Interconnectedness  

Was anyone else amazed that with all the power outages out east, the internet didn't skip a beat? In my case I actually learned the news from the New York Times website! It's even more impressive (and ironic) when you consider that this is a network problem. It's the very fact that we're all so interconnected - in this case for electricity - that made this "day of colossal disruption" possible. And yet the internet, seemingly the broadest (and newest) network around, was unfazed.

By the way, my first reaction to the story was that it was probably caused by the internet - in partcular, by the MSBlast worm. Luckily for Microsoft, that doesn't seem to be the case...

MORE: Via Metafilter I came across this interesting historical experiment related to previous New York blackouts. It's worth a look if you want to know more about those incidents, but it's also a pretty interesting way to deal with history, and one that I imagine will get a huge boost when New Yorkers' internet connections are back up.