, sure, I’m just telling about how Puerto Rico has a lot of lessons for us here in Ouray. Maria and Irma, oof. Those storms hit us, left us reeling, Benjamin. Reeling. Demolished our power grid, our agriculture, our economy. We had to learn how to rely on ourselves, on what we could build with our own hands—a zipline and bridge across a river, griddles and grills to cook meat for our people, our own antennas and signal boosters for phones and internet, even plans for low-carbon micro-grids to get us off the big one that failed us. There’s lessons there in that. People think an apocalypse is for the whole world. But for us, those storms? They were apocalypses.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Three months after an EMP attack destroys the U.S. power grid, starvation, disease, and the brutal cold have killed millions.

WHEN the plane finally began to descend, Mitch Rapp turned to the window and examined the grid of runways and buildings

Electromagnetic energy that does work of our technology as a byproduct of seeking to ground. Electromagnetic energy turns the motors of industry, lights the homes, powers the grid, as a byproduct of routing it towards ground. You can bottle this energy, this lightening for a while. However, it will escape. It will always escape. You can't freeze it. You can't stop it. It will flow towards ground state.

Since 2010, the price of electricity from utility-scale solar farms has fallen almost 90 percent. Onshore wind fell 60 percent in the same time. Advanced batteries, which power electric cars and are increasingly finding a role in balancing fluctuations on the electric grid, fell more than 80 percent. When highly efficient light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, first came out just over a decade ago, you could easily pay $50 for one; nowadays they sell at Home Depot for $1.24 apiece, a decline of 97 percent.

Electricity is generated by the movement of electrical charges (electrons). In order to move an electron from one point to the other, it is necessary to perform electrical work.

Voltage can be understood as the pressure required to move the electrons from one point (A) to a second point (B) within an electrical circuit. The greater the voltage, the greater the flow of electrons through an electrical conductor.

It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.

Today, multiple major waves seem to be arriving simultaneously—technologies like the cloud, AI, AR/ VR, not to mention more esoteric projects like supersonic planes and hyperloops. What’s more, rather than being concentrated narrowly in a personal computer industry that was essentially a niche market, today’s new technologies impact nearly every part of the economy, creating many new opportunities. This trend holds tremendous promise. Precision medicine will use computing power to revolutionize health care. Smart grids use software to dramatically improve power efficiency and enable the spread of renewable energy sources like solar roofs. And computational biology might allow us to improve life itself. Blitzscaling can help these advances spread and magnify their sorely needed impact.

Essentially a vast, space-based clock, the time signal from GPS satellites regulates power grids and stock markets. But our growing reliance on the system masks the fact that it can still be manipulated by those in control of its signals, including the United States government, which retains the ability to selectively deny positioning signals to any region it chooses.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

With Evie, every slight touch, even the accidental ones, felt like so much more. Like there was enough electricity to power the entire city grid. And we hadn’t even kissed yet.

In 2021 we learned that Texas had the electrical power grid of a third world country.

Wars are fought in the shadows. The weapons are subversion and misdirection. Propaganda and misinformation. Hacking social media accounts. Infiltrating national power grids.

On my quest to find businesses that are innovating for the greater good, I came across an article in the Huffington Post titled “Without Light, Can There Be Life?” It was written by the cofounders of WakaWaka. Maurits Groen and Camille van Gestel. They wrote about the 1.2 billion people living without access to electricity as a result of extreme poverty or devastating natural disasters. Their response to this seemingly intractable social issue was to innovate a highly efficient, low-cost, hand-held solar-powered LED light and charger that they named WakaWaka. I was intrigued and discovered from their website that this award-winning device was bringing light and power to over a million people in 43 countries around the world. So I went to the Netherlands to interview Maurits Groen in his Off-Grid Solutions office in Haarlem. As with all DreamMakers I have met on my journey, Maurits has a powerful purpose in life. He has a compelling global vision of a just world that is rooted in his belief that all people and the planet matter.

