Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1190860
60 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 Last Sunday, I woke up at 4 AM with a song in my head that I had never heard before—at least not that I could remember! The lyrics had me so perplexed that I had to jump out of bed and check it out. Two things came up on my word search when I looked up "the want of a nail:" the first was the song I had just heard in my head, and the second was something about "the butterfly effect" from a number of chaos theory texts. First, I re-played the song titled "The Want of a Nail" by Todd Rundgren and listened to the lyrics I had heard in my head just 20 minutes before in my sleep. "For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost, For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost, For the want of a horse, the rider was lost, For the want of a rider, the message was lost, For the want of a message, the battle was lost, For the want of a battle, the war was lost, For the want of a war, the kingdom was lost, For the want of a nail, the world was lost." Then I read the blogs on the butterfly effect. In the example I found, a butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a tornado weeks later, mean- ing that small events can lead to larger conse- quences. I believe this wholly. I see that small changes to the initial design or information gleaned at the start of a project lead to much larger issues all the time. After I digested as much as I could about the butterfly effect, I chanced upon a TV show about bridge failures that focused on a device used to check for voids in the concrete-to-steel wire construction. It was very much like a time- domain reflectometer (TDR). Whereas a TDR 'The Want of a Nail' and the Butterfly Effect The Bare (Board) Truth by Mark Thompson, CID+, PROTOTRON CIRCUITS