Finance & The Money Culture
Not sure how well this will translate outside the live evening audience at TED, but one of the biggest surprises to me at this year’s event was how much I enjoyed Sarah Kay’s spoken word poetry. Apropos of nothing, I sat beside Sarah for one of the early sessions at TED U and didn’t know who she was. In her favor, I hadn’t had breakfast and she offered food.
Rosencrantz: [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are about to be hanged] That’s it then, is it? We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anybody, did we?
Guildenstern: I can’t remember.
Rosencrantz: All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.
Guildenstern: There must have been a moment at the beginning, where we could have said no. Somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.
— Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
Incredible video of liquefaction and cracking from the Sendai earthquake:
Good comments in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on risk, Japan’s accident and system coupling:
We have now had four grave nuclear reactor accidents: Windscale in Britain in 1957 (the one that is never mentioned), Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986, and now Fukushima. Each accident was unique, and each was supposed to be impossible. Nuclear engineers have learned from each accident how to improve reactor design so as to diminish the likelihood of that particular accident repeating itself but, as Donald Rumsfeld famously reminded us, there are always “unknown unknowns,” and so each accident has been succeeded by another, unwinding in a way that was not foreseen. The designers of the reactors at Fukushima did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by an earthquake would disable the backup systems that were supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake.
And presumably there are other complicated technological scenarios that we have not foreseen, earthquake faults that are undetected or underestimated, and terrorists hatching plans for mayhem as yet unknown. Not to mention regulators who place too much trust in those they regulate.
Thus it is hard to resist the conclusion reached by sociologist Charles Perrow in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies: Nuclear reactors are such inherently complex, tightly coupled systems that, in rare, emergency situations, cascading interactions will unfold very rapidly in such a way that human operators will be unable to predict and master them. To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.
More here.
New BusinessWeek cover is striking. Click for the story.
Good VF piece on the disturbing Stuxnet cyber virus:
Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.
Read it here.
From a fascinating new OKCupid study, the relationship between dating, mating and race. Nuanced and sophisticated treatment of difficult subject. Here is a pop-normalized graph of messages received by race on the dating service — Asians rule.
One of my favorite short talks from this year’s TED University: NYC volunteer firefighter Mark Bezos on making a difference.
