Many books originally printed in paper (true books) have become available in electronic form. Personally I still prefer to read books on paper, rather than on a computer screen, but that is a personal preference that could change in the future.

I also clearly prefer to read pages full of Internet links on the Internet rather than on paper, because on paper the Internet links makes little sense.

Someone tipped me recently that my name appeared on the front page of a new book sold on amazon.com. I have to admit I was curious what was written about me (as no one had contacted me concerning such a book project). So yes I ordered the book. The book was simply a collection of pages from Wikipedia printed on paper and bound into a book.

What was even more disappointing was that also the Internet links was just printed out on paper. Links that often only make sense on the Internet. Have you also noticed: if you click on words in a paper book strangely nothing happens.

Not long after I ordered another book from amazon on a topic that interested me (not myself this time :-), that I though was a ordinary paper book. Again to my big disappointment the book was just a collection of pages printed from Wikipedia, without any editing to make it more paper friendly. Again there were lots of links that made no sense on paper.

I also wonder if there exists a special names for such books?

The dream of a paper free office seems to be even further away than before. Think if every page from the internet now will be printed on paper and sold as paper books.

I do not see much purpose of such books as long as they not are edited a bit to fit paper. Well such books of internet links that strangely do not work on paper could possibly be a good back up for a massive solar storm taking down the electricity grid. We can then show the children of the word such books and tell them that in the good old times we could simply click on the words and new pages would pop up from no where. So yes we should call them BackUpBooks!

In the financial boom several countries lowered the reserve requirements for banks. Solid strategic reserves were not important anymore, because the world was different, we had internet, facebook and twitter. Then surprisingly still we got the bust, many banks went bankrupt, but it was only money, and the big ones got bailed out.

During the last 30 years many western countries have also strongly reduced, if not completely removed their strategic grain reserves. Several countries have converted strategic grain silos into fancy apartment complexes. What do we need strategic grain silos for when we can live in a grain silo and order sushi over the internet :-)

Due to drought and fires Russia temporary ban its grain export. The fast rising wheat prices should be a reminder that the very fundament of the world still is much the same as it always have been. Most food still comes from the earth and the sun. No I do not predict a near term hunger catastrophe in the western world. And even if we got one (if it did not last for too many years) it could probably even be healthy for many people (but bad for others). And think how nice, when people again really would appreciate if they got invited for dinner. Not long ago I was just by coincident reading an old book about cooking in wartime. Well I do not remember the exact title now. My copy is an ocean away. But it was quite funny to read how less food and higher prices on food in some parts of the world during the second world war (where there not was big lack of food) according to the author actually made many people healthier. But I hope people not need a war to find this out, the cause of such a diet typically has many horrible side effects.

The total world production of wheat looks like it will be quite good this year. But may be politicians should start to think more than a few years ahead, but when did this ever happen.

"The Indian equivalent of the Great Wall, the Customs Hedge, which is rarely mentioned in history books, was grown to prevent the smuggling of salt in response to the East India Company's oppressive Salt Tax. Composed of thorny trees and shrubs, this barrier covered 2500 miles and was attended by 12,000 men for 50 years before it was finally abandoned in 1879"

From the book "The Great Hedge of India" By Roy Moxham

It is not only in finance many people are relying on Gaussian models. Also in volcano modeling there exist Gaussian models. The picture is a hypothetical Gaussian volcano with sigma 5 kilometers. Add some stochastic volatility (sigma) and the model get slightly more realistic, then add some jumps and it is even more realistic.

Or even better listening to the music of the volcanos, if smooth and Gaussian stay calm

"Giant smoking volcanoes stand in a row like the pipes of a cosmic organ through which the mighty breath of the earth blows its roaring music." by Robert Scholten

By the way the picture is from a book "Earthquake and Volcano Deformation" (2010) By Paul Segall, an interesting book that contains many other quantitative models outside the Gaussian volcano.

Last year I walked on the top of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier on Iceland (or was it 2 years ago?). I found it particular interesting when the guide told there was a volcano underneath it. I felt wonderful walking on a tail event producer under blue sky. The volcano did not go off before the next year (now).

Recently I walked in the streets of London talking to a Professor that is obsessed with tail events. I got very exited, finally someone to share ideas with. Suddenly he was yelling at me “Watch up”, and I jumped forward to avoid the fast approaching car that I strangely not had seen, simply because I had got way too focused on discussing tail events phenomena.

Too focused on tail event theory and you will get hit by practice.

I just came over a new book titled “A Time to Dance a Time to Die” by John Waller. The book is about the history of the extraordinary dancing palgue of 1518, from the book

“There’s been a strange epidemic lately

Going amongst the folk,

So that many in their madness

Began dancing,

Which they kept up day and night,

Without interruption,

Until they fell unconscious.

Many have died of it.”

The book gives historical evidence that there actually was a dancing epidemic going on in the 1500, and that people danced until their wear of the skin on their feats, and yes some died. Well you should read the book I guess I only skimmed through some of it.

The book reminded me of a little personal dancing experience I had some years back. I like to dance, mostly to trance-dance type of music; I like music with fast rhythm, with a lot of fire. It is not often I go out hitting the discos, but over the years the number of times add up. I am just an okay dancer, I have never exactly been noticed on the dancing floor for my dancing.

Well that was until a few years ago when I went on a trip to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. One night I decided to hit the outdoor dancing floor. It was about 200 people there, may be 100 of them were dancing, the rest of them hanging around the bar next to the dancing floor. I felt very energized that evening, I started dancing. The DJ that evening plaid very good techno-trance.

I was dancing faster and faster, suddenly a few people started watching me and I got more space to dance, I guess this must have encouraged me to danced a bit wilder. The DJ must have noticed this and switched to some even faster techno, even more people stopped dancing and watched me dancing. The DJ was speeding up the music even faster, and I danced faster and wilder. Suddenly I noticed every single person on the dance floor had stopped dancing. It was now a crowd of about 100 to 200 people watching me dancing. I danced even faster and wilder. A security guard came to stop me, but I ignored him and just kept dancing. The DJ played faster and faster techno-trance and it went on for quite some while until I decided to stop dancing. I went to the bar and had a glass of orange juice.

A bit later I walked back to my hotel room. An American couple walked just in front of me (I could hear it from the accent). They had not notice me walking just behind them. Then I heard the girl saying something like “How can he dance like that, he must have been on drugs”…

The funny thing I have never ever in my life used drug and I had not even had a drink with alcohol that night. I was probably the only one sober.

The next day I when I waked up I could basically not walk, the pain in my Achilles was intense. It took about 2 years for it to heal completely. But yes it help me understand personally how people can dance to death. My theory is this: the more you dance the more endorphins you release, endorphins are excellent pain killers and makes you happy, it triggers more dance, more endorphins. The question is how you reach the first level when you hardly can stop dancing, this is partly based on coincidently situations I think, if I not had felt so energetic that evening, if not people had stopped dancing to watch me dancing, if the DJ not had played faster and faster music, if the security guard just had stopped me, well then I would not have to gone around two years with hurting Achilles.

I even heard from a fried that was there on the dancing floor that I had done several 360 degrees flips in the air during my dance. This is however not really true, it was not a flip, it was just some old Judo tricks that I just mixed into my dance steps, well it was a 360 degree flip of some sort, but very simple actually.

If you ever should end in the same situation stop in time! Two years of pain in the Achilles region was it worth it, oh yes for sure. I almost felt like Michael Jackson, but dancing yourself to death is not worth it. So yes this was my first and last dance show I think.

To bad I not have it on Youtube! Not every option trader can dance like that!

I was also bitten by several mosquitos down there I remember, may be there actually is some type of dancing palgue virus, well at least I recovered! I am not making this up, strange things happen more often than you think

I have an old manuscript that is published in very few copies that is about the statistical properties of various skull shapes.

I can personally guarantee you that the distribution of human like skull shapes is leptokurtic. If you think it is Gaussian distributed it is because you not looked close enough at enough skulls!

For example elongated skulls are more common than you would think based on the Gaussian skull-model.

Well also mixture of Gaussians give fat-tails, did you mention Aliens ?

I swear at the same time I walked into this strange store in New York city looking at this replica of an elongated skull a woman with elongated head shape walked into the store and looked strangely at me ( it was a bit scary, a bit too much of a black swan event, but there was no impact.).

Elongated head shapes (skulls) are out of fashion, but looks like still fashion in tiny parts of the world. There is lots of archeological evidence that elongated heads (headshaping) were popular in big parts of the world in the ancient past.

Stochastic Fashion Headshaping

Financial markets are partly shaped by humans (part by nature, nature catastrophes etc), human skulls are also partly shaped by humans and partly by nature. They both have leptokurtic distribution, but there is much more to it.

Step out of your office, travel this wonderful world, observe, observe, yes there are still people with elongated head shapes out there, they are not aliens, well for someone spending most of his life at the university campus a lot of phenomena are Alien, they exclude it and end up living with their Gaussian models, changes in head shapes over time is not stochastic volatility it is stochastic fashion.

Okay I am soon heading far east, wonder what skull shapes I will observe there.

"Gaussian bloggers” post with Gaussian frequency that is they post every other day or so, then some times a little bit more frequent. It is like they try to adjust to the readers that possibly on average want the information to arrive smoothly and nicely, not too often, not too seldom.

Others bloggers are more leptokurtic, they do not post for a long time, then suddenly they post a lot of blogs in one day! ;-)

No more blogs today, I am running out of battery!

Influenza 1918

In New Scientist an article claiming we have no clue about tail-event probabilities for some catastrophic events. Reading the first few lines I would though it was Nassim Taleb article, but it was someone else. The article start out pointing how horrible things went in finance where people supposedly had very sophisticaded models. The article use this as a warning signal that we possibly also are under estimating and have little clue about the exact probabilities also for catastrophes.

I fully agree with the author we have no clue about exact probability calculations in catastrophes. Still finance and catastrophe theory people are possibly among the most knowledgeable in applied probability theory, and still most of them are horrible in abusing the wrong models and assumptions.

Other scientific fields are just even more horrifying when it comes to use abuse and misunderstandings when it comes to probabilities, statistics etc.. (more concrete and horrifying examples will be given over time).

The cover story in the same magazine is about how Darwin's Tree of Life theory probably was incorrect, or at least very incomplete. In every scientific and not so scientific field people from time to time and over and over again seems to get big surprises how bad their models actually work. Then the models are replaced with something else, something better(?) and again people get very confident that they know almost everything. Until again the real world proves the model wrong. Or at least partly wrong on a little assumption that make the model fail big time just when the model is most needed. In economy the consequences is billions and billions and billions lost, in catastrophe theory the possibility of the lots of dead and suffering people that potentially could be avoided etc.

Personally I think finance, physics, cosmology, medicine, biology... still at best are at very primitive stages of what is possible to actually understand. No I do not have the answers myself (well possibly some of them ;-). The more I study the more I understand I do not understand and also that others do not understand. And even if we should get close to the ultimate truth in some scientific disciplines there are good reasons to believe there sooner or later will be a massive crash in also knowledge. Even mountains die. If you look for the exact probability for such a knowledge crash you have missed the main point. Well hopefully such a knowledge crash will not happen for many more generations to come, well that bad models crash is good, hopefully new and better ones will replace them, and hopefully the generations to come will get a glimpse of the ultimate models before it all crashes again.