Through the Looking Glass - Fragile vs Robust
A tiny sample :)
A tiny sample :)
Man: By trying to prevent fires of any kind insures the build-up of dead brush to biblical proportions, thus generating the distinct possibility of creating fires unable to be controlled. Channel CA in 2019. Fragile
To assume is to err. Fragile
Monoculture farming vs 3 sisters.
Monoculture farming depletes soil and encourages insect pests. If a virus hits a monoculture garden, catastrophe ensues. Monsanto and its Bt gene fortified corn, designed to ward off the corn borer beetle, has failed as the beetle adapted. What does Monsanto do now besides enforcing patents on an increasingly compromised product? Fragile
The 3 sisters garden
By the time European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s, the Iroquois had been growing the “three sisters” for over three centuries. The vegetable trio sustained the Native Americans both physically and spiritually. In legend, the plants were a gift from the gods, always to be grown together, eaten together, and celebrated together. As older sisters often do, the corn offers the beans needed support. The beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil for the benefit of all three. As the beans grow through the tangle of squash vines and wind their way up the cornstalks into the sunlight, they hold the sisters close together. The large leaves of the sprawling squash protect the threesome by creating living mulch that shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds. The prickly squash leaves also keep away raccoons and other pests, which don’t like to step on them. Together, the three sisters provide both sustainable soil fertility as well as a healthy diet. Perfection! Robust
By the time European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s, the Iroquois had been growing the “three sisters” for over three centuries. The vegetable trio sustained the Native Americans both physically and spiritually. In legend, the plants were a gift from the gods, always to be grown together, eaten together, and celebrated together. As older sisters often do, the corn offers the beans needed support. The beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil for the benefit of all three. As the beans grow through the tangle of squash vines and wind their way up the cornstalks into the sunlight, they hold the sisters close together. The large leaves of the sprawling squash protect the threesome by creating living mulch that shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds. The prickly squash leaves also keep away raccoons and other pests, which don’t like to step on them. Together, the three sisters provide both sustainable soil fertility as well as a healthy diet. Perfection! Robust
But there’s a problem. Like a road network, the Internet has its own highways and intersections that consist of cables and routers. The navigation system that manages the flow of data around the network is called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When you visit a website, BGP determines the best path through which the site’s data are to be transmitted to your device thanks to the redundancy of the web. It’s the shortest route solution It works well but ... BGP was designed only to be a temporary fix, a “good enough” solution when the Internet was rapidly growing in the late 1980s. If BGP is compromised, the web stops. i.e., Denial Of Services (DOS) Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.[1] Man in the middle (MITM) In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other. Black holing In networking, black holes refer to places in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded (or “dropped”), without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient. The black holes themselves are invisible, and can only be detected by monitoring the lost traffic. Fragile
The supply chain driving the inherently complex production and distribution of smartphones must overcome numerous events able to disrupt the system in a myriad of ways including War, revolution, disease, weather, material shortages, manufacturing issues, truck breakdowns, traffic accidents, container ship mishaps, piracy, etc, etc, etc. Fragile.
Scientific experiments are inherently fragile in order to parse out the inner workings of nature. Discovering the constituent colors in light/Newton, The double-slit experiment/Young and Michelson & Morley accurately determining the speed of light.
Keeping a teeter-totter perfectly balanced is hard as we all know. Fragile
When a currency never varies, a slight change makes people crazy. Fragile
Think the ossified 2 party system in the US as it’s always the same two parties without term limits. The system is paralyzed in its inability to improve. This ties in with lobbyists, the MIC, HC, Education and the continued subsidies given to big oil, big pharma & banks too big to fail. Dems over-regulate, the Repugs, under-regulate Fragile
The Athenians selected assemblies by lot. Robust
Top-down political systems are also not robust. Think dictators. Heavy-handed control gives rise to possible rebellion as said systems cannot adapt to the vagaries of society or reality in the long term unless you have the occasional assassination. The French Revolution happened because the royals couldn’t meet the needs of the bourgeois. Fragile
Extreme and needless complexity defines the medical industry. Ditto government bureaucracy. Fragile
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished and ... she always finds a way. Robust
Computer tech, requiring power to run, is incredibly complex and ... its data, stored as magnetic 0s & 1s on hard drives and SSDs (Solid State Memory), digitally decays within 30 years. If one bit is wrong, the program won’t work. Fragile
Acid-free fine paper, requiring no power to run, lasts over a thousand years. Think illuminated manuscripts. Robust
Religion, a system designed to be obeyed. Fragile Science, a system designed to be disproved. Robust
Forecasting of any kind is a guesstimate at best. Think Microsoft regarding the rise of the net. Fragile
Modern civilization, due to its extreme complexity, is fragile to the max.
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