Sunday, March 14, 2010

Black swans and other unexpected events

I've been reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a very interesting book on how often the "highly improbable" occurs. I hope to write more about what I've read, but I just had my own "Black Swan" that was unexpected in both a good and a bad sense.

I was typing "Has spring sprung in Duluth?" when my computer suddenly quit! I hadn't plugged it in after returning from the cabin and it I had rebooted it a couple of hours ago. Oh, great! There goes all that I had typed!

I plugged the computer in and rebooted. It said it had 27% charge; that shouldn't have caused it to quit. With heart in mouth, I restarted TextEdit, the program I use to write the drafts for this blog. I selected the file for this month's blog expecting to see nothing since yesterday.

Surprise! Somehow the last character I had typed was still there! Is this a White Swan?