"Shorting the Grid" describes how closed meetings, arcane auction rules, and five-minute planning horizons will topple the reliability of our electric grid. Hopeful speeches will not keep the lights on.

"Shorting the Grid" describes how closed meetings, arcane auction rules, and five-minute planning horizons will topple the reliability of our electric grid. Hopeful speeches will not keep the lights on.

The history of the grid, the world's largest interconnected power machine that is North America's electricity infrastructure. The North American power grid has been called the world's largest machine. The grid connects nearly every living soul on the continent; Americans rely utterly on the miracle of electrification. In this book, Julie Cohn tells the history of the grid, from early linkages in the 1890s through the grid's maturity as a networked infrastructure in the 1980s. She focuses on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid—in fact made up of four major networks of interconnected power systems—paying particular attention to the work of engineers and system operators who handled the everyday operations. To do so, she consulted sources that range from the pages of historical trade journals to corporate archives to the papers of her father, Nathan Cohn, who worked in the industry from 1927 to 1989—roughly the period of key power control innovations across North America. Cohn investigates major challenges and major breakthroughs but also the hidden aspects of our electricity infrastructure, both technical and human. She describes the origins of the grid and the growth of interconnection; emerging control issues, including difficulties in matching generation and demand on linked systems; collaboration and competition against the backdrop of economic depression and government infrastructure investment; the effects of World War II on electrification; postwar plans for a coast-to-coast grid; the northeast blackout of 1965 and the East-West closure of 1967; and renewed efforts at achieving stability and reliability after those two events.

The grid has long been an invaluable tool for creating order out of chaos for designers of all kinds—from city planners to architects to typesetters and graphic artists. In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences. Ordering Disorder delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web. Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade. More information at grids.subtraction.com

Winner of the 2015New York City Book Award The never-before-told story of the grid that ate Manhattan You either love it or hate it, but nothing says New York like the street grid of Manhattan. This is its story. Praise for City on a Grid "The best account to date of the process by which an odd amalgamation of democracy and capitalism got written into New York's physical DNA."--New York Times Book Review "Intriguing...breezy and highly readable."--Wall Street Journal "City on a Grid tells the too little-known tale of how and why Manhattan came to be the waffle-board city we know."--The New Yorker "[An] expert investigation into what made the city special."--Publishers Weekly "A fun, fascinating, and accessible read for those curious enough to delve into the origins of an amazing city."--New York Journal of Books "Koeppel is the very best sort of writer for this sort of history."--Roanoke Times

A nation unprepared : surviving the aftermath of a blackout where tens of millions of people over several states are affected.

Read this book and you will never view reality the same way again! Mainstream science argues that if something can’t be touched, measured, quantified, and duplicated in a laboratory, then it doesn’t exist! According to this worldview, reality is an unconscious, non-personal mass of matter, which leaves no room for the existence of spiritual or unexplained phenomenon. But is that all there really is to reality? Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman don’t think so, and after reading this book, neither will you! In The Grid, paranormal investigators and best-selling authors Jones and Flaxman present their theory of the Grid, a divine superstructure that includes multiple levels of existence, the entirety of which make up our reality. Imagine a towering skyscraper with numerous floors, where each floor represents a different “level” of existence. Matter, spirits, angels, ghosts, extraterrestrials, quantum physics, biology, neuroscience, religion, metaphysics—even paranormal studies—all have their place in the Grid. And once you have an understanding of the many floors of the Grid and how they are connected, you will learn all the possible ways you can “take the elevator” to access them, such as developing your psychic abilities, deep meditation, out-of-body experiences, and even the use of psychoactive drugs! Jones and Flaxman will show you how to release the limiting belief that “this is all there is” once and for all by exploring the Grid, expanding your awareness, and empowering your life in the process. Reality, dear friend, will never be the same again.