[pct-l] Deep Survival

[mceverj at qwest.net (Jim McEver)]

On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 20:56, CMountainDave@aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 1/24/04 7:56:13 PM, gray_hiker@mindpoison.org writes:
> 
> << Um, while he may call this chaos theory... It's not anything close to
> the actual chaos theory. 
>  >>
> 
>    Well, actually he is saying accidents happen because risk makes them 
> inevitable. That goes for plane crashes, car crashes, space shuttles, Mars rovers 
> 
>     David C
>   

Another book that makes the very same point is "Normal Accidents" by
Charles Perrow - I read this 12 - 13 years ago in grad school. He makes
the case that complex, closely coupled systems - such as nuclear power
plants, space shuttles, super tankers, etc - are at some point bound to
fail catastrophically because the potential for multiple failures in
supposedly redundant systems is non-zero, the complexity of the
potential interactions is too complex to anticipate, and the closely
coupled nature of the systems guarantees that failures will propagate
throughout. I've certainly seen this in my line of work - supposedly
"fail-safe," highly redundant systems have gone down because of
simultaneous failures in multiple systems. 

It's always better to be lucky than smart...

Jim McEver