11.14.2001


Whenever I hear about a plane crash, I think of William Langewiesche's March 1998 Atlantic Monthly article about the 1996 crash of ValuJet 592 (part 2, part 3) into the everglades.

Langewiesche posits that there are three general kinds of airplane accidents: procedural accidents, engineering accidents and system accidents. Procedural accidents are "those old-fashioned accidents that result from single obvious mistakes, that can immediately be understood in simple terms, and that have simple resolutions. To avoid such accidents pilots must not fly into violent thunderstorms, or take off with ice on their wings, or descend prematurely, or let fear or boredom gain the upper hand." Engineering accidents are failures in the performance of the plane (mostly in unusual circumstances) that should have been foreseen, but were not: "An American Eagle ATR turboprop dives into a frozen field in Roselawn, Indiana, because its de-icing boots did not protect its wings from freezing rain -- and as a result new boots are designed, and the entire testing process undergoes review."

The third type of accident, a system accident, is the most interesting:

The ValuJet accident is different. I would argue that it represents the third and most elusive kind of disaster, a "system accident," which may lie beyond the reach of conventional solution, and which a small group of thinkers, inspired by the Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, has been exploring elsewhere -- for example, in power generation, chemical manufacturing, nuclear-weapons control, and space flight. Perrow has coined the more loaded term "normal accident" for such disasters, because he believes that they are normal for our time. His point is that these accidents are science's illegitimate children, bastards born of the confusion that lies within the complex organizations with which we manage our dangerous technologies.

...Safety is never first [in the airline industry], and it never will be, but for obvious reasons it is a necessary part of the venture. Risk is a part too, but on the everyday level of practical compromises and small decisions -- the building blocks of this ambitious enterprise -- the view of risk is usually obscured. The people involved do not consciously trade safety for money or convenience, but they inevitably make a lot of bad little choices. They get away with those choices because, as Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong -- what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down.

It's tough for me to wrap my mind around his argument: that a system may be so complex that some efforts to make things safer may end up making things more dangerous.

Langewiesche writes consistently interesting and provocative articles (Atlantic Monthly articles index -- my favorites: The Million-Dollar Nose, The Shipbreakers, and Peace is Hell).
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11.13.2001


Two additional thoughts on anthrax:

1. There have been some searches for "what does anthrax smell like?" that have yielded this page. As a public service, I feel compelled to note that a) anthrax is odorless, and b) DON'T SMELL THINGS THAT YOU SUSPECT ARE ANTHRAX!

2. Here's something that bothers me. I complain to people that I have anthrax and they tell me that I'm a hypochondriac. I need you to get this straight: I'm only a hypochondriac in retrospect. Right now, I'm sick.
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11.8.2001


I don't tend to give the national news media a lot of credit, but I'm pleased that I haven't seen a report on, "What does anthrax smell like."
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11.7.2001


Does this ever happen to you? I'll think of something that I have to do, but I'm right in the middle of something so I can't do it right then. This thing that I've thought of is something I do a lot (it could be anything) that I used to enjoy doing, but through dint of overdoing it has become boring. So, I'll forget all about what it was I wanted to do except for the vague notion that there was something exciting I wanted to do (my brain hasn't caught up with itself, maybe). I'll wrack my brain trying to remember what the exciting thing is and eventually I'll come up with the less than exciting thing. And I'll be really disappointed.
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11.6.2001


I went to a conference today on a really boring subject. It was boring enough that I stopped really paying attention to what the speaker was saying and started to pay attention to his speech pattern. After five minutes of zoning out, I noticed that the speaker said "alright?" after every (EVERY!) sentence. Except he'd said it so often in his life that 90% of the time it wasn't recognizable as "alright?", it was just this "ah-eeh?" noise. Of course, after noticing it, I couldn't listen to anything else and it started to creep me out. It felt so oddly personal, like I was listening to him having sex. Or something.

One other thing: About halfway through the conference, the fire alarm went off and nobody did anything. The conference just went on as usual. The speaker didn't say anything about it. Nobody got up. Nothing happened. Five minutes and it shut off. I realize that we've become inured to fire alarms because we hear them all the time and there's never an actual fire. Still, this can't be such a good thing. I think we should either stop doing fire drills completely or have actual combustion fire drills. Or maybe those are both bad ideas. Alright?
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11.2.2001


Pseudonym Week

Episode 5 - Reader Feedback!

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(see poll results)

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11.1.2001


Pseudonym Week

Episode 4 - Before Gordon Sumner and Madonna Louise Ciccone and Prince Rogers Nelson

Boz: Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Eng. novelist. Dickens used this name both in reports of debates in the House of Commons in The Morning Chronicle (1835) and, more famously, in his collection of articles entitled Sketches by Boz (1836-7). He explained the name as being "the nickname of a pet child, a younger brother, who I had dubbed Moses (after Moses Primrose in Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield) [...] which being pronounce Boses, got shortened to Boz." The name was pronounced "Boze."

Elia: Charles Lamb (1775-1834), Eng. writer, poet. The well-known writer first used his pen name in his Essays of Elia, which appeared in The London Magazine in 1820-1823. The subject of the first essay was an Italian clerk named Elia who worked at South Sea House, headquarters of the East India Company, where Lamb had worked and where his brother was still employed at the time of the appearance of the Essays. The name is said to have been originally pronounced "Ellia."

Molière: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), Fr. dramatist. This classic pseudonym is also a classic mystery. How did the author of Tartuffe and Le Malade imaginaire acquire his new name? We do know that he must have first used it in 1643 or 1644, for it is found in a document dated June 28, 1644. It at least has a much more theatrical ring than Poquelin, which to a Frenchman suggests either poquet, "seedhole," or poquer, a verb meaning "to throw one's ball in the game of boules in such a way that it stops still where it lands." As for the name Molière, it did in fact also belong to a second-rank writer who died in the same year that Jean-Baptiste was born (1622). But the commonly held theory is that he derived it not from his lesser codramatist, but from a place of this name - or something like this name - that was visited by the touring company to which young Poquelin belonged. (There are several villages named Molières, for example, and at least one called Molères).
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mark@markand.com
aim: mdanderson45