A catalogue of the drawings, miniatures, cameos ... illustrative of the Bonaparte family, and the principal persons connected with the Republic and Empire ... now in the collection of John Mather ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb THE BLACK SWAN To Benoц®t Mandelbrot, a Greek among Romans PROLOGUE ON THE PLUMAGE OF BIRDS Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.[1] I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes ...»