Blur and Black Swans

'Blurry' swans on a cold day

I was on my usual speedy bicycle ride to work this morning and I stopped off quickly to get a picture of the pond and the swans. I did not use a flash as I did not want to disturb or upset the swans; so the picture came out a little blurred as there was very poor light. It probably captures the mood though, so all's well that ends well. I have made a new resolution to blip during the day - as I was 'scrabbling' around for ideas at one minute to midnight last night. Just made it by the skin of my teeth!

Catch up time at work today. All the students have gone home, the university is very quiet, and we get to discover what our PhD students have been up to for the last few months (and in some cases years...). Hopefully, it will be good progress and lots of interesting new ideas. We aim to innovate! Our restructure is still in progress and we watch with interest to see how the organization adapts and moves forward. Management and strategy is certainly a fascinating subject - especially when you combine it with organizational behaviour, politics and philosophy. This is a great place to be an anthropologist, even an amateur one !!

Watch out for the Black Swan ......

From Wikipedia

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a literary/philosophical book by the epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory.

The book also covers subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, and ways of life, and uses elements of fiction in making its points.

The first edition appeared in 2007 and was a commercial success. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The second, expanded edition appeared in 2010.