ur doin it wrong
I was just going to Tumbl this at first, but the more I looked at it, the more it fascinated me. For reasons that I won’t bore anybody with right now, I was roaming around on the Japan Science and Technology Agency homepage (really, there was a good reason), and I saw a tiny link in the corner for the Failure Knowledge Database. Intriguing, no? Curious as to whether this was an official, Diet-mandated version of Failblog or simply a directory maintained of every occasion throughout history when a Japanese scientist got served, I had to check it out.
Honestly, I wasn’t that far off – it’s pretty much a directory of various technology- and engineering-related fuckups – mostly Japanese, but not exclusively so – with detailed analyses of what went wrong, how it was handled, and what we can all learn from this.
“When we look at the recent high incidence of a diverse variety of failure in Japan, we could be forgiven for thinking that we are witnessing failure on parade,” write the authors of the site in a charmingly loopy introduction, before launching into a description of how it’s possible to cross-link all the various causes and outcomes of failure to better understand and prevent future catastrophes.
That kind of self-awareness is pretty commendable, right? Let’s air our dirty laundry and all that. But not very interesting, right? Wrong.
