I was going to write a proper blog post today, but I got stuck in a good old fashioned TTC delay for about forty minutes this morning (this also means I haven’t proofread this post nor thought too much about the topic). Some poor folks that left later than I may have been held up by multiple delays. Indeed, a single delay on the TTC seems to invite further delays. I.e., though long delays aren’t (that) frequent, once there is one delay, multiple long delays seem to crop up. If the TTC has statistics on the number of chains of delays that appear within half an hour of each other, I’d love to see if I’m just experiencing a memory bias (also likely). However, I’m not here to rant today, but to put some thoughts down I had during my bonus (cramped) quiet time today.
Continue reading “Fault tolerant… public transit”
Nonereliable
If your pocket calculator made a mistake every ten operations, would you still use it? Or if the brakes of your wheeled-vehicle of choice only worked 99.9% of the time, would you keep using it? Or what if one in every thirty flushes resulted in your toilette backing up and surprise alligators streaming out? After I lost all the data on my phone, save the Chuck Norris-like audio files, I started thinking about what technology I’ve abandoned because it was so unreliable that it was more trouble than it was worth, or “nonereliable” ((Yes, this entire blog post exists just so that I can make this word a “thing”)). More generally, I began to wonder what makes things or people so unreliable that we’re better off without them. So, in the blog post, I’m just thinking aloud, considering a few examples of things I consider to be unreliable and trying to determine some factors that influence whether I continue to rely on them.