Black Swans

My dear friend Valerie gave me permission to use this and another photo today.  I want to talk about Black Swans and Valerie's visit to her park triggered this post.

I realize some of you have seen this post, or at least the photos before, but I think it needs repeating.

The black swan caught my attention (and imagination) when I saw this swan image in a magazine.  I decided to make the background look like the black swan's wings in flight, since there is white underneath the black feathers.  Originally native to Australia, hunted to extinction in New Zealand, and coveted by some towns in Great Britain, these swans have an even deeper symbolism than their seemingly mythical beginnings.

As long ago as ancient Greek writings, black swans were assumed to not exist.  All "known" swans were white.  When discovered in Australia in 1697, the term Black Swan soon became well known, reaching England, where many pub owners named their English pubs "Black Swan."

And then there's the British saying "All his swans are turned to geese," which means a person's expectations were set too high.  Some poets and writers then turned that saying around to "All his geese are swans," which implies people place too much importance on their possessions.

Another myth, propagated by short sighted individuals, claims Black Swans are as dangerous and evil as black cats.  Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake adds credence to that myth, since the evil antagonist (Odile) is a black swan to the protagonist (Odette), a white swan.


Of course, what I think of when I hear the word "Black Swan" comes from my days as a scientist and statistician.  On a normal bell curve, the very ends of the curve are known as "outliers," or those extreme numbers (observations) that fall so far away from the center of the curve they are considered either random events, or measurement error.  If they are statistically improbable, they are sometimes usually called "Black Swans."  Examples of recent Black Swans include 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that brought New York City and the airplane industry to their knees, the global financial crisis of 2008 that wreaked global havoc to the world's monetary system, and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011 that took its toll on both human and many species lives dependent upon that body of water.

In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book entitled The Black Swan.  Later that year in a New York Times article, he explained his concept of Black Swans:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalise it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Could the corona virus be considered at Black Swan?  Is it an outlier, because nothing in the past can point to its possibility?  Does the corona virus carry an extreme impact?  And finally, in spite of its outlier status, have we found a way to justify close to 90,000 deaths in the United States and nearly 308,650 world wide deaths so far? 

By the time I go to bed tonight, the number of deaths will have changed dramatically.  I guess I can justify it by saying we didn't (and still don't) have enough  tests, we have mixed signals coming out of our administration, and we were hopelessly unprepared, even with ample warning this would be a pandemic.

I now give you my interpretation of this anomaly known as Black Swans.  Materials used: magazine images, black paint, black lace.

And finally,

I give you Valerie's black swans (sans capital letters) with their family in tow.

Thanks for these photos, Valerie.  Had you not showed these, I might not have been prompted to think of COVID-19 as a Black Swan.  And thanks to everyone for stopping by.  I'm very grateful to each of you for understanding why I'm so late visiting each of you.