Filling holes

As a semi-competitive runner enthusiast (5 years so far), I have been playing catchup on the science and history of the sport. I have not read enough about running to be called well-read. Missing from my shelf are many of the obscure books and even a few popular ones like Duel in the Sun and The Perfect Mile. It seems every second book I see is one I do not recognize. Once you start looking, there's a lot to catch up on, especially when you're a slow reader. This doesn't bother me so much because no matter how much you've read there's always someone out there better read than you.

Fractal geometry of running

I'm almost done reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (second edition). The main focus of the book is on "Black Swan" events, which are unexpected events that are both under-represented and therefore ignored in many models of the economy/finance/statistics, etc. It sounds even as I write this sentence silly that someone would need to pointing out extreme events are rare but important. But the point is more subtle having to do with how we perceive low odds of 1 in 10,000 (happens once a decade) the same as really low odds of 1 in 10,000,000,000 (happens once an eon). For instance although a human population's height and weight are Gaussian (the chances of meeting an 8ft tall person is closer to the latter value), if incomes were distributed in a Gaussian manner then the odds of a Warren Buffet existing would be the same as a 14 ft. person. Rather incomes are scaleable; as incomes increase the fraction of comparatively richer people remains the same. This leads to his point that we spend most of our lives in a Madelbrotian universe more than a Gaussian one.