"Black Swan" Review, Posnanski Praise

Review:

I was reading "The Black Swan" on the flight home. It's got some fascinating stuff on the problem of induction, but overall, the author makes so many snarky hits at concepts and ideas he doesn't really bother to completely understand. I'm halfway through, and it seems to be getting a bit better, but I have to see this book so far as infuriating, decontextualized bile in the grand scheme of things that makes a few good points, and I think I will probably read the rest with such a viciously critical eye that I will probably miss any possibility of enlightenment.

You see, the book is about Black Swans, which are defined to be transformative, unexpected, rare events. The one-in-a-million events, like the invention of the wheel, the onset of a war, etc. Now, after a foreword asking us to imagine all such events in our life and in history, the author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) claims that most of our lives absolutely hinge on these catastrophically powerful Black Swans, that these events are so transformative that they leave in their dust the gradual changes. This is the general assumption of the book, from which all the rest follows. Taleb's history as a trader gives him a wealth of examples to draw upon to illustrate Black Swans, and the consequent failures of predictions. Taleb also finds a number of historical examples: Wars, far from seeming inevitable, actually take almost everyone by surprise in the beginning. We have failures in predictions, and we are governed by unfathomable forces that are unfathomably rare.

"The Decision" - One Year Later

What is there left to say about "The Decision"? What to say hasn't already been said? How can I lure readers into this contrarian death trap of tedious arguments and insidious intent, focusing especially on Richard Jefferson, that I call a weblog? Hmm....

Well, personally I think LeBron made a bad decision in leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers, but "The Decision" was a fantastic, brilliant marketing move that made him the talk of the town for probably the rest of his career. He certainly ended all those "LeBron/Kobe" arguments that people were actually having in 2010. It was a gigantic way of saying to him, "Kobe, listen: you're a great player, but no general manager on Earth would want you over LeBron right now for next year. Where LeBron chooses to go will determine the state of the league for the next decade. You will not understand this, Kobe. It's alright."

Now, in spite of this successful media gamble, and in spite of LeBron inarguably embracing the team concept over selfishness, he was hated on, by, naturally, people born and bred to hate things. He was hated on by such inverse-latchers-on for his pink plaid shirt and his unfortunate decision to be announced first (and therefore most important) in the subsequent Heat parade (another media coup, but Wade's relegation to the end of the Big Three in the parade showed unbearable narcissism by James). This media blunder would haunt James, much like Vlade Divac in "Once Brothers," but there was basketball to play and they were players that played basketball in Miami, now, because of "The Decision", which happened exactly one year ago.

Travel Blog Day 20 - On hiking

I don't know if I'm cut out for traveling at this point in my life. I like to do exciting things, I guess, but I also know that I feel a sort of guilt about luxury, especially the unearned luxury of merely being born into my family. Especially luxury in a hiatus of searching for a career. I feel a strong sense of guilt over this trip, and my aunt casually telling me to spend more and do more varying things with this time ("You only live once") only makes the guilt stronger, especially as she tells me about how "one of her conditions" for this trip is to start over from a disappointed career as an artist. Now, spending money isn't going to help either of our coming job searches, but, then again, wasting a trip on hotel rooms seems worse. That's why my favorite outdoors pastime is probably hiking (on this trip, usually on straightforward paths or even along roads cutting across the mountains of Italy and Greece).

There are no airs in hiking, no real worries about how I'm dressed or groomed. There are no veneers of authenticity, no pretenses of locality, no luxury, and most of all, no forgetting myself and no escaping myself, neither of which I want. Just a couple buses at beginning and end, some fraction of a marathon's distance taken at 3 of 4 miles an hour (with frequent pauses), some fun sights for my eyes and fun grades for my feet. I don't need scuba dives, or gondoliers, or whistling a happy tune at a bar late to give me what could only equal the ecstasy, engagement, fatigue, and meditation that hiking can.

Quick thought on Quatrain LI from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

-- Omar Khayyam (from Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of Khayyam's Rubaiyat)

One of my favorite parts of this verse (besides, you know, being an absolutely perfect four-line poem with an absolutely affecting image) is how metrically complex the first two lines are. I'm going to go into this, but first look at the last two lines:

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

As a Royal Guru once said...

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it.

-A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Okay, I've dissed Richard Jefferson enough. This is a mistake, and, as per my motto*, I would like to fix this mistake. As ridiculous as he is, we cannot prey on phantoms just because we are hungry. RJ 2.0 (as some Spurs fans first enthusiastically, than mockingly, titled his promising 2010-11) didn't exactly bring us to the promised land; in fact, he looked lost in the Memphis series, and indeed, the whole time after the All-Star break, he was a less efficient, less influential part of the Spurs on both ends. Sure, he had his place in the starting lineup, but after Tim's injury (and doubly so after Manu's at the end) he just did not have a place on the team. The reasons for this are several, most of them federal: List while I list.

*-"Never make mistakes, always come correct."

Travel Blog Day 17: Two Gorge-ous Hallucinations

I checked the view count earlier today and apparently Free Darko linked to my ridiculous Burl Ives/Free Darko fiction. Heh.



Blogging's a funny business: One day you're blogging about some gibberish that passes through your head as randomly as a cloud in a dream over the sycamore tress, the next day (or year) you are sanctimoniously defending these same opinions in an overwrought second blog that attests to the consistency of your identity, the solemn consideration with which you decided to pit a quite-popular blogger who pairs basketball and critical theory against a legendary folk singer known for his off-beat characters that encapsulate the futility and the cynical artistry of the aristrocratic American gentry in a satirical screed against the former which, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually fails miserably to make this juxtaposition correctly, damns my narrator (the third character) of mental violence and sadomasochistic machismo, and ends up giving a feeble and "badass" adolescent-hero-figure voice to the legitimately impenentrable and difficult vocal genius Burl Ives. Yes, blogging's a funny business indeed. Yeah, blogging will certainly teach your grandmother to suck eggs, alright.

Incredibly Readable and Confusingly Enthusiastic Tripe

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--Omar Khayyam


After that pretty negative post on the 2010 Finals, it's only natural that I would have more negative things to say. Or, it's only natural that I would have something overly positive to say about some other Finals. I don't know what's natural anymore, but I know it's the second one that's happening.

How about 2011: That was a pretty good Finals. Let's associate series with Radiohead songs. Whereas the 2010 Finals was the series of "No Surprises", and the Spurs-Grizzlies series was a "Let Down" (I guess OKC-LAL last year was "Morning Bell"?) the 2011 Finals had "Everything in its Right Place" (you only need the title to get these). Wherea$ the 2006 Final$ were more like "Electioneering" (amirite?).