Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 73 of 171
Rare events cluster in time
Kevin’s point was that if you know what to look for, these kinds of faults are all over the place, but they are normally just treated as “anomalies.” A series of random anomalies might actually be a systematic pattern of faults with a single origin, like a crack. These kinds of faults occur far more frequently than one in one billion per operational hour. Furthermore, a common fallacy is that random events are evenly distributed in time. For example, if we have a one-in-five-hundred-year storm, we assume that it will be another five hundred years until the next one. However, the conditions that give rise to the rare event often persist even after the event has occurred, so that they tend to cluster in time.