There's a good Wikipedia page on Taleb's thesis on anticipating catastrophe -
search 'black swan taleb'.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 14/03/2011, at 11:06 PM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Thanks for the generator details. I was curious how that happened.
> This may well go down as the worst engineering design disaster in
> history. Also, I'd never heard of "The Black Swan" and have just added
> it to my Amazon wish list.
>
> Chuck Norcutt
>
>
> On 3/14/2011 2:15 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
>> That would make sense but it may be at the cost of other
>> functionality - I'm too tired to check. But making it the default -
>> dumb stuff. I was listening to a story about the Japanese tsunami on
>> the radio an hour or so ago. It appears that the designers of one of
>> those nuclear (nooculer if you're murkin :-)) power plants built a
>> big concrete sea wall to protect the plant. The tsunami simply swept
>> over the wall and drowned the plant generators which had been
>> cleverly positioned just below the wall. This shut down power to the
>> cooling system and made it impossible to Scram the reactors. It
>> sounds really dumb now but I'll bet it didn't at the time they built
>> it. As Nick Taleb said in 'The Black Swan', we are hopeless at risk
>> management because we can only anticipate risks that fall within our
>> experience. Genuine catastrophes are simply not conceivable for us
>> and we are never ready for them. Y'know, er, like it's really dumb to
>> built reactors on a coast in an earthquake zone but we'll continue to
>> do it because we think that we're smart enough to anticipate all the
>> possible problems - and we're not. Andrew Fildes
>> afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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