danger! high voltage

There was no physics colloqium this week - again - so I crashed the EECS colloqium. A guy from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was talking about the power grid. It was kind of cool. He obviously had an EE background, but then he was talking about how a system they'd come up with is similar to thermal physics, and then noted that some market phenomenon they'd observed would be analogous to a theoretical "negative temperature." Not sure what he meant by that last bit. That dude had some mad cross-disciplinary skills going on.

Fun fact - Texas has its own power grid. So does Quebec.