Robust Life

I just posted about preferring to say "I'm in life" rather than "I'm in love with life" = it's ongoing engagement vs. a spike of euphoria.

Spikes of euphoria may arise out of ordinary engagement with life...

I. What "in life" looked like yesterday

Here's one of the most amazing photos/moments that's arisen from the girlettes being in my everyday life.

Yesterday bink took me to the Zoo & Conservatory for my birthday.  Normally I skip the animals, which are sometimes sad, and go directly to the growing greenery (love it!);
For Covid safety, the place now requires that visitors (who need a timed-ticket) walk along a one-way path. You could still skip the zoo, but for a change, we decided to see the zoo too.
Girlette FrankColumbo came along because she's new and hasn't been out much.

And here's what happened when we got to the Golden-Haired Lion Tamarins:

_____________________

II.  "Robust things are often more efficient than efficient things are robust."

Speaking of amazing, yesterday Julia (@ happify design) and their visiting girlette Annie Evening made me this birthday greeting:

The message reads:

EfFICIeNcY Is tHe OPPo5ite OF ROBuStNEss

"Efficiency v. robustness " is a concept from the world of computing/Game Theory etc.

I think of more mundane examples:
 a thrives-only-in-special-conditions (efficient) orchid or rhino
vs.
a thrives-anywhere (robust) dandelion or squirrel.

(I'm not sure "opposite" is the correct word though.)

In personal terms:
The store's lack of efficiency drives me nuts--(it truly would benefit from more efficiency)--
BUT, I've always relished how robust it is: like a garage sale, I've often said.

(A big problem with Ass't Man is that he's trying to impose efficiency . . . without respecting the robustness of the system.
OK, it's inefficient, but it works--it's its own ecosystem.
He's like––I don't know--like introducing rabbits to Australia?)

From a short  article on Efficiency vs. Robustness (with good comments):

"Something is EFFICIENT if it performs optimally under ideal circumstances.
Something is ROBUST if it performs pretty well under less than ideal circumstances.
"Robust things are often more efficient than efficient things are robust." [BF mine]

[OR (I like this--from the comments on above post):
"Efficient: works very well under expected conditions
Robust: does not fail catastrophically under unexpected conditions"]

Good to design robust systems since, as the article said (in 2013):
"After a while, you notice that events with a 'one in a million' chance of occurring happen much more often than predicted."

We in 2021 should know that ^ VERY WELL.
Especially those of us who've lived long enough to see it (the so-rare-as-to-be-almost-nonexistent thing) happen time and again.