“And then you'd die”
Sitting here recovering from Eye surgery. Thank you, you made my day.
Heh. As it happens, there are reliability engineers who have deep backgrounds in a mathematical field known as, “System Identification”. One of the more-or-less common ways of using System ID takes mathematical models of something one is interested in; then, using real data from the field, modify the parameters, structure, and what-all of the model so, given field input data, one gets output data that matches the field data. Once one has done all this and not made too many mistakes, one can then get new input data from the field or generate one’s own hypothetical input data, then see what the model generates for output.
Weirdly enough, people who are responsible for opening and closing sluice gates for dams in response to rainfalls or snowmelt in major river systems are all over this method. So are traffic engineers.
And, in this one case I read about, were a bunch of reliability engineers thinking about longevity in humans. Cells: one has redundant cells that die all the time! The body makes new ones, but after yea many divisions, the telemorenes shorten up and the body doesn’t keep on doing that! Nerve cells and brain cells die at a certain rate and aren’t replaced.. These maniacs built this really, really complex model, went out and got actuarial tables, information on cell life and such from medical journals, and went to town with the System ID math.
The results were interesting. Peak reliability for humans was in the early teens. Their models showed death rates increasing as one would get older as the built-in redundancy of a human’s internals got worse with age; except that the probability of dying stopped getting worse around age 95. And, not surprisingly, given how the model was manufactured using those actuarial tables, the models showed occasional individuals living to what appeared to be ridiculous ages, like 145.
This might all seem like looking at one’s own naval, but it was the insight of the failures of redundancies in a model with multiple thousands of redundant entities and millions of redundant cells in those entities that made the model interesting and perhaps useful.