Since 1996, the Kuramoto model has turned up in other physical settings, from arrays of coupled lasers to the hypothesized oscillations of the wispy subatomic particles called neutrinos. We may be catching the first glimpses of a deep unity in the nature of sync. Whether there will be any practical applications remains to be seen. Given how many diseases are related to synchrony and its disruption (epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic insomnia) and how many devices rely on synchrony (Josephson and laser arrays, electrical power grids, the global positioning system), it seems safe to say that a deeper understanding of spontaneous sync is bound to find practical benefit.

To test that prediction, we needed empirical examples. They weren’t easy to find. Any candidate had to be fully characterized, its wiring diagram known down to the last detail, every node and link documented, or we couldn’t calculate the clustering and average path length. Then I remembered that Koeunyi Bae, a student in my chaos course the year before, had done a project about the Western States power grid, a collection of about 5,000 electric power plants tied together by high-voltage transmission lines across the states west of the Rocky Mountains and into the western provinces of Canada. Koeunyi and her adviser Jim Thorp provided the data to Duncan. It contained a great deal of detailed information that an engineer would find crucial—the voltage capacity of the transmission lines, the classification of the nodes as transformers, substations, or generators—but we ignored everything except the connectivity. The grid became an abstract pattern of dots connected by lines. To check whether it was a small-world network, we compared its clustering and average path length to the corresponding values for a random network with the same number of nodes and links. As predicted, the real network was almost as small as a random one, but much more highly clustered. Specifically, the path length was only 1.5 times larger than random, whereas the clustering was 16 times larger.

Here, it seems to me, is where sync has been uniquely successful. As one of the oldest and most elementary parts of nonlinear science (dealing, as it does, with purely rhythmic units), sync has offered penetrating insights into everything from cardiac arrhythmias to superconductivity, from sleep cycles to the stability of the power grid. It is grounded in rigorous mathematical ideas; it has passed the test of experiment; and it describes and unifies a remarkably wide range of cooperative behavior in living and nonliving matter, at every scale of length from the subatomic to the cosmic. Aside from its importance and intrinsic fascination, I believe that sync also provides a crucial first step for what’s coming next in the study of complex nonlinear systems, where the oscillators are eventually going to be replaced by genes and cells, companies and people.

Braess’s and Koffka’s remove-may-improve wisdom is not limited to roads and traffic. It’s been found in electrical power grids, biological systems, and even in my senior season of college soccer.

Contemporary doctrine continues to espouse a procedure for decision-making, which cognitive psychologists have told us for a half-century has limited utility. Each service and the joint community have a slightly different model of this procedure, but all models have as their foundation the rules of systems analysis; identify a problem, determine criteria that relate to the problem, assign weights to those criteria; develop and compare alternative solutions (courses of action) based on those criteria; and decide on the “optimal” solution. A systems analysis procedure works well when determining how to degrade an integrated air defense or disrupt an electrical power grid or similar man-made systems. It is of no value when it comes to designing the concepts that drive campaign or operational plans. Instructors at the Naval War College’s Command and Staff course and at the Army War College taught me the intricacies of this formula. It proved inadequate on nearly every occasion I tried to use it. Yet, this was the only procedure the US military acknowledged until the late 1980s when officers began to learn of emerging research on decision-making. Literature on this research explained how recognizing patterns of activity enabled people to make decisions intuitively.[xvii] In essence, as people perceive a problem they tell themselves stories of how to respond to those problems and then they “act out” their stories. (Excerpt from article “From Grand Strategy to Operational Design: Getting it Right”)

Most of the thirty-odd billion dollar corporations of today began in the nineteenth century. Their growth was made possible not only by machine technology but by the now primitive office instruments of typewriters, calculators, telephones, and rapid printing, and, of course, the transportation grid.

