[sdiy] WAY OT: US power failure - Was: Giga-Ohm Resistors--Where?

[Ian Fritz]

Larry --

Great post!  Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

It sounds like what you are saying is that the outage could have been due 
entirely to natural dynamic instabilities inherent to the system.  I've 
been wondering lately if this would be possible.  With such a large coupled 
non-linear system it seems to me that it would be quite difficult to ensure 
stability under all possible perturbations.

The news that has been getting press attention (what little of it there is) 
appears to be focused on human error --  operators not contacting each 
other properly because of malfunctioning computers was the last I read.

And all the fuss about "decaying infrastructure", etc!  If what you seem to 
be saying is true, then more reliable equipment in and of itself might not 
help, unless the basic method of stabilization were also improved.

Could you tell me, how long might a 0.1% frequency deviation 
last?  Sometimes my VCO frequencies do not reproduce at the same 
temperature.  And my homemade counter works off the line frequency.  (There 
-- now we're on topic).

Best regards, and thanks again,

   Ian


At 04:51 PM 9/7/2003, you wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Magnus Danielson <cfmd at swipnet.se>
> > But where do you get the 1000000V power supply to run the circuit?
>Ehum... we have a power line expert here... (I still expects him to give us
>a insiders geek-tour of the big powerfailure earlier this year...)
>
>Larry Hendry writes:
>OK.   I am guessing that might be me.  If not, I'll have a go at it anyway.
>Those who consider it too OT, you were warned in the subject line. :)  And,
>I warn you again, this is long.

...