Lifting weights & Psychology

The Black Swan Theory of Events developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

I) The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.

2) The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).

3) The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.

"What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. I) It is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. 2) It carries an extreme 'impact'. 3) In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains 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."

Online academic resource JSTOR has announced it is making its database accessible to the public, amid the widespread closure of universities across the world due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The database, frequently used by university students for research and essay work, announced on Twitter today that it has made over 6,000 ebooks and over 150 journals accessible without the need for an online login.

Previously, students needed a university login to access these resources.

This is the first time that the database has been openly accessible to non-subscribers.

really hoping this sickness is just a stress cold and not the real thing..