How Pressure Relief Valves Enhance Transformer Longevity and Reliability? Pressure relief valves (PRVs) are integral components in the safe and reliable operation of transformers. Transformers, which are vital for the efficient distribution of electrical power, are subjected to various stresses during operation. Over time, factors like temperature fluctuations, electrical faults, and other mechanical stresses can lead to internal pressure buildup, potentially damaging the transformer. This is where PRVs play a crucial role in safeguarding transformer longevity and reliability. Understanding the Function of Pressure Relief Valves A transformer’s primary function is to step up or step down voltage levels while ensuring safe energy transfer. Inside these transformers, insulating oil is used to cool and insulate the internal components. However, this oil can heat up and expand due to electrical faults, short circuits, or external temperature changes. In some cases, if the pressure becomes too high, it could cause damage to the transformer, resulting in catastrophic failure or even fire. This is where PRVs come in. These devices are designed to release excess pressure in the transformer tank, ensuring that the pressure inside the unit remains within safe limits. When the pressure inside the transformer rises beyond a certain threshold, the PRV opens, allowing gas and oil to escape and prevent the transformer from rupturing or experiencing other damage. The Role of PRVs in Enhancing Longevity By preventing overpressure conditions, Pressure relief valves protect transformers from mechanical stress, which could otherwise degrade their internal components. Excessive pressure can lead to insulation failure, seal ruptures, and even transformer explosions. The regular operation of a PRV ensures that pressure levels are always kept under control, mitigating the risk of such failures. Moreover, PRVs help maintain optimal oil conditions inside the transformer. When overpressure occurs and oil expands, it may lead to the release of gas and even oil leakage. PRVs help maintain the integrity of the transformer’s oil system, reducing the risk of oil contamination and maintaining its cooling and insulating properties. At Precimeasure, we manufacture Pressure relief valves in 2 sizes, 80 mm and 150 mm. It can be used in transformers of all sizes. The device is cast with aluminium, it has a maximum of 2 resettable switches for trip and are highly robust and reliable. Improving Reliability Through Regular Operation A transformer’s reliability hinges on its ability to operate continuously without interruption. If a transformer fails due to pressure-related issues, the entire electrical grid may experience outages, affecting homes and businesses. Pressure relief valves contribute to transformer reliability by preventing catastrophic failures. When they open in response to high pressure, they give operators the chance to address the issue before it becomes a critical problem. Regular testing and maintenance of PRVs ensure that these devices are always functioning as expected. This proactive approach further enhances transformer reliability, as it reduces the likelihood of unanticipated failures that could otherwise lead to costly repairs or replacements. Thus, Pressure relief valves play an essential role in enhancing the longevity and reliability of transformers. By preventing overpressure situations, reducing mechanical stress, and maintaining optimal operating conditions, PRVs help transformers perform efficiently and last longer. Ensuring the proper maintenance and functioning of these valves is an investment in the transformer’s health, ultimately ensuring a reliable power supply and minimizing the risk of costly failures.

So the next time you peer into the open window of a Web browser, you might ask yourself: where does "the network" end? Does it cease with the virtual worlds, images, and minds of the Internet, or with the silicon-electronic matrix of computing devices, or with the electrical grid that powers the show with energies extracted from waterflow and toxic atom? Perhaps the network extends further—to the Jacquard looms and American war machines that loosened the historical dynamic that eventually stuck a magic toxic tablet in your hands, to the billionfold packet-switching meshwork of human neurons that shape and submit to information space, to the capital flows that animate the quick hands of young Filipinas who wire up semiconductors for dollars a day. As you contemplate these widening networks, they may alter the granularity and elasticity of the self that senses them, as well as changing the resilience and tenderness of the threads binding that self to the mutant edge of matter and history. I suspect there is no end to such links, and that this immanent infinity, with its impossible ethical call, makes up the real World Wide Web.

I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.

Leah thought for a moment. The other day she’d said to me: “Not a lot of women will tell you this, but the desire to be pregnant is like the desire to eat when you’re starving. And it’s distinct from sexual desire; a physical craving to carry that weight.

This is the way the power industry began in the days of Muncie, Indiana. Each town had one power plant, and there were no power lines between cities or towns. Moreover, technological developments are forcing a new look at this sort of design, nowadays referred to as microgrids. However, with current technologies and costs, microgrids are not yet cheaper than power from the large-scale grid. In other words, if you want an electric power supply that is extremely reliable—that is, very rarely has blackouts—at the lowest possible price, you need a fleet of large generators and a grid interconnecting them.

A generator tripping off is akin to a large water tower that had been filling one of the ponds suddenly stopping. To maintain the exact water level in that pond, and in all ponds, one of two things has to occur. Either you turn on another source of water exactly as large as the one you lost instantly (a “reserve generator”) or you immediately shut off downstream water users, whose total use at that moment equals the supply you’ve lost. Either one or a combination of these must happen to maintain immediate balance, although the consequences for the users are dramatically different.

Energy efficiency is universally viewed as the best and cheapest means of reducing carbon emissions. But the power industry was designed to make and sell as much power as possible as cheaply as possible. Repurposing the industry to both sell and save electricity raises extremely difficult financial, regulatory, and managerial questions.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has sole jurisdiction over pricing (rates) in the wholesale portion of the industry.

First, they could create a system of “open access” in which any power generator could use anyone else’s transmission system on a first-come, first-served basis to deliver power from a generator to a state-regulated distribution system. Second, the FERC started allowing some generators to make wholesale sales—sales only to other utilities, not actual end users—at deregulated rates. Once federal regulators enacted these key preconditions, advocates of deregulation could approach individual states. State legislatures could then vote to allow competition among deregulated retailers of power, or “retail choice,” as it became known. About half the states did just this, almost all in regions where retail rates were well above the national average.

There have been, as of this writing, only four secretaries of homeland security. Each of them has conceded the likelihood of a catastrophic cyberattack affecting the power grid; none has developed a plan designed to deal with the aftermath. I

The brain is essentially an oddly shaped sphere of Jell-O, crammed inside a box, covered in a shallow layer of cerebrospinal fluid. This gelatinous material contains a kind of electrical grid—hooked up to an EEG, the brain can power a toy train—that transmits information through the body via microscopic fibers called axons. When someone is hit in the head or stops suddenly, the brain is jolted against the skull’s jagged interior, distorting or even severing the axons and interrupting the function of the synapses, the connections between the fibers of the brain.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation can be.

Stuxnet is perhaps the most infamous of APTs, but it has cousins such as Flame and Duqu, along with many others yet to be discovered. Worse, now that Stuxnet, a tool developed to attack industrial control systems and take power grids off-line, is out in the wild and available for download, it has been extensively studied by Crime, Inc., which is rapidly emulating its techniques and computer code to build vastly more sophisticated attacks. The deep challenge society faces from the growth of the malware-industrial complex is that once these offensive tools are used, they have a tendency to leak into the open. The result has been the proliferation of open-source cyber weapons now widely available on the digital underground for anybody to redesign and arm as he or she sees fit. How long will it be before somebody picks up one of these digital Molotov cocktails and lobs it back at us with the intent of attacking our own critical infrastructure systems? Sadly, preparations may already be under way.

If it is energy services that we really want, why not measure and regulate utilities in these units rather than kilowatt-hours? Suppose, for example, that instead of setting a maximum rate utilities could charge per kilowatt-hour we allowed them a maximum rate per lumen of light delivered, including the cost of the bulb and fixture along with its input power? Under this approach, if a more efficient light source came along, so that the bulb and input power were cheaper for the utility to provide together than the existing, less-efficient combination, the utility would automatically have the incentive to install the more efficient technology.

The reasons why industrial-scale CHP has not been used more widely in the United States are all related to regulatory and institutional hurdles. It can be difficult to make the necessary coordination arrangements with a large building that will accept and use a generator’s waste heat. It also requires navigating many siting, land use, and other rules to put generators into or near heat users. Arrangements with utilities are also a frequent issue. Because cogenerators displace utility sales, utilities don’t have an economic incentive to help them get established—yet utilities have to connect up and monitor the cogenerator and provide backup service when the cogenerator trips off (some cogenerators are “off the grid,” in which case there is no backup, but most are not).