Essay: "Black Swans and Game of Thrones"

Warning: This essay contains spoilers about the first season of Game of Thrones and the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a "Black Swan" event as follows:

"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."

What's great about Taleb's book is how it points to a simple phenomenom that most of us (myself included) managed to ignore: how bad we are about predicting the future, and how good we are about forgetting about how bad we are about predicting the future.

Memoir: "The Burden of Control"

Last year, about this time, I went on a trip to Uganda to visit my little sister, who spends a lot of time in Africa doing research for her PhD (she's in AIDS research).  Now Uganda is very, very poor.  The roads are terrible and dangerous, the buildings are all falling down, and there's not much infrastructure.  So there's not a lot of "culture", per se.  The local people eat simple food and have simple hobbies.  Furthermore, unlike, say, Asia or the Middle East, "civilization" is a relatively new thing.  Most of the cities were founded in the late nineteenth century.  So there's not a lot of history you can see.