A while back a colleague told me about an interesting entitled book “Lights Out”1, a used copy of which I promptly procured online for a few dollars. It arrived last Thursday about noon — and a few hours later the largest blackout in the history of North America enveloped much of the Northeast. Now, I’m not a superstitious type. Nor am I egotistical, or crazy, enough to consider the possibility that the arrival of that book had anything to do with the blackout. But it certainly did give me pause to reconsider that whole phenomena of cause and effect. They say - whoever “they” are - that there is no such things as a coincidence. So, just in case, if it in fact was anything more than pure coincidence, I hereby publicly and contritely offer my most humble apologies...
The Dirt on Dirty Electricity
Up until recently, the term ‘Dirty Electricity” evoked in me images of the smoke stacks from coal fired power plants, open pit mines and mazes of huge erector-set like structures stringing power lines across the countryside. But the overt pollution of air, water and land resulting from the generation of electricity is only one meaning of the term. The other meaning of ‘Dirty Electricity’, though, specifically refers to one type of electromagnetic frequency called ‘high-frequency voltage transients’. A less visible is a form of pollution that does not appear on the agenda of the environmental movement hardly at all, it may turn out to be just as significant a form of pollution.