Success Syndrome teaches us -‘How NOT to Design’

“… (The design mistake) It was repeated 3000 years ago, 300 years ago, just 30 years ago and will likely to be repeated even today.”

“…Possibly the greatest tragedy underlying design errors & the resultant failures is that many of them do indeed seem to be avoidable, yet one of the potentially most effective means of improving reliability in engineering appears to be the most neglected.”

-Henry Petroski in his book, “Design Paradigms Case Histories of Errors and Judgements in Engineering”.

Ancient Turing

PaaNini (Pāṇini 520 - 460 BCE)'s theory of morphological analysis which is generative & descriptive, uses metalanguage & meta-rules. His work is considered as more advanced than any equivalent theory before 20th century.

A metalanguage is a language used to talk about a language to specify it or to study its properties.

In mathematical logic a metalanguage is used to describe another language known as the object language.

When a language X is used as metalanguage to talk about a language Y, Y is called the object language.

The #Zijin Bridge

On the fateful day of June 14, 2019 at 2:12 am, a couple of sedan cars were passing sequentially over the bridge - Zijin. Suddenly, the column near the span 3 started buckling as soon as the first car reached the center of the pier. Being a symbol of Heyuan City, China, Zijin bridge has been operational since 1972 with the life expectancy of 100 years. Constructed across the Dongjiang River from northwest to southeast to connect the Hezi road, it was the second river-crossing bridge of the city.