151–160 of 173 posts
Living in Astoria, NY and this happened a mile away from me. At first my TV blips, my spotify shuts down and outside you could see this very bright turquoise light all over the place. It was bright like it was a daytime just in the green blue color. At first I thought it must had been some fireworks nearby, New Year is coming, right? But there was no fireworks noise, no party noise, nothing, just this bright green li…
LGA got shut down briefly because of the power outage. Amazingly, they had it back online in an hour. Which was great for us because we flew out of there this morning.
I was a few miles away in Williamsburg walking outside when this happened. No line of sight to source because of the buildings. Just saw the clouds & sky turn orange and then bright blue and then it started flickering. Seemed to go on for a few minutes before it just faded away. My wife and I started to get concerned because we had no clue what it could be. I turned to Twitter and found out pretty quickly it was a tr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generally, North American designs result in fewer customer interruptions. I suspect this is offset greatly by the differences in infra, where EU uses buried cables instead of US style utility poles.
Second that. In many years living in Europe I’ve seen a blackout only once (and got reimbursed for the inconvenience!).
I remember few years back an insane thunderstorm caused an "equipment failure" in the electrical infrastructure, and it manifested as a blackout. The blackout was somehow local and my mobile phone worked OK (though I could not charge it).
Generally any blackouts have been short, from tens of seconds to half an hour or so. No spectacular blue lights with aliens swarming in from the resulting dimensional rift.
It did raise thoughts of how highly vulnerable a modern society is to loss of electricity.
I mean, what if the lights went out and did not come back? (The Long Dark reference is intentional)
Were an EMP or something take place and fry electrical devices for good from a large ares, things would go bad and fast. The system impact would be massive.
There would be: no computers, no cars, no cell phones, no TV, no fridges or freezers. No digital clocks. No electrical heating. No lights. No deliveries to shops. No subway, no trains. No card payments. And so on. Eventually people would be out and rioting and stealing to feed their starving kids once a week or so had passed and any cupboard storages of canned beans and the like had been exhausted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the end I rushed to the rooftop, scared as f I'm glad that you were ok. I would probably have over-reacted by diving under the bed. The lesson that I took from the footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor (1) is this: When people see a sudden bright light in the sky, the usual reaction is for them to go to the window to see what it is. So then the blast wave arrives in time to give them a face full of flying glass shar…
Knowing what's going on kind of dictates your response. If it's a forest fire, for example, swift action is much preferable to hiding under the bed. Hence looking out the window.
Also, forest fires are not typically sudden flashes of light or found in urban areas. Context matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you should say that mobile users on Reddit have no UX problem with vertical videos. Here is how the above link looks like on my mobile device. Original link (to classic reddit UI), mobile version horizontal, mobile version portrait, respectively: https://imgur.com/a/JU4v3rn
The video has a full screen button which can be seen in your screenshots. Tap it and the video fills the screen in portrait mode on both the old reddit and the new mobile reddit, at least on my Android device.
The event itself though is a really interesting example of 21st century phenomena observation. Much like the meteor over Chelyabinsk, so much video from a bunch of nearby cameras (dash cam's in Russia and smartphones in New York), it creates an amazing amount of raw data that people can sift through to try to figure out what is going on.
Transformer "explosions" don't last very long. Transformer fires are a different color. [0] As others have noted, the color suggests arcing. Arcing has a number of different causes, but should be brief -- system protection in the form of circuit breakers should interrupt the flow of power immediately ending the arc. This article is more factual, characterizing it as a electrical fault creating an arc: https://abc7ny.…
Transformer "explosions" don't last very long. Transformer fires are a different color. [0] As others have noted, the color suggests arcing. Arcing has a number of different causes, but should be brief -- system protection in the form of circuit breakers should interrupt the flow of power immediately ending the arc. This article is more factual, characterizing it as a electrical fault creating an arc: https://abc7ny.…
I imagine our conventional understanding of the utility of circuit breakers falls apart quickly as we get to the inside of the actual power plant.
What is different is how the breakers are controlled - rather than being its own stand-alone overcurrent protection device as in a home electrical panel, it's just a dumb device controlled by one or more multifunction microprocessor relays that are designed to detect a variety of power system fault conditions and clear them rapidly to avoid damage to expensive equipment.
Transformer "explosions" don't last very long. Transformer fires are a different color. [0] As others have noted, the color suggests arcing. Arcing has a number of different causes, but should be brief -- system protection in the form of circuit breakers should interrupt the flow of power immediately ending the arc. This article is more factual, characterizing it as a electrical fault creating an arc: https://abc7ny.…
Electric arc welding uses, well, arc. And powerful one, I have to add. So you can have long lasting big arc that does not draw enough energy to trigger circuit breakers.
In the protection schemes used on the bulk electrical system, we have very sensitive relaying that can pick up on faults of even milli-amps (remember at high voltage even a small amount of current can dissipate a lot of energy) to detect, for instance, high impedance ground faults or turn-to-turn faults inside a transformer.