It's also not appropriate in all cases to spread out, for example the nearest zones to London are around ~7ms away in mainland Europe.

I just plug into the wall socket and it works.

How could I choose to connect things to L2?

Because phase 1 is picked so often, they actually rotate the phases at the street ie switch 1 2 3 with 3 1 2 to avoid having ie 300% more load on phase 1 and having the grid just die.

That's bollocks or speaks for a completely incompetent electrician. Usually, you have three phase rails coming out of your GFCI that distribute the phases sequentially to each breaker [1] to avoid that scenario, as well as ending up with a tripped main breaker because the customer overloads the phase.

The only case where great care is being taken to avoid random assignment of phases is in event stage technology - you do not want your lighting dimmer packs on the same phase as your amplifiers because dimmer packs inject extreme amounts of EM noise, and you also have to take care to not put overloads on any single phase anywhere. However, it's questionable on how long this will stay relevant, given that most lighting load is moving off to LEDs.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Busch-Jaeger-Hage-Phase-KDN380A-3...

What you describe is... beyond awful and an absurd fire risk.

They are very slowly modernising here, but they seem to have a cultural resistance to change/modernisation; they're in love with the old days.

Very different to Aus/NZ where we're eager to get the latest stuff/NZ is often used as a test market.

The GP is also a bit misleading. Most residential properties in the UK are only fed one phase - either the street only has one phase or the grid connects houses up L1, L2, L3 in sequence. Of course I'm speak about detached and semi-detached houses, in larger groups of houses (e.g. blocks of flats) you usually get 3 phases, and one of the jobs of the electrician is phase balancing.

https://www.newfound-energy.co.uk/electrical-three-phase-wir...

It seems blue is strongly favored by psychology students for example : https://www.livescience.com/34105-favorite-colors.html

AFAIK phase order matters for e.g. three-phase motors, they will spin in the wrong direction if wired with the phases in the wrong order.

If yesterday's temps lasted for a week instead of a day or two a lot of essential stuff would stop working.

You are right, and it's arguably harder for those smaller boxes sitting in cabinets / on telegraph poles, despite being much lower power systems to start with. It might be 50C+ in there before they even turn on! Those things might have a two-stage boot process where they just run their fans for a bit to cool things down before actually booting the main system. It must be a real nightmare for entirely passive stuff, I have no experience with that.

I was trying to point out that high-end hardware should survive a couple of days despite a data centre losing its cooling. it is designed for exactly that situation.

Sounds like the downside of the "pets versus cattle" methodology is that natural phenomenon will wipe out your entire herd, while the pets survive.

Being able to look up at the buildings there and know there are indeed 5 different clouds somewhere up above my head in that specific location would be really cool. Being able to point at a specific building would be even cooler.

I do of course (sadly) appreciate the flip side of this coin which is one of (many of) the reasons precise data is not published. So I guess I'm just wondering out loud, probably rhetorically :), how I might find out one day. "<-- That building" is enough resolution for me :)

EDIT: A quick Google found baxtel.com (among other websites) has address-level locations for most providers. The buildings are all so boring, haha! (Understandably so though.)

AWS at least in the past use to co-locate with other third party servers in the data centre. And so you if you had such a server you could ping AWS endpoints to triangulate where physically those servers might be.