Taleb explains his ideas regarding ‘Black Swans’, highly unlikely and largely unforeseen random events that nevertheless have significant impact. Taleb maintains that Black Swans dominate the history of the human race but are largely ignored due to a combination of psychological biases and what he dismissively refers to as “Platonic” theories like the classical theory of statistics centered around the Gaussian distribution.
It’s a lot to digest but NNT, as he styles himself, is a very entertaining and largely lucid writer. I would say he raises far more questions than he answers but the book is no worse for that and may be one of his central points – we just don’t know nearly as much as we think we do.
Another Hurt song from Grossman’s CD. This one is pretty rough, but I doubt it will get any better as it’s not one of my favorites and I’ve no incentive to practice it further.
This is another John Hurt tune I learned from Miller’s DVD. My tempo is a little more consistent here than usual. Not actually consistent, just a little more than usual.
I found this book lying on the floor in the hallway of my apartment building. It is Mathewes-Green’s account of a year in a newly-formed Orthodox Christian church in the US, shortly after her conversion from Protestantism.
Parts of the book are quite engaging and I certainly learned much I didn’t know about the Orthodox church, which was basically nothing. Many sections, on the other hand, read like a rather tedious blog on her daily life. I’m afraid I skimmed through quite a bit and it felt much longer than the 200 or so pages it supposedly contains.
This tune is taught on both John Miller’s DVD and on Happy Traum’s DVD. I’ve incorporated elements from both arrangements here. I used a stereo micing position like the last recording, with one mic pointing a little above the spot where the neck meets the body and one pointing at the body just below the bridge.
Here’s a fiddle tune I’m learning from Duck Baker’s book and CD. These suckers are hard. This is the easiest one and as you can hear I’m still having some trouble.
For this session I used two mics in a stereo position instead of using one for reverb. I guess I’ll have to get a third mic if I want to keep using this technique and still use a mic for reverb, but the stereo arrangement gets a nice sound I think.
If I had to live my life over again I would give serious thought to practicing neuroscience or some related field of inquiry. The mysteries of consciousness and the many puzzles offered by the curious phenomena of intelligence are endlessly absorbing. What’s more, as this NYT article shows, many of the experiments you get to perform are indistinguishable from a Monty Python skit.
Part of my delight in reading these articles is the clear sense that, whatever else neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, and their many brethren enjoy, they really enjoy messing with people’s heads. And that’s fine work if you can get it.
