The Obligatory blackout comment

So the big news is of course the blackout that we had. I am sure I have little that would shed any light on the whole situation (no pun intended). By sheer coincidence I was in a lecture where we were warned a week in advance of routine electrical work that would disrupt all our electrical systems at around 4PM on Thursday. So I was not surprised when all the lights went out. I was rather surprised when I discovered that they were out over the whole northeast.

I ended up staying in Manhattan on Thursday night. It was hot, but we made it. New Yorkers have been learning to deal with the unexpected, and we did fine.

I spent the weekend on Long Island (Cedarhurst) because I had planned this a week in advanvce. I spent some time with some family. They also had power before my part of Manhattan. They were only down for a few hours.

What frightens me is that it is only a matter of time before the internet goes down too. While information is very distributed, as is the computing, there must be some routers that are centralized. I frankly know little about the architecture of the net, and I do know that it was designed initially to resist just these kinds of things, I would love some reassurance that this can't happen to the net. Does email still work on the original principles that the ARPANET people envisioned; ie, that in the event of a problem, email would get rerouted via some other nodes? This was particularly unforseen - everything was out. Shouldn't we have had some backup plan, especially for New York?