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There is an element of uncertainty in every complicated engineering endeavor. “In July 2003, in the Pacific, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a flying cow,” Robert Bea told me. Bea is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley and a leading scholar of risk; he also spent many years working in research and management at Shell. The cow, it turned out, was part of an illegal cattle shipment bound from Alaska to Russia; as the plane approached its destination the smugglers became nervous about their cattle and began shoving it off the plane. “No risk analysis can ever be complete. No one can predict a flying cow.
