Tags / 4 quotes from 3 sources
#accidents
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Plane crashes as chains of unlikely events
do not share Kurzweil’s faith in the reliability of even these safety-critical systems. He is correct in implying that humans are primarily responsible for most airplane accidents. The software on modern commercial airplanes is probably the most reliable software ever written…
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…
James Lovelock Reflects On Gaia's Legacy : Nature News & Comment
Safety of nuclear energy
Will nuclear energy be part of the future, despite the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan? The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the…
Ontology
Essential ontological dichotomies include
Essential ontological dichotomies include: Universals and particulars Substance and accident Abstract and concrete objects Essence and existence Determinism and indeterminism