Disaster Analysis

The story of John Law's paper money system that created Europe's first speculative bubble.

The story of Maximilien Robespierre, whose pursuit of virtue led to the Reign of Terror and his own execution.

Exploring how leaders and thinkers created systems that led to their own downfall through overconfidence in planning, ideology, finance, and narrative.

The story of Sir John Franklin's meticulously planned Arctic expedition that became a catastrophic failure.

How redundancy fails when it is most needed — and why the systems that survive catastrophe are built on a quantifiable principle, not on a hope.

Documents ETOPS-240 aviation data showing twin-engine in-flight shutdown rates below 0.002 per 1,000 engine flight hours, establishing what separates high-SRR from low-SRR redundancy architecturally.

Dissects Boeing MCAS as a SRR < 1 case: a redundancy measure whose second sensor was eliminated to reduce complexity, guaranteeing that a single sensor failure would be catastrophic.

Analyses the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as a SRR ≈ 0 case: multiple redundant backup systems that all failed simultaneously because none were truly independent of the same failure mode.

Introduces the Safety Return on Redundancy metric using James Reason's Swiss Cheese model, revealing when redundancy genuinely protects and when it simply redistributes false assurance.

Exploring the history of the St. Lawrence Seaway and its role in unleashing invasive species that devastated the Great Lakes ecosystem, from sea lampreys to Asian carp.