Taleb speaks a lot of bell curves in this article and how larger more tragic events might occur.

Of course, a great divide always esists between the center and the ends of the bell curve. Human beings are mammals---herd instinct animals---and most cluster toward that safe center. In the VT incident, most seek safety in conformity and appropriating blame somewhere, anywhere. But, consciousness is a delicate matter. In any era, some people are aware of the cutting edges of cultural and spiritual evolution, while most are not. To awaken from the comforts of conformity and gain perspective and new awareness, one must give up acceptance by others and move outward toward the fringes of the curve, four or five standard deviations out.

Usually this "leaving the herd" whether intentional, inadvertent, or compulsive means risking social ostracism and mainstream ridicule.
The center tends to repeat what it knows, innovation is not a characteristic of the herd, so most challenging ideas come from the fringe.

It amazes me that the idea of not blaming someone for the VT incident is challenging at all, but for some people it seems to be and we now have volumns of what caused it and keep on bickering and predicting bigger and more violent incidents.

My challenging idea for today is to stop blaming and hating and bickering, love yourself, love your neighbor, forgive yourself, forgive whatever happened at VT and, if nothing else, be kind to yourself and everyone you meet and that includes all life.

On the fringes ---Imagine, there does not have to be another massacre at all. What's good for you is good for Me.

Kindest regards,
Bonnie

The article 'Predicting random chaos from hindsight' says: "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable." When completely caught out by some random event, we humans are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a "black swan."
This implies that the Virginia Tec tragedy is a highly improbable event. I hope it is. But there are many causes behind such events. In his mind, Cho had another "improbable" event, the Columbine, as a model for his act. After Cho, there were copycat incidents and threats across the nation. In a way, one violent act inspires another one and there are many other reasons why such violence takes place. One may argue that they are all completely random because they did not have to happen but they do. Similarly, it is correct to say that having a gun is not the reason to fire it because a person with a gun can choose to fire it or not. But it is more likely that an angry person with a gun fires it at a wrong time than one who is not angry and it is certain that one without a gun cannot fire it whether angry or not.

For anyone that is interested in doing their homework:

http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/~llou/guns.html#study

There are many shootings which happen in drunken brawls, or when people get angry, or in a moment of insanity. A tiny fraction of them are pre-planned. Cho's actions are of planned execution. The motive is bizarre. The motive in this case as revealed by his tapes is an extremely rare condition. Hindsight or no hindsight he is a Black Swan.

I have questions regarding Cho's younger years, middle school and high school. Did he not have parent/teacher consultations during grade school that made his parents aware that he had psychological problems? How did he manage to finish high school without counseling or taking part in classes that required his participation? How was he accepted into college without a battery of tests and personal references? Why would school officials allow him to be passed from grade-to-grade with his myriad of problems? I realize his parents may not have been aware of his problems, but I think they did know. Even his S. Korea relatives knew something was wrong with him.

So what is the story with the black squirrels?

Black helicopters?

I have seen them.

The black box and the black book?

Black holes?

Jack Black?

And yes the greatest one of all.

The Black Cat (I have had two of them as companions, most beloved aloof characters)

Why are they all so unusual and special? Black is unlike all the other visual identifier colors because black is not really a color.

Scientifically black is not a hue (color); a black object absorbs all the colors of the visible spectrum and reflects none of them, this is sometimes confused with black being called 'a mixture of all colors' but that is not the case.

I would add that white is a mixture of all colors or undivided. All are reflected as one. There is no separation the many are one. Yet in black we find that there is also no separation all are absorbed as one.

So we find something the same about white and black, in them we find unity and they absorb or reflect all as One. Unlike those colors. I wonder if color is like ego?

The other big insight here is that light is invisible. You can't see the photons flying around your room you can only know them, when one slams into the rods and cones of your retina.

So light is a thing of knowing not belief. Without The Source there would be no black or white or color for that matter.

When we look at a light source we see both no data and all data, for light is the carrier of data to be processed into reality?

mental aerobics in life’s gymnasium

Dear Richard:

I have always considered black to be a Neutral.
Which is what I try to be regarding the VT incident.

Love
Bonnie

Black Swan is one of my favorite songs. By Thom Yorke from his album The Eraser.

Worth a listen.

'The Black Swan' is on my Amazon book list, but I forgot why exactly until today I was cleaning and found the article I tore from the student newspaper at the college I work at. The author, Nassim Nicolas Taleb, gave a speech awhile back which I was unable to attend. I like these type of topics, 'Tipping Point', ect.
His current book is 'Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Change in Life and in the Markets'.
It is still based in his Black Swan Theory, 'which asserts that there is tendency to exclude unexpected or random events that cannot be explained in data models. In these unexpected events, Taleb argues, "end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything"'.

This is could be a positive or negitive thing, in my opinion. Bringing this up in the Cho case is just another example of a negitive first society, ie, people who always think of what can go wrong before considering what could go right (I'm surrounded by people like that myself, but to be honest, at first I have no trouble thinking of possible negitive Black Swans (pearl harbor, 9/11, Jonestown) while the possible positive Black Swans take some time to bring up (Ghandi's march to the sea, Pope John Paul going to Poland, see, still having trouble).

Another Taleb Quote: "My Major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously, and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: 'I don't know.'"

Two things we should all probably do more of is be unexpected and random and also say 'I don't know' more often.

I don't know about that Bobby...