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Interesting, I love the field of infectious disease and of course software, so the intersection is always fascinating. A related failure mode (which is closer
by TZubiri 1y ago
Interesting, I love the field of infectious disease and of course software, so the intersection is always fascinating.
A related failure mode (which is closer to organ transplants I guess), is that when replacing a part with a faulty one, a defect in the new part can cause the other parts to bear more load. When a part fails abruptly you have a halted system and a lot of healthy parts, but when a part fails gradually, the whole system starts to degrade with it by sympathy.
And of course electrical networks are a classical example of faults expanding, there may be security devices to limit the failure to the device or even the local electrical network, but sometimes those failsafes fail, and that's what causes wide blackouts like the one in Spain recently.
- HPsquared 1y agoThis is called "cascading failure".
- privatelypublic 1y agoAnd powergrid failures have little to no relation to any of this
- TZubiri 1y agoNo? My understanding is that Electric devices (including infrastructural), are connected by networks, electricity can "travel" downstream just as easily as it can travel upstream unless specific mechanisms are engineered to avoid that, sometimes those mechanisms fail. A power surge generated by oversupply in a power plant can affect burn both "downstream" devices that consume its electricity, as well as lateral unrelated networks, since they are all connected in a network. I'm sure I'm wrong in a lot of points, but pretty confident in the fact that failures can flow upwards and cause blackouts downstream.