Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The New York Times has an article on the 200th anniversary of the Manhattan street grid. I hadn't realized, and probably should have, that hundreds of buildings north of Houston Street were either moved or torn down to fit the grid plan. (Greenwich Village was explicitly excluded from the grid, which is obvious on looking at a map or wandering around that part of town.

Less cheerful, the state of the Japanese electrical grid is bad, and unlikely to be fixed in time for summer. The main problem is loss of capacity; a smaller one is that Japan has two incompatible grids, one at 50 Hz and one at 60 Hz, dating back to decisions made in the 1890s. There's a lesson here about excess capacity, and how quickly it can become necessary, which I suspect nobody in North America is going to be allowed to act on. [via autopope]