“Go and tell him he doesn’t have a brain on one of his own posts, and say why you think so, so we can watch him mop the floor with you.” http://zenpundit.com/?p=3074#comment-10816

I see someone else tried to be cute with your song title, but it did seem to me that you were taking a bit of a “straw-man” (you know, no brain) approach to this subject. Even if a bottom-up strategy was used, the system would need to become “Smart” to take advantage of the way we orient ourselves in the world today. So it wasn’t entirely clear, to me, if you were just picking apart “Obama” or had some clear point to make, and I still am not sure.

“Your network is safer if you have Windows, Macs and Linux boxes in it than it is if it[‘]s pure Windows.”

That statement simply makes my mind explode, a feeble one to begin with, to be sure. I am not sure I would use any of them (or GE for that matter), but mixing them all together seems to be pure crazy. Redundancy is a much better way to go, IMHO. You could use any or all, but they would all have to comply with the same logic, and I think that is the point you are missing.

Logic is what moves you from the past to the future and the Grid has two distinct ways to go, the logic of the wave or the logic of the pulse. The wave is great for top down control, but the pulse is better for bottom up command. To lower the conversation to the level of maximizing profits (logic of G.E.) does little to help in the conversation.

“by making end-user power management “smart” — by installing computerized meters and other technology that lets end users control their power consumption.”

The end user has no control only command. Of course the consumer has the ultimate control over everything, but that control is through commands. If everyone had an electric car and unplugged from the system at 7:00AM every morning, this movement would have to be controlled by the power system and would start before you unplugged.

Have you seen the movie “Matrix”? In a way, the consumer acts as a storage battery, in that our commands are not random, but can be speculated on. This speculation is in the form of stored power, it is what we are going to do. Your computerized meters would simply record your commands and tell the system what you are doing, or about to do. If the system was DC, I suspect it would have to be modular, redundant, and smart.

Mob away.

I’ve read that in Britain, at least some of the water pumping is done with directly-connected steam or gas turbines, which sounds like a really, really good idea.

The intrernet actually began with a top down approach in the development of a redundant system that would be able to withstand the system crrash of a nuclear war.

As David Foster has pointed out above, that is a myth. Without going into gory technical detail, I would refute your assertion by simply pointing out that we call the internet the “inter” -”net” because it is composed of connections between smaller networks. More importantly for my purposes, the internet was not a big top-down political project. No committee sat down and decided where all the routers, servers and clients would be. Even Domain Name Services, the one central authority of the internet, only names the largest domains. The vast majority of internet addresses in the world are assigned by local administrators.

Particularly asking him or herself why the large area blackouts of the 70s and 80s have still (albeit infrequently) happened

The famous northeast blackouts in the late 70’s and 80’s are textbook examples of emergent cascade failures in a top-down designed system. Starting in the late 50’s, the American state and federal governments in cooperation with Canada began a program of “rationalizing” the power grid in the northeast to make it more efficient. The modular nature of the grid prior to that was largely dissolved so that power could flow easily all across the region. Unfortunately, this also meant that overloads and failure could propagate just as easily. Interestingly enough, New York cities Con Ed power grid was still largely modular and would have stayed on line had not its operators tried to use its power to try to stabilize the rest of the grid.

If they had the capability to sense and evaluate the loading as a system with a brain would have been able to do, they would have been able to do exactly what she proposed, disconnect themselves and remain operational and not had the large area failures that occured.

Yes, modern technology could have prevented the failures of 40 years ago but it won’t prevent its own failures in the future. We’re talking about an untested, computer-controlled grid that spans the entirety of North America routing power from solar farms in Arizona to New York City.

Shannon Love is proposing the same philosophy that says raw meat is good enough, why make make this fire thing? It is not safe. It is not reliable. Don’t do it. Welcome to the 19th century.

Well, if you’d bother to read to the end of the parent you would have noticed that I have no problem with new technology. My entire adult life as been dedicated creating and maintaing new technology. I am not arguing against new technology but rather against a specific method of implementation. I am arguing for a bottom-up, evolutionary implementation instead of a top-down, dictated implementation. I am arguing for an implementation conducted by engineers starting small and experimenting their way up to larger systems instead of an implementation conducted by politicians who will start big at the top of the system and try to change everything at once.

In technology, we face trade offs between reliability and efficiency. Reliability requires surplus and redundancy. Efficiency means eliminating surplus and redundancy. When you have a political culture that says that increasing efficiency will “save the earth!” its easy to see how reliability will be a secondary consideration.

I have no idea how old Shannon Love is but I would direct the poster to review his or her history about the development of safeguards in systems particularly with regard to overloading the power grid. Particularly asking him or herself why the large area blackouts of the 70s and 80s have still (albeit infrequently) happened. And why the system was not able to simply disconnect itrself from each other as she suggests. The short answer is that they were built on ‘dumb’ technology. If they had the capability to sense and evaluate the loading as a system with a brain would have been able to do, they would have been able to do exactly what she proposed, disconnect themselves and remain operational and not had the large area failures that occured.

Shannon Love is proposing the same philosophy that says raw meat is good enough, why make make this fire thing? It is not safe. It is not reliable. Don’t do it. Welcome to the 19th century.