In their May-June piece "Designing Minds" (pages 183-185), Edward Wasserman and Mark Blum-berg argued that mistakes and ;erendipity have more to do with evolution and progress than does intentional design. As Henry Petroski's editor for some 17 years, I was not new to this think-rning; I do have the notion that To Engineer is Human. Still, Wasserman and Blumberg offered a different angle and sharpened my focus.rnAnd sure enough, I see it everywhere in the issue yournhold in your hands. This time, though, the topical nuance seems to drill in on unintended consequences-none more so than Robert Hargraves and Ralph Moir's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors" (pages 304-313). It seems that uranium reactors were the technology of choice during World War II and thereafter in part because they were good at producing a byproduct people were looking for from them: fissile material to make bombs.
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