At the moment I'm using the Internet, as are you. In many ways, the Internet is the largest and perhaps most successful global system ever built by humanity. And yet because of the way it was built---haphazardly, over the course of a few decades---there are no maps, no records documenting its entire structure.
Given my interest in energy, and understanding how society's energy use is broken down, I wanted to understand how much energy the Internet uses. Recently my colleague Justin and I did a study to understand just that.