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For years Europeans and the Romans before them presumed that there was no such a thing as a black swan because all the known swans in the Old World and the New were white. As a result, the aphorism “all swans are white” signified something that was obviously true. Finally European explorers sighted a black swan in Australia in 1697 and a pair were captured in 1726. Turns out black swans are quite common in Australia and New Zealand. About that David Hume…the Scottish logician-philosopher who lived 1711 to 1776 …wrote: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” In the hands of logicians like Hume and mathematicians-investors like Nassim Taleb , the author of the recent book on randomness called “The Black Swan,” the possibility of ‘black swans’ is a problem of logical and probability and for Taleb especially, a monumental challenge in generating reliable...