Jim Medding’s Blog

A book that I would highly recommend is The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Although the framework of this book is Taleb’s life and professional career in the financial markets industry, the applicability of the concepts within the book are wide sweeping. Taleb explains a Black Swan as follows:

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence…One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird…

What we call here a Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

A Black Swan can be either negative, e.g. 9-11, or positive, e.g. the Internet; negative Black Swans tend to occur quickly while positive Black Swans unfold over a longer period of time. Because Black Swan events can occur in all endeavors in life, traditional statistical sciences can’t always be trusted as a predictor. This, fundamentally, is why I don’t believe in “technical analysis” in stock investing nor do I believe in “six sigma” in engineering.

My daughter mentioned recently that a total eclipse of the moon will occur soon. After a quick web search I found not only information about the coming eclipse, but also a great resource for this subject -Mr Eclipse.com

Here’s what it will look like here on the west coast:

For novices, like me, you might what to check out Lunar Eclipses for Beginners. There’s also a companion Solar Eclipses for Beginners, but it doesn’t look like there will be a total solar eclipse visible here in the NW for a while.