http://lifeaftersixty.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/the-black-swan-visits-japan-earthquakes-tsunamis-nuclear-power-plants/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BDbuJtAiABA
The Black Swan, like Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven," is not a bird you want tapping on your chamber door.
The earthquake(s) and tsunami(s) in Japan, and their terrible consequences, are straight out of "The Black Swan," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The subtitle is: "The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE." (No, we're not talking about a ballet film.) If you plan to continue living in the unpredictable world of the 21st Century, you probably should read "The Black Swan." Just my opinion.
A Black Swan is an event that's "outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility," Mr. Taleb writes. The other two fundamental attributes of a Black Swan are: it's impact is extreme; and it seems explainable and predictable only after the fact.
"A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. . . . The effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential."
We humans are arrogant. We think we know everything. We study the normal, and rule out the random and the unimaginable. Because Black Swans are rare and unpredictable, the statistical measures "experts" use to predict "risk" usually don't even consider the possibility of Black Swans. Mr. Taleb views the reliance of experts on the bell curve, which ignores large statistical deviations, as a "Great Intellectual Fraud."
"What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. . . . We can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance."
An earthquake in Japan was in itself predictable. Everyone, even the experts, knew that Japan sat astride a terrible fault line in the Earth. The unpredictable factor was timing: Will a major earthquake strike this year, or 20 years from now, or 50?
But could anyone have predicted that the earthquake would be followed by several destructive tsunamis? What about hundreds of aftershocks, some of them significant earthquakes in themselves, continuing for days and weeks? What about the possibility of additional tsunamis with each major aftershock? What about potential nuclear accidents?
It is reported that Japan's nuclear power plants were engineered to withstand strong earthquakes. But did the experts calculate for a 9-point earthquake? Or was that outside the range of statistical probability?
Did the experts foresee the failure of electric power to run the pumps? Who could predict that the backup system would fail, and then the next backup system would also fail? Yep, it's unlikely and unpredictable, and it happened.
And food and water? Knowing that an earthquake was possible on a fault line, did the responsible government agencies and private disaster agencies stockpile enough food and water for a destructive earthquake followed by destructive tsunamis? Followed by nuclear meltdowns?
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