Risk
An annotated collection of 5 books & articles on risk, spanning 1962 to 2014. Featuring works by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Robert N. Charette, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Fail-Safe
Burdick and Wheeler wrote this novel at the precise moment when automated military command systems were outpacing the human judgment meant to govern them—a structural problem that has never left us. The central catastrop…
Why Software Fails
Charette compiles a catalogue of the largest software disasters in history — Denver's airport baggage system, the IRS modernisation, the FBI Virtual Case File — and extracts the structural reasons behind them. Most failu…
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Taleb's argument that the events that shape history, markets and careers are not the ones we predict but the ones we cannot — rare, extreme-impact, retrospectively explainable events he calls Black Swans. The book disman…
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Taleb's central concept: some things are not merely robust (they resist shocks) but antifragile (they improve from shocks, volatility and disorder). The distinction is not semantic — it changes how you design systems, or…
Pressure
David Haig's play dramatises the 1944 confrontation between Scottish meteorologist James Stagg and General Eisenhower over whether weather conditions would permit the D-Day landings — a decision where imperfect data, ins…