WTCHNG DHOL

/////////////SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY


/////////////HIGHLY IMPROBABLE BUT CONSEQUENTIAL EVENT


//////////////.........NP=Reading the contents of working memory
Posted: 19 Feb 2009 04:30 PM PST
Working memory refers to the process by which small amounts of information relevant to the task at hand are retained for short periods of time. For example, before cellular phones became so ubiquitous, calling someone usually involved first finding the number and then remembering it for a just few seconds by repeating it to oneself several times. Once the digits had been dialled, they are immediately forgotten.
Very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying working memory, but very recently some advances have been made. Last month, a group from the University of Texas Medical Center described a novel mechanism by which the response of single cells in the prefrontal cortex to a stimulus can persist for many seconds after the stimulus has been removed. They suggested that this could be how cells encode information for short periods of time.


////////////////////Platonic fold: The place where our Platonic representation enters in contact with reality and you can see the side effects of models.
Platonicity: the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions, like friendship or love – at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.



///////////////our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly large deviations



//////////////////..........SD=Snacking Smart

Letting yourself get too hungry between meals is counterproductive to your weight loss efforts. You'll simply be tempted to overeat when mealtime comes. That's why The Sonoma Diet allows snacking. But like most things, snacking is more restricted during Wave 1 than it is during the rest of the diet. Between lunch and dinner, or between breakfast and lunch, you may have a small snack to tide you over. When you get to Wave 2, there will be plenty of possibilities. On Wave 1 there is one — a Tier 1 vegetable.
We do, however, allow for an exception: If you're a bigger man, or if you are a woman or man who leads a very physically active life with plenty of exercise, you can expand your snack menu a bit. Here are some possibilities:
1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese with Tier 1 raw veggies
3 ounces of hummus, either homemade or store-bought, with veggies
Low-fat cheese stick with carrots or celery
1 slice of whole grain bread with 1 tablespoon of peanut butter
2 ounces cooked chicken breast or turkey deli meat



/////////////////////Mediterranean diet associated with reduction in women’s deaths from heart attack and stroke

///////////////FXTRIMISTAN



///////////////// Black Swan Idea to argue against the "unknown, the abstract, and imprecise uncertain--white ravens, pink elephants, or evaporating denizens of a remote planet orbiting Tau Ceti."




/////////////////"scalable professions." Scalable professions are the ones that have big upside for the same amount of work no matter how many zeros start to follow the first $.

eg WRITER VS BAKER
SPECULATOR VS DOCTOR


/////////////////.......FDCRY=As I was browsing the Forbes 400 this weekend John Arnold struck me as the quintessential example of someone with a scalable career. At 33, he was the youngest member of the Forbes 400 this year. He has parlayed some good success in his Enron days and $8 million that came with it into a rather large fortune of $1.5 bil; greater than the GDP of Sierra Leone (population ~6 mil). John is an energy trader and his profession is highly scalable since it would require roughly the same amount of work to run a $100k portfolio as he would to run his $3 billion Centaurus Energy portfolio.

Non-scalable professions include dentists, doctors, and pretty much any profession where the rewards are directly tied to the time you put in. Taleb points out that it is the existence of scalable professions that has led to such a lopsided distribution of wealth in the world. It really does make one wonder. What happens when no one wants to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher because they could use their time and effort to get into more scalable careers? I don't have any profound answers as to what should be done about wealth distribution worldwide (though Jeffrey Sachs does) or how we keep people motivated to enter necessary but non-scalable professions, but if you do feel free to leave them in the comments. If you have some time read The Black Swan and spend a few minutes thinking about it.



//////////////////......On Saturday, hit up the supermarket to pick up the food you'll need for the coming week. Buy extra fruits and vegetables, especially those that don't need a lot of prep like apples, oranges, snow peas, baby carrots, and peppers. On Sunday, get to work peeling, slicing, chopping, and cooking.



///////////////Never let life's hardships disturb you…no one can avoid problems, not even saints or sages."
– Nichiren Daishonin



///////////////////MOVIES-SOCIAL IMITATION-FIGHTS SOLITUDE


//////////////////history as opaque, essentially a black box of cause and effect. You see events go in and events go out, but you have no way of determining which ones produced what effect. aleb argues this is due to The Triplet of Opacity.[5]



/////////////////TRAVELS INSIDE MEDIOCRISTAN



//////////////////
In the second chapter, aleb tells the story of author Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova and her book A Story of Recursion. She published her book on the web and was discovered by a small publishing company; they published her work unedited and the book became an international bestseller. The small publishing firm became a big corporation, and Yevgenia became famous. This incident is a Black Swan. aleb seems to be using "recursion" as a hint that he is predicting the story of his own book The Black Swan--Yevgenia's rejection of fiction and nonfiction as categories is eerily reminiscent of Taleb's idea, and her character seems autobiographical as Taleb may be poking fun at his own intolerant temperament



///////////////////Stroke Therapy Window Might Be Extended Past Nine Hours For Some (February 18, 2009) -- Some patients who suffer a stroke as a result of a blockage in an artery in the brain may benefit from a clot-busting drug nine or more hours after the onset of symptoms. ... > full story



//////////////////wild vs mild


///////////
In the third chapter, aleb introduces the concepts of Extremistan and Mediocristan. He uses them as guides to define how predictable the environment you're studying is. Mediocristan environments can safely use Gaussian distribution. In Extremistan environments a Gaussian distribution is used at your peril.



//////////////////There is no frigate like a book/ To take us lands away... " - Emily Dickinson …



/////////////////Anything simple always interests me.
— David Hockney




///////////////////aleb, author of the bestselling book, The Black Swan, divides the world into 2 countries: Mediocristan and Extremistan. Looks like these two countries have completely different laws governing them. What are these laws? And how are they different? Let’s look at these questions in this article.

Mediocristan: Let’s start with Nassim’s favorite thought experiment. Assume that you round up a thousand people randomly selected from the general population and have them stand next to each other in one stadium. Imagine the heaviest person you can think of and add him to the sample. Assuming he weighs three times the average, between 400 and 500 pounds, he will represent a very small fraction of the total weight of the entire population (in this case about half a percent). In Mediocristan, when your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. So who all belong to Mediocristan? Things like height, weight, income of a baker or a prostitute, car accidents, mortality rates, IQ etc.

Strange country of Extremistan: Now, let’s turn to the same people whom we lined up in a stadium and add up their net worth. Add to them net worth of Bill Gates which according to wikipedia is $58 billion. Now ask the same question: How much of the total wealth would he represent? 99.9 percent? Indeed, all others would represent no more than a rounding error for this net worth. For someone’s weight to represent such a share, he would need to weigh fifty million pounds! Same thing can be observed about book sales of randomly selected authors and adding J. K. Rowling to the list . In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact aggregate, or the total. Nassim calls such events/things black swans. Matters that belong to Extremistan are: wealth, book sales per author, name recognition as a “celebrity”, speakers of a language, damage caused by earthquake, deaths in war, sizes of companies, financial markets etc.

How does this help? Nassim observes that the law of averages or the bell-curve statistics works well in Mediocristan. When friends from Mars will visit earth, they can check a small sample of people and learn a lot about people from Mediocristan. However, if you try to apply bell-curve to Extremistan it can get you in trouble. Let’s say you want to cross a river during your wildlife trek and you ask the local villager, “How deep is the river?” Villager says, “On an average 4 feet”. Now, in Extremistan, you don’t know whether it is: 4 feet +/- 1 foot or 4 feet and in one or two places 50 feet deep. Thanks to Satyam scam and the money I lost in a single day, I didn’t take time to understand what a black swan means. Next time you apply bell curve statistics to your decision (such as stock purchase), ask whether you are applying the right law in the right land.



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