Satellite Views Of The Blackout

An anonymous reader writes "These Before and After satellite views of the blackout, from the NOAA, show the geographic extent and intensity of the outage. Toronto, Ottawa, and Detroit seem the worst hit. Currently, a cnn article mentions that a reverse of power flow around Lake Erie may have caused an overload that triggered the programmed shutdown of the power grid. Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."

Comments

Comparator

[sakusha]

The NYTimes has a nice "comparator" gadget up on their front page right now. I had that idea last night, I cut up the before/after images in photoshop, put them on different layers, then blinked from Before to After. Unfortunately, the sat images have the overlay map placed inaccurately, so if you line up the two maps, the cities' positions jiggle. I lined them up so the map jiggled and the cities were in the correct positions. But it appears that the After shot has a slightly lower exposure, there is some noise and insensitivity near the edge of the data frame that seems to mask some of the light intensity in the recording.

Three meals from the next revolution

[gelfling]

I'm remnided of that Twilight Zone eipsode "The monsters are due on maple street" where a bizarre power failure drives the residents to kill each other.