Comments Down

Snorland comments is down right now, and preventing hundreds of blogs from being opened. That's what you call a "tightly coupled" system, where one error in a single link becomes a fatal system error. Fortunately, this system is not extremely tightly coupled. Humans are some of the loosest coupling around - so the fact that I can use independent systems (which are also tightly coupled and malfunction with some frequency) to isolate the problem in this system (ie, my blog) alleviates the problem. In other words, I temporarily removed the text that enables comments, so this limits the problem to the comment system rather than allowing it to take the whole blog down with it as it had been doing.
Material from this lecture courtesy of Professor W.D. "Woody" Kay, a political scientist at Northeastern University, and his required reading for "Science, Technology, and Public Policy", which I took last spring.