Greg Elin has a sad but resonant post on this catastrophe that was the Shuttle. I hope he doesn’t mind if I quote him in full:
Listening to news last night and this morning regarding the recently released report on the NASA report on the Shuttle crash and coverage of the EPA’s Inspector General’s report on the deception of air quality downtown, I can’t help but feel an eery premonition of the news coverage a decade or two from now as an array of natural disasters caused by poor management become more and more painful and even catastrophic: over fishing, deforestation, global warming, inefficient use of non-renewal energy.
Seems to me the overall lesson of the recent crisis is that complex system like space shuttles, stock exchanges, electrical grids, computers, human bodies, and ecosystem often have sudden catastrophic failures. The same integration which makes the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts makes whole of failure much greater than the sum of the failing parts.
Amen to that! Beep!