Computer Science: “The software’s ‘black boxness‘ was driven home for me once when XP was taking an excruciatingly long time to load, and even the best tech sleuths at Microsoft couldn’t figure out the cause. Had I been able to look under cover, I might have seen, oh, that Windows was wasting 90 seconds looking for a nonexistent drive.”—Lee Gomes, “Dear Windows 7 Programmers, I Have a Few Ideas…,” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Jun 08, p. B8.

Finance: “Being long a bunch of radioactive crapola that you can’t sell except maybe for cents-on-the-dollar to some vulture, er, distressed-investment specialist, and being forced to mark it on your books at that price instead of the price that your high-tech black box model says it is worth can’t be much fun. It’s especially unpleasant when, after marking it to market, you have to take big fat writedowns and the next thing you know your stock options are worthless and nobody’s getting a bonus this year. Dudes, that’s harsh.”—Harry Koza, “Mark-to-market: Great on the way up, very painful on the way down,” The Globe and Mail, November 7, 2008, p. B12.

Biology: “For many current research purposes, however, the ecological model can be daunting. ‘As an overall approach, ecology is hard,’ Goldberg says. ‘It’s complex systems and highly dimensional.’ These challenges have led many to think of human microbiota more as biologists conceptualize organ systems, looking for inputs and outputs and putting aside—for now—what happens in the so-called black box. ‘It’s conceptually easy to think of it as an organ system,’ Foxman says. ‘But there are lots of reasons to go into the black box…Ultimately, we really do need to understand the system.’”—Katherine Harmon, “Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear? The human body has more microbial than human cells, but this rich diversity of micro-helpers that has evolved along with us is undergoing a rapid shift—one that may have very macro health consequences,” Scientific American, December 16, 2009.