Eight Black Swans
About a year ago I read a fascinating book entitled The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In he describes the impact of the improbable in life and our capacity to cope with it.
The term Black Swan comes from the 17th century European assumption that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a symbol for something that was impossible or could not exist. The Black Swan Theory (according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb) refers to high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.
Taleb's purpose in the book is to build robustness to the negative Black Swan events while exploiting the positive ones.
The August/September 2009 issue of National Geographic's Adventure magazine
describes 8 black swan events and how to survive them. It's an interesting read.
Satellite navigation works best with 24 functioning orbiters. If
several were to switch off, thousands of adventurers could go off
course.
How respond to these and other inevitable black swans makes all the difference in the world.