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This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

John Vaillant • Fire Weather

‘Swiss cheese’ model. He represents the various barriers that keep a system from failing, such as good, safe technical design, alarms, automatic shutdowns, checking and monitoring systems, as separate pieces of cheese with various holes that are the hazards. The holes are dynamic in the sense that they move around as they are created and destroyed

David Blockley • Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure. A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.

Morgan Housel • The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

Fire suppression without provisions for the inevitability of California’s fire cycles is, simply put, the pursuit of uniformity with the result of catastrophe. What if we saw fire not as a crisis to be managed, but as an epistemological break – a regular call to rethink our relationship to prediction, adaptation, and climate governance? What if we ... See more

Sublime Zettels March 2025

Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangero... See more

The Really Big One

Normal Accidents are a compelling reason to keep the systems you rely on as loose as you possibly can. There are many positive things to be said for systems, but expecting zero failures is unrealistic in the extreme. Loose systems may not be as efficient, but they last longer and fail less catastrophically. The more complex a system is and the long

Josh Kaufman • The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

Although there was physical, visible evidence of the fire, residents of Centralia were bitterly divided over the question of whether or not the fire posed a direct threat to the town. In The Real Disaster is Above Ground, Steve Kroll-Smith and Steve Couch identified at least six community groups, each organized around varying interpretations of the... See more

David DeKok • Centralia, Pennsylvania

sometimes as high as 20% of meth labs that explode, thousands of houses are sold without the buyers being aware the house was formerly used for cooking meth.