Not only that, but you couldn't have gotten this image on film with a Hasselblad. (pushing film to 25,600 ASA maybe... not likely) I still shoot MF film and love it for what it does, but I think this extremely cool image of the night-side Earth is not something wet-process film could ever have captured.
Other books I’ve much enjoyed, when your interest is in structural or other failures:
Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, a wide ranging history of structural failures of various kinds, and their causes.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark, which is a personal memoir from a senior researcher with many decades experience developing rocket fuels - he is the proverbial Rocket Scientist. Most interesting, and amusing (in a morbid way), is the quite different culture of safety “back in the day” of this somewhat esoteric engineering/chemistry field.
Although not especially “current,” Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which analyses complex systems from a sociological perspective. Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around. Several historical disasters are analysed. I read a newer edition published in 1999, and the author had added a chapter on Chernobyl, which turned out to be a textbook example of some Perrow’s theory (in particular, that adding fail-safes also adds complexity, thus not necessarily making for any more safety. The Chernobyl disaster was precipitated at least in part, because they were on a tight schedule to test a fail-safe system.) The book is fascinating and a good page turner, hard to put down.
Perrow’s book is best combined with a reading of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg.
I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years in practice). I read Perrow's book several years after it was published. I was struck by how relevant his points of failure were to the practice of anesthesiology, the concept of the danger of tight coupling. I referred to this book over subsequent decades in my presentations on Grand Rounds, but to my knowledge none of the residents or other attendings ever read it.
Doesn't work. Remember the Titanic? Remember the British airship R101 (the "government" ship)? Both had their designers and higher ups perish in the subsequent maiden voyage disasters, right along with many/most of the innocent passengers.
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