[waffl]

I learned about this from the book "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors" by Matt Parker. It was interesting in the context of describing this concept of 'Swiss Cheese Model' where if just the right holes line up, something disastrous like this can happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Apart from the bolt length, the process of finding and matching bolts was broken, and the windshield, if fitted from the inside (plug type) would not have blown outward.

It's also a reminder of how we're engineering a world where human intuition alone cannot resolve these minute differences. It's a particularly scary thing in these high risk/high responsibility situations that there aren't endless fail-safes in place (think air max, challenger etc)

Quote from the book: "If humans are going to continue to engineer things beyond what we can perceive, then we need to also use the same intelligence to build systems that allow them to be used and maintained by actual humans. Or, to put it another way, if the bolts are too similar to tell apart, write the product number on them."