Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb ISBN 9780141038223

While I was reading this book – during the days around Christmas 2013 – a major storm ravaged northern and western Europe. At one point my wife asked “What is that book about, anyway” and the perfect illustration of my answer presented itself in all newspapers the next morning: hundreds of thousands of households in Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, France and The United Kingdom were without electricity. How much easier could you want for an example to explain the concept of a fragile system? Some systems are so much optimalised that they work smoothly in the normal situation in Taleb’s vocabulary ‘mediocristan’, but as soon as an event of certain impact unexpectedly, or dismissed as not probable manifests itself, the vulnerable system collapses as a house of cards. The system is fragile and breaks, often with catastrophic consequences.

via HEACH: Antifragile – a review or two, sort of.
HatTip to Dave Lull