good book

Aug 06, 2014 2 Replies

"Inviting Disaster" by James Chiles. This is analysis of all sorts of disasters: oil rigs, submarines, steamboats, airplanes, dynamite factories, dirigibles, buildings, torpedoes, Bhopal and TMI, dead astronauts. And some disasters that never happened.



Many involve electronics, all involve people doing, or not doing, sloppy or stupid things.



Don't skip the introductions: they are good too. There's some interesting stuff about what I call complexity webs, the enormous number of causality chains in a complex system, many of which can be sinister.


John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation

I'll check it out.

I have an older book of the same sort, "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. Also recommended. He talks about the way that tightly coupled nonlinear systems with little redundancy give rise to a characteristic sort of accident. Chemical plants, nuclear reactors, space shuttles, and so on.

Summary at

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La Famille is going toute ensemble to tour the battlefields of the Western Front of WW1 next week, so I'll need some lighter entertainment. ;)

(My elder daughter was born to run a tour company, and has given us all a whole lot of pithy reading: 'The War Walk', 'The Price of Glory', 'The Storm of Steel' and Hew Strachan's "The First World War". All really good if you have a strong stomach, and of course highly topical since Monday was the centenary of Britain entering WW1.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

I live two blocks from Glen Canyon, which once sited - until it blew up - a dynamite factory.

Take along some P G Wodehouse; the pig books are good. And maybe The Lyonesse Trilogy.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

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