what so hard about living life? Its just full of ups and downs. Someone close to me told me that today after a whole lot of pessimistic viewpoints from me about life. My theory: death is the relieve of one's life and i am just glad to move on. I am tired of living as a human and even more tired as a nice human. Maybe i just feel that humans are too full of flaws. No one is perfect and it is the unperfectness that makes us human. It is also the unperfectness that makes us beautiful. It is the hope in people's eye and heart then create miracle and give joy to life. It is the struggle that humans put up which makes their life worth more. Even though everyone's life is priceless, you have given your life a value by deciding how to live it. By living it to the fullest, you would have given it the most value it can ever have i guess.

Life is also precious because it is not just yours to begin with. It belongs to everyone that cares and loves you. By taking good care of it, you answer to all those people around you. I guess it is also true that it works the reverse way as well. You bask in the love of those around u, and that is what makes u think that life is worth living and is precious to you. And this is how every individual person work which forms a entire network of bonds and relationships in this world. It is infinitely long and infinitely strong.

I guess living a simple life is actually the easiest to be happy and content. Instead of dwelling too much into it, we should just live life normally and plainly. When humans first started out with sticks and stones, they had lesser problems and lesser worries. Even though life was simple and plain, i believe they all struggle to survive and to live happily with their close one. Haha maybe life should have stayed like that. Instead of having conflicts, jealousy due to complication of our lives, we should have stayed at the stone age. And joy and happyiness would be much purer without any materialistic attachment.

This is for my special friend out there, i don't feel that i am alone. Don't worry, i am not indulging in self pity. In fact i am living a happy life because i know i have many friends i can count on. Many friends that i can go through thick and thin with. Many friends to share my sadness, pain, loneliness, happiness, joy, bitterness and so on... with. Even though i am ok with death, i might think it relieve me of my duties to live on. Even though i might sound i want to die, i actually don't (i think). But i think i have dwelled too much into it to realised that to me death is just as good a thing as living. Or maybe its not ba. I don't know. But i do know that if i continue to live on, i might find the answer i am looking for in life. Maybe i am not meant to find it. But i know that at least living will show me more things that i have not seen or felt before. New experiences that will bring about more colours to my life.

Haha, after talking so much. Maybe i did sound suicidal at first. But i don't think i am.... Shouldn't be ba.... I shall take a step back and let life continue on....

I will never ever forget my 2 years in ac band. It truly musical as i listened to the many years of music making done in ac. How i wished such feelings never ended.... However, i know that these beautiful memories will always live in everyone's hearts.... in my heart too...

Ac band, truly a family.....

A picture is worth a thousand words. I finally felt the full force of it today. I think life is still full or surprises, ups and downs. everyone is moving off in their own way but i still feel stuck at the same spot, lost....

hai.... undescribable saddness.... isit because the girls are all moving off to uni? maybe ba... but it feels like its more than that.... i think its true that we ns people are trapped in a land where time stops...

haha think i must stop thinking on the negative side. cannot be pessimistic

It only takes one to make it bad and everything else to make it good.... thats why make every human 'bad'. Maybe thats why there is so many show and games about destroying the world. Haha learning to accept badness is a way of life we must learn....

haha i think we are very interesting creatures. there is nothing human is not capable of. It just amazes me everything i see how riduculous people can act. People who are cynical will just shrug them off as 'retarded'. But i feel that it is these behaviours that make up our interesting lives and gives us lots of challenges we have to face. It is also he same behaviours that brings about rise and fall or people, company, nations. It is the element in the world that makes it as exciting as it is. I think i am like psychotic now. haha.....

Reading other blogs just made me emo... again...

i feel distant from everyone yet again. turns out that this blog is going to be full or my rantings. haha....

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

Good ones are really hard to come by.... sigh....

Why do people like to complain so much? This is already a wonderful world we are living in and yet we still yearn for more no matter how rich or how comfortable we get. Because of this inequality spreads further and life gets tougher. Yet looking at it from another point of view, it is such desires that has brought us this far.... wheels, engine, planes, everything that we have now comes from this emotion. I guess it doesn't matter does it? hai... mx is just ranting again....

Something commonplace in our society. I have seen it, bare it, suffered through it all my life. Maybe i have been through too much of it i am no longer even affected anymore. Do i not care or am i sick of it? I guess it doesn't really matter.... mx is just ranting.....

After reading all that philosophy about randomness and about life, and giving the summary of the book in my last 2 post, you must be thinking so thats how i should try to leave my life. By leaving things to chance and letting it benefit you instead of hurting you. However, what i am going to write after this will not actually go in sync with all those things i have said before. For in the end, our life is not just a bunch of statistics. Even if it is full of unknowns, i believe that we can actually decide in what will being happening in the future. Haha so here we go...

Talking about chance and randomness, humans actually do like to take chances for every decision in our life is like a gamble. We do not know what will happen if we choose to do this or do that and more often than not, we will regret our decision and believe that other decisions would have been better. Instead of always considering the result of our choices, we should try to be less rational about decisions and be more emotional about it. Why do we have to always consider whether we will reap the most benefit or most rewarding from things? For somethings in our life, we can never determine whether we have actually done our best or have made the best decisions. Recently one of my friends just broke up with his girlfriend (argh girl boy relationship is just not in my field of expertises) and he was very sad over it. For one whole day he kept telling me he was sad and thinks that life sucks. (actually kinda sound like me, haha i like to say life sucks too) I tired telling him that its over and since you do not want to do anything to save the relationship then do not regret what you have done. This is a very good example of difficult choice in our lives. What i am trying to get across here is once you have made a decision, do not complain that you are sad (or generally negative feelings) because it is what u have choosen. This is not a case of no point crying over spilled milk. It is not because you have made a decision and thus cannot do anything about it and therefore you shouldn't be sad. It should be because you have already choose that decision and therefore you shouldn't be sad. People always think that when bad things happened to them, it was a bad decision. However, they do not know that if another choice was taken, it might have been worse. Therefore do not try to think of different results that might happen and instead remember that experience and leave it as something meaningful in your life. Take everything as a postive experience and not a negative one. Even if you were to feel sad it should still be positive. Imagine that all your life you can only feel happiness and only happiness, wouldn't your life be boring? It is because of the countless type of emotion that we humans can feel that make us humans. Everything can be a pleasure if we take it to be so. Anger, pity, joy, sadness, bitterness, jealousy. These are all precious emotions in our lives that makes it so interesting.

In the end, even though what i have said in the about might not be related to Black Swan. However, i believe that it is linked because we should not let other people's opinion on life influence us. We should have our own way of living and experiencing things. Therefore the above is just my personal opinions of how life should be for me and not for anyone else. Why should we care about Black Swans that happen in our life? Let those events be experiences that carves your life and your personality and not let someone else control you. I believe that everyone should try to experience everything they can in life (including taking drugs, doing stupid things) and not be afraid of mistakes. ( I wouldn't call them mistakes actually, they are all just decisions, they can be correct to you but wrong to others)

Haha, i am going to end it here now. Hopefully i wasn't confusing and complicated. (tried not to be la...)

Black swan is the randomness in our life. There is no way to predict it for we are only able to know it is one after we have experienced it. It can be both positive and negative at the same time. Negative being natural disaster and positive being a sudden lucky break in a pop star's career or maybe the suddenly popularity of a book like harry potter.

So how do we try to avoid it or predict it? We don't. What we can do it just to prepare ourself for anything that can happen to us. This is not to say that we should not try to predict the future but what we should do is to look at how black swans can hurt us or help us. We should look at the result instead of the black swan itself. This means to say if we were to invest in stocks, we should invest in the most stable one (90% maybe) and the most unstable (10%). The most stable one will allow us to avoid black swan from happening for even a major change will not cause much of a difference (also known as mediocristan), while the most unstable will allow us to enjoy the profits if a positive black swan is to happen to us but at the same time will also not hurt us much if something negative were to happen because we will only invest about 10%. Although this sounds like a farfetched example, it can actually be applied to many things in our life.

Also, we shouldn't be too particular about randomness and chances just because of all this talk about the black swan. Instead we should allow for contingency to enter our life and let it be. Because infinite vigilance is just not possible. We should continue to look at things normally and not look at them with skepticism.

One interesting example i found in this book is the way the author disprove induction with a simple example. Imagine a turkey is being fed everything for the pass 100 days. To the turkey, as each day passes by, the probablity of the next day being fed increases. However, after 100 days, the turkey was suddenly killed which defies the the fact previously established rule. This is the same things with everything in our life. Due to randomness, our life is not symetrical, yesterday compared to today is not the same as today compared to tommorrow. Black swan events are asymetrical with no rule to them and no chance of prediction.

People like to believe in economist and investors because they believe that these people are able to predict the future. However, most of the time they are actually unable to predict accurately because they do not have enough facts or simply have too much facts. How many people are actually going to predict the length of the war in lebanon and when it is going to start and end. Even with such information, the so called professional might be blinded by these information and still unable to forecast anything due to the black swan effect. It has been proven by research that the accuracy of their prediction is not much different from those of taxi drivers sometimes. So when an investor tells u about all his inside information and special statistiscal table, do not believe them as they are and take it with a pinch of salt. You never know what might happen tommorrow and can't and will never be able to predict the future. It is precisely the randomly that gives the future its definition, if not we will always be living in the history because we already know what is going to happened. Sometimes human themselves must realise that to know about the future is to know about the now which is not possible logically.

Black Swan is a term coined by the writer to describe events that are unexpected, but yet explainable after the event has happened. It also has a huge impact on our lives which makes it significant but yet unpredictable. An example of this will be the 911 event, World war 2 and also the tsunami crisis in 2004.

Human beings have the tendency of removing blackswan from their predictions (irregardless whether it is market trends, stock maket, populatrity of a book/cd/movie etc..) due to several factors. As you try to predict what might happen tmr (for example, tmr is going to be a fun day because i am attending my friend's birthday party. maybe there is going to surprises at the party which will make things wild and crazy and fun), you will try to imagine it based on the things that you already have knowledge of (in this case the usual birthday parties you have been too) which are actually the known unknown. However, as tmr arrived, you realised there are things that happen which are totally unexpected and cause your initial prediction to be totally off the charts (before you went to the party you broke your leg and had to be sent to teh hospital, or your friend decided to cancel the party because his grandfather just died touch wood touch wood). These would be the unknown unknown. It is due to these random factors that can occur in our lives which causes the black swan effect. Therefore, sometimes having more information cause us to know less about the future for we blinded by what we think we know and lose sight of what we dunno.

Humans which a very interesting nature which is that they tend to be overconfident in whatever they try to predict. An experiment has shown that people that hold high positions in corporation and organisation tend to create a bigger margin of error when asked to predict certain figures.

The effect is particularly significant if it were to happen to something that is extremistan (things that have wide variable like the wealth, income, book sales, deaths in natural disaster, economy data, terrorist incidents) than mediocristan (things that have small variable like height, weight, IQ, car accidents). This is because in extremistan, a random change in figures will cause a huge difference in the average and in the total while for mediocristan it is not so. Like for example there is an earthquake today which caused a total of 100, 000 deaths. This will cause a surge in figures of the total number of people killed by earthquake in that particuar year. Hence in this kind of situation, we are unable and cannot predict what will happen in the future because there is alot of randomness and chance involved.

There is also another cause of blindness in recognising black swan events. We humans tend to simplify things which causes elimination of informations. This is because our brain is made that way in order for us to remember and link things together easily. We tend to try and explain things with reasons that we can think of after it has happened and thus making us believe that everything happened because of something. However, we fail to see that sometimes things can't happen just because of a series of actions we did but due to total randomness.

I think i will be taking a break here... the book is too deep.... will be coming back with simplier sub ideas from this book in the next post. But this is generally what the book is trying to talk about.

Whew.... never think that i will have a blog again. I am short of time so this will just be a short intro. Purpose of this blog is more a diary than an open area for people to see my thoughts. I have created this thing to help me remember all the books i have read or events that i had gone through which had enlightened me. Haha hope this will work out. The first book i will be recording about (in my next post hopefully) will be the black swan. Its about the theory of randomness and the unknown unknown rather than the known unknown.

Wish that this blog will help me improve my english somehow and also help em decide to actuarial science or psychology in the year to come